Wen Marketing Ser?

This article is a reality check for every marketer who is taking their first steps into crypto marketing. If you think confidently, (like I did when I was taking my first steps), that “people are just people, marketing is marketing”, then this article is definitely for you.

It will hopefully help you re-position your mindset for much quicker/greater success.

One of the big eye openers for me, when I first got into crypto marketing, was how different reality is from what people think it is. In other words perception versus reality. By people here I mean those of us who invest in tokens and support early stage crypto projects in particular.

The “wen marketing ser” meme is a great example of this, because it’s not just a meme. This is a genuine “no smoke without a fire” situation and if you are running the marketing for a crypto project at some stage it’s extremely likely that you will have someone in your telegram or Discord: “wen marketing?”

Setting the crypto lingo to the side for this discussion, what is infinitely more interesting is the subtext of that simple and on the surface innocuous question.

Wen marketing?

In other words “when are you going to start doing marketing?”

At first when people began to say that to the project I was working on at the time, it irked me. My mistake was in taking the comment at face value. Understandable then that I found it irksome that after working 16 hours a day 7 days a week, and more importantly with my team hustling to “do marketing” every day.

Reality check: there are times you will be doing great marketing and the token price of your project will still go down. You’re not marketing in a stable environment…it’s more like throwing darts at a dart board, on the other side of a ship, in the pacific ocean, in the middle of a major tropical storm, with a blind fold on*!

*If your project is early stage and your dev team are building software, I can tell you based on 10+ years of working with developers, deadlines/time estimates about when features, or even major releases will go live, are just estimates. This makes planning and execution of multi channel campaigns extremely difficult. Especially when 3rd parties, like influencers (for example), need time to make videos etc. This instability is something that needs to be baked in to your planning. But I digress…

What I came to understand later, as my journey to greater wisdom as an investor progressed, was that the people asking this question were not interested in what marketing was being done.

They were interested in token price. In other words when someone is asking Wen Marketing, they are probably really asking ‘Wen Moon’, but from a slightly more granular viewpoint.

To summarise this in crypto parlance, the real question they are asking is “wen marketing so I know wen moon”.

Which brings us back to the “perception v reality” point.

The perception for a lot of retail investors, seems to be that there is a marketing lever you can just pull to make the token price go up on command.

The reality is crypto marketing is a grind. You need an ability to create strong narratives, and the ability to create hype. Your marketing as a crypto marketer should never be about being busy and always be about bringing to life creative campaigns that will support and ideally hype your narratives.

You also need to be strategic if you are working for a project with a token. If you are, then you need to realise that token price growth, almost irrespective of the project is a major KPI.

Even if nobody is telling you it is, trust me, it is…unless you’re working for a stable coin, maybe. A large % of your audience as a project with a token are going to be speculators whose primary interest is “token go up!” and that’s probably never going to change.

Simply creating articles and tweeting won’t cut it. That’s the cost of entry, not the path to glory. You need to be aware of what’s happening in the market, not just today but also likely in 6 months.

What are the OG crypto investors investing in? What types of things? What are the hottest narratives in 3 months time likely to be? For the average early stage crypto project, these are CMO questions now!

For example in 2020 when DeFi was blowing up, every project that was gaining any traction was talking about how they were DeFi.

To be clear I’m not advocating for dishonesty or pretending your project is something it is not. However that is to some degree why partnerships are a huge key to success in crypto.

What projects could you partner with that will allow you to create marketing synergy, ideally tap into whatever the hot narrative of the day is AND create a win for your users?

Hint: your narratives need to be aligned, but if they are then you have a platform to create a great marketing win:win:win that should gain traction.

Hello Utopia!

Because without a mastery of Crypto Twitter as an organisation, clearly defined narratives, great relations with influencers who can boost your “signal”, and the ability to tap into the current hype (ideally before it’s saturated), you’re just ngmi in crypto marketing.