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WXY: Enhancing Certainty in Marketing

PeterY

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「You never know where the other half of your advertising budget went.」

Original Article Title: "WXY: Increasing Certainty in Marketing"
Original Author: PeterY (@yudeewxy), Founder of WXY crypto marketing labs

The advertising industry has a saying, "You never know where half of your advertising budget is spent." This statement still applies to Crypto marketing in recent years. However, today, with the sluggish primary market, project funding constraints, the dim prospects of altcoin season, and increasing environmental uncertainty, project teams have to increasingly consider "performance marketing" to enhance marketing certainty.

Key Differences Between Crypto Marketing and Internet Marketing

Marketing Directly Linked to Coin Price. Because now Twitter, communities, and third-party platforms are filled with thousands of AI BOTS that grab information in milliseconds, or even directly engage in wash trading. Therefore, the accuracy of marketing is directly and instantly linked to the coin's price fluctuations. Based on this rationale, many project teams' marketing activities will collaborate with market makers. Market makers do not give retail investors time; merely shouting buy orders is just pumping, but with the market makers' cooperation in driving up the price, this integrated marketing effect will be greatly enhanced.

Crypto projects, apart from large platforms like Binance, are basically engaged in "niche" marketing. Project teams only need to reach a small portion of the target audience to achieve significant results. For a rug pull project, having 10,000 real purchases is already a good price performance. Everyone can check the on-chain addresses of the top 500 shitcoins on CMC and the gas fee on the chain they are on. After deducting likely bot and project team addresses, what remains is actually a very niche user base.

Based on this, marketing strategies with higher certainty have become more important

What is certainty? It means that when the CEO/CMO invests the budget, they can roughly estimate the actual effect, as well as which channels will have what impact and effect. Up until the final review, the difference from the initial estimation is not significant. Achieving this effect is marketing certainty, which is the most indispensable ability in today's marketing scenarios across various fields.

How to Enhance "Certainty"

Channel Resource Certainty. Currently, Crypto project marketing channels are mainly divided into several categories: media, KOLs, TG/Discord communities, video platforms (Youtube/TikTok), self-media platforms (Instagram/Reddit)...

These channels, different platforms, marketers need to consider the following corresponding aspects: user base, audience size of similar projects, historical interaction volume of the channel, effectiveness in different regions, authenticity and activity of channel users... The project marketing team needs to have accumulated basic data on channels in different languages. At the same time, there should be targeted "exploratory" marketing plans for "trial-and-error" marketing. Compared to Product Market Fit (PMF), this "trial-and-error" marketing can be referred to as Marketing Market Fit (MMF). For any project's marketing plan, I would advise them to find their MMF to determine their basic marketing data dimensions and benchmarks.

KOL and Community Authenticity. "Sales through emotion" rely on emotional engagement. If the audience's emotions are not stirred up, reaching them through a single piece of information will not lead to purchase conversion. Unless the project can reach the audience frequently in a short period, for example, within 3 days, the same potential target audience can be reached by different KOLs and media 6 times. Only in this way is it possible to achieve a certain conversion effect.

However, a better approach is to emphasize the authenticity of the dissemination nodes (KOL/community), including: their actual number of fans, exposure of a single piece of content, interaction rate of a single piece of content, whether these KOL accounts have unique values, whether the KOL has personalized expression, whether they have strong "vitality." The project needs to find those KOLs and communities that "have attitude" and match their project's target audience, and then have the KOLs generate content that suits them, rather than bland advertising content. Mediocre content will only produce mediocre results, even if the channels are top media and KOLs.

Content Effectiveness. I have seen too many marketing cases where the depicted content is ineffective, even misleading. The so-called ineffectiveness can be divided into several types: incomprehensible content, lack of differentiated content, mediocre content tone, failure to spark reader interest, readers not knowing what to do next after reading... Good marketing content is no different from a good movie in terms of captivating the target audience and their reading interests from the opening scene or even the title. Whether it is sensational, data-driven, thought-provoking, or questioning... a good start will automatically categorize the target audience and capture their likelihood of continued reading.

According to statistics, a Crypto user now encounters over 1000 pieces of effective content every day (from media, Twitter, short videos, mobile push notifications, communities, chats), and only stays on the beginning of each piece for 1-2 seconds. Only those who are interested will click through to continue browsing. Therefore, the beginning of the content almost determines 80% of its effectiveness. At the same time, good content must have "interactivity"; it should clearly tell readers how to interact next, what the benefits are, and the content itself should create such emotions.

100 True Fans. Since this is "niche audience" marketing, the concept of true fans becomes extremely crucial. This group can be the core 100 developers, the top 100 high-frequency users of the product, or the 100 Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) or community managers with influential outreach... Depending on the project's characteristics, there may be slight differences. However, what remains the same is that under the marketing system in the crypto space, traditional "scalable" marketing does not work well for most projects, except for when reaching a certain scale with CEX/DEX.

