There are 6,139 Digital Advertising Agencies businesses in the US as of 2022, an increase of 12% from 2021.
There are 54,581 Public Relations Firms in the US as of 2022, an increase of 4.8% from 2021.
This is very substantial growth, especially considering that this growth has outnumbered the growth in product and service offerings, which had undergone a significant decrease during and post-Covid.
It means that there is now a bigger competition for a client, which increases client acquisition costs and as a result increases the cost of services.
What does it mean for crypto?
Several facts about Digital Marketing and PR agencies
- Standard marketing tactics and strategies do not work at all or are not as effective when applied for advertising crypto, NFT, or blockchain-powered products.
- Most of the Classic Marketing and PR agencies have not adopted new strategies to address the peculiarities of the crypto market.
- 40% of the Marketing and PR agencies started catering to crypto without adjusting their marketing services.
What does this data mean?
- The decentralization revolution did not touch the conservative PR business for the most part like it has disrupted tech & finances.
- Decentralizing powered by smart contracts allowed to challenge the existing order of things by making processes more efficient and removing levels of middlemen.
- Decentralization processes strengthened the philosophy of a peer-to-peer economy where effective marketing initiatives shouldn’t be built on the principles of top-down hierarchy but on the horizontal type of marketing initiatives that start at the bottom.
When we say decentralization, we most often talk about the ecosystem that doesn’t have any central power, and that doesn’t contain the points of extreme accumulation of resources or funds that are mostly fair when it comes to distribution.
1st Paradox of crypto marketing.
The Consumer becomes an adopter, not an object of the ad, but the subject of the marketing campaign.
For many people, the crypto journey started with the news about Bitcoin and its rapid appreciation and speculative potential. Let’s use it as an example to illustrate the point. Bitcoin adoption started with a small community of supporters that believed in its transformative potential, its impact on our everyday lives, on how we rely on funds, and how we perceive economic transactions.
Bitcoin emerged without institutional help, started from small community circulation, and expanded to global adoption. This is where the main hint for marketing initiatives in crypto comes from. The hierarchy of marketing initiatives, effective in terms of financial and time resources in crypto has to be changed from Top-down (Big budget -> TV commercial, Movie placements, mentioned in major media outlets, with community building coming as the lowest priority or absent at all) to “down to top” hierarchy – where the end result can look the same but marketing initiatives originate at the bottom, by forming relations among key community members. With the correct strategy, execution can result in exponential growth because this is how crypto projects flourish. They are tested, discussed, and emulated in diverse environments and when they leave the originator’s circle they have bigger chances for success rather than projects that are marketed without being in sync with communities and target population.
There are many super popular projects in crypto, but they often remain undiscovered mostly because we are not part of the community, which also means that the project naturally found its follower and users, excluding advertising expenses from the product cost, making the utility stronger and community members who are more engaged and become the ambassadors.
The question is- how do you identify and recruit the first community members? We at NFTMAY do it through bounty marketing -a reward-powered marketing vehicle that allows you to recruit passionate project supporters that will help your community grow exponentially. This is a very productive strategy that help to achieve more significant impacts with little budget.
2nd Paradox. FOMA and Abracadabra
In the beginning, there was a word. What was this word for your project?
According to the data that our company has accumulated during the past 5 years we have been working with crypto marketing, the more acronyms your company has created, the more abbreviations your company has utilized, and the more chances your project will go viral, why is that?
According to the data that we have received, unknown acronyms and abbreviations used in crypto content activate FOMO – the fear of missing out. (Hello bitcoin).
People who discover your project through Discord surfing, or through social media browsing on Twitter or Instagram, are attracted to the words/terms/acronyms they don’t understand.
It gives the feeling that there is a secret. Strength in a project that has already developed its own vocabulary. It works as one of the strongest motivators that make the user want to belong to the group with its secrets and triggers the desire to belong to the secret knowledge keepers.
This is not something a traditional PR agency would do – quite the opposite, they aim to be as crystal clear as possible while delivering their message – and this strategy is impotent when it comes to crypto marketing.
3rd Paradox. Duality of Perception
Despite all the innovation that crypto has brought, the word crypto is stigmatized. It still has a flair for deceptive and scamming practices.
Here is an excerpt from the agreement offered by Chase bank to one of our clients that had crypto elements in its business offerings.
This also brings up the fact that advertising options are limited for crypto-related businesses.
Therefore, the advertising industry won’t easily allow you to advertise your products freely on Facebook or Twitter, Instagram or Google. There will be lots of reviews and complications. In most cases, crypto project owners don’t have access to the advertising options that are available to common B2B or B2C businesses.
By being de facto expelled from this advertising industry, crypto was forced to locate its own ecosystems for spreading the news and putting itself on the map of the market.
This situation has forced crypto project owners and crypto supporters, NFT collectors and NFT artists to look for new venues where they can create their own rules of interactions and basically design their own ways of engaging with the real world and Metaverse. This is why Discord has become the primary platform of choice as a discoverability solution and the basis for community growth. It allows projects to create customized spaces and experiences, and wrap the functionality around their unique needs.
Every crypto marketing campaign is a unique journey, and in order to take it, you have to forget everything you have learned in the pre-Metaverse days.
We are NFTMAY – crypto marketers and educators. We love data, make informed data-driven decisions in marketing, and love to share what we’ve learned.
We are launching education and mentorship programs for PR companies to become re-educated to effectively work with crypto projects, as well as for individuals, freelancers, and marketing departments of the crypto companies who want to take it one step further and run their marketing initiatives in-house.
Thank you for your attention today!
If you have any questions, please email us at yes@nftmay.com