Most projects at the beginning stage require more of this "small but deep" connection, arousing the ideals, values, and economic incentives of these 100 people. They will then generate a significant volume in social media and the community. This effect is sufficient to bring early word-of-mouth publicity and a community of initial scale to the project. This may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but that's how the crypto space has developed over the past 15 years. All excellent projects, in their early stages, were very geeky, idealistic, and community-oriented.

Early Planning of the Tipping Point. 99% of CMOs and CEOs only plan how much media, how many KOLs, how many communities, and how much content. But they lack planning on which elements can trigger a "tipping point" in discussions. Referring to the concept of "Dominant" and "Auxiliary" in the Book of Changes (Yijing) can help understand this. Everyone does the "Dominant" part well, but misses the consideration of the "Auxiliary" part. The two complement each other to achieve a natural harmony. To achieve widespread content sharing through light efforts, it must rely on a "tipping point" in the topic.

So, what content is more likely to be shared? Obviously, it is the "human weaknesses" that marketers often talk about: greed, lust, curiosity, jealousy, gossip, showing off, contrast... Marketers themselves are the planners of this marketing battle, and they must clearly plan:

A. Who

B. What kind of story to package, a story that has quarterly dramatic, contrasting, and gossipy elements
C. Through which channels to spread the above content by word of mouth
D. Which channels will amplify the mentioned word-of-mouth content on a larger scale

Effective Use of Crypto Traffic Tools, but also considering the ROI, such as platforms like Kaito, Cookie, Galxe, etc. Different platforms are at different stages of their lifecycle, and some, although well-known, may have a lower cost-effectiveness ratio. Marketers should be adept at finding more cost-effective channels and propagation nodes and even supporting these platforms at an early stage, tying themselves to them, becoming the top projects supported by them, as seen with the relationship between Cookie and Spark.

The project team must have the ability to build a marketing monitoring system, whether it's positive or negative word-of-mouth on X, the discussion heat in the TG community, content actively or passively exposed in the media, actual effect conversion brought by KOL channels... The project side must have a reasonable monitoring tool and system, allowing for real-time and convenient operation.

AI Adaptation. Google's search behavior has gradually changed, especially in the coin circle, where users are more willing to search on X and AI ends, possibly resulting in more accurate results and a lower risk of encountering hacker ambushes. This behavior requires marketers to gradually consider adapted marketing activities, such as from SEO to GEO. SEO used to be a factor that marketers must consider in their marketing activities, but not necessarily now. Because if users' search behavior occurs on platforms such as ChatGPT, Deepseek, and Grok, the content captured by AI is the most important. Therefore, a new form of marketing behavior, 'GEO,' has emerged, focusing on how to create content that is more easily captured by AI. Although this field is still in a trial-and-error stage, the scale of projects in the coin circle is still relatively small. Therefore, marketers can create a large amount of high-quality foundational content and lay a good reputation groundwork on platforms such as media, BBS, and self-media to make it easier for AI to capture.

Due to space constraints, it is not possible to elaborate on each point, and different project types can also have more deterministic thinking. However, there is only one goal: regardless of how much or how little marketing budget is available, it needs to bring as close to the expected results as possible. Based on our past experience at WXY, we generally allocate the project's marketing budget as follows:

· PR Cost 15%. Media is like the air force, its role is to cover the surface and be retrievable during searches, especially after major media coverage where endorsement effects come into play. The cost of a Press Release in top English media is in the range of several thousand USDT (to avoid unnecessary trouble, specific prices will not be mentioned here), while a Sponsorship will be in the range of 10K-20K USDT/article (advantage being a more natural content, featuring the journalist's name for a stronger endorsement effect). The price for a single article in Chinese Crypto media ranges from a few hundred USDT to several thousand USDT, depending on the resources associated with these media.

· KOL Cost 30%. KOLs must be differentiated, with significant differences based on their influence level, whether they are in the long tail, waist, or head; they can also be categorized into first-level research-focused, second-level trendsetters, contract-led signal groups, macro analysis, technical charting, meme commanders, alpha market players, etc. Of course, prices also vary greatly, ranging from tens to thousands of USDT.

· Third-Party Marketing Platform 15%, mainly split between half USDT and half the project's native token, but the specifics depend on the project quality and platform acceptance.

· Community Partnerships 15%, in line with the ratio set for the third-party marketing platform.

· Others 25%, allocated for specific targeted channels for this project, such as offline events, sponsorships, gifts, promotions, voting..., and for additional expenses.

Based on the above analysis and budget allocation, specific marketing goals can be customized for each channel and different scenarios, even including ROI. At the same time, a portion of the budget can be allocated to specific responsible individuals for performance rewards. By achieving these goals, most marketing results are satisfactory, and the project can even surpass 99% of projects in the industry.