Marketing Basics for ICOs and Blockchain Projects - John Hargrave, Media Shower

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and the token economy and I'm your host Manuel staggers this episode has support from no official sponsor but from my very own the blockchain and us newsletter get an email from me every two weeks with a very short summary of new podcast episodes so you can immediately pick those interviews you'd like to listen to to stay up-to-date just visit www.cannainsider.com/careers the CEO of media shower a media platform for I SEOs

crypto and blockchain projects he is the publisher of the Bitcoin market journal and he is an author and frequent speaker at conferences this episode is a little shorter than my normal introduce but it is straight to the point and packed with info about marketing and positioning blockchain projects and now to the interview John thanks a lot for making time today John you run a marketing agency for blockchain and token companies and I speak to a lot of people in this field and many of them are quite confused when it comes to to their marketing at their marketing strategy so in your view what

are the most important things for crypto and blockchain companies to understand when it comes to marketing sure so as you said I'm the CEO of media shower which is a media and marketing company focused on blockchain so we work with AI co-founders and blockchain entrepreneurs as well as enterprises who are looking to get into the blockchain space and what we're good at doing is helping the blockchain founders or projects connect with quality investors so connecting quality blockchain projects with quality investors and what we've found is important number one takeaway is to

build the list build the list so when you're creating your marketing campaign you want to have a list of people who have opted in and raised their hand and said I'm interested in your project and I want to learn more I want to know what's happening so that list can take several forms the best form is email of course because with email you can then be sending out updates to them on a regular basis and when you look at all the different marketing channels email is the only one that people consistently look at right like all of us check our email and it's also what we call a push channel which means that you're pushing

the content to them versus a pull channel where they have to go pull it down such as social media how long how long about does it take to create a good email list well it depends on how much traffic you have coming to your site and how good you are at converting them which means basically getting them on to your list so that number can really vary but what you're looking for is attraction of at least let's say 5,000 users and once you reach that point a list of about 5,000 folks and hopefully that's an opt-in like an email list then you really can start to get some traction and build some buzz in the marketplace and most companies you see don't necessarily do that they think of an email list maybe as an afterthought

or well what we hear from folks because they're not typically sophisticated marketing folks they're more technologists or blockchain enthusiasts we hear get me some buzz in the marketplace we hear people saying like get me mentioned in Forbes as if that article in Forbes will suddenly cause money to start magically raining down from the sky well the truth is even if you do get mentioned in Forbes that's like one small step in the overall marketing journey and it's far more valuable to put your energy into building systems that are going to build your list so for example having a blog on your website with regular content and at the end of

every piece of content there's a really easy signup form to get updates about your blockchain project that's a way of building the list and that's a project that will pay dividends far into the future hmm what kind of content do you see works well for conversion it needs to be valuable and the challenge is finding content that's valuable because you can't just be talking about your project all the time you have to be tying it into larger themes or kind of broader ideas so as an example what I do at our company Media shower is I regularly record little two-minute videos about some aspect of blockchain so it might be an idea it

might be a new trend I've seen it might be something that I learned recently at a conference and I put those on YouTube we put those on our investor website Bitcoin market journal and then I share it on LinkedIn and the beautiful thing about LinkedIn is when you share a video when as people are scrolling through their LinkedIn feed it will start Auto playing so if you can make a really focused tight two minute video with a lot of really interesting ideas or some real value people will share that and so we create these videos and using them on different platforms as a key part of our marketing strategy we call it create once use everywhere you create a great video you can use it on your blog in

your email newsletter on your LinkedIn feed and so on so how often should you know people create these videos constantly but daily I mean daily one or what's the good frequency there yeah that's great and part of the challenge with content is it is a monster that must continually be fed so you really do need to have a steady stream of that content coming out now it doesn't have to be daily one of the best newsletters that I read is a weekly newsletter our own Bitcoin market Journal newsletter is a weekly newsletter a consistency is important so if you're going to do a weekly newsletter you need to say okay it's coming out every Wednesday it's

and we're going to stick to it and you need to do that over the long haul look at it as at least a year journey to really get that audience built up so consistent and and and regular are the two important things to take away their right that makes a lot of sense you mentioned video what are other content pieces that people can create well written content is terrific because then Google will pick it up and of course you get indexed in search engines and you get more organic traffic that way well that could be an article a blog post on your own site that could be a medium article it could be on the LinkedIn blogging platform but anywhere that

article can be read and shared and shown as thought leadership now folks start doing this and one of the common problems they run into is they're expecting thousands of readers right off the bat and it's just starting to build your audience I mean you might get a dozen people reading your posts and you say well this is not really worth my time but it is it is because you have to do that you have to invest that time and energy in order to build the audience number one and you it's valuable for you to help articulate the ideas that are kind of rolling around in your head to actually put them into words and put those arguments out there you can kind

of stress test your ideas so it makes you a better communicator and it also makes your ideas better mmm-hmm so you mentioned to format articles videos you mentioned some of the channels LinkedIn medium what about though I mean sure those are this is like the shell right off the marketing but what's inside is probably also very important so you said before you have to order your thoughts but people also have to develop some good things to write about so how should they go about that well a great way is going to conferences going to meetings going to talk to other block chain thought leaders and listen to what they have to say and I always have a notebook with me everywhere I go you have to capture those ideas when

they occur to you so whether you use you know Google keep or Evernote or some kind of app or just an old-fashioned notebook capture those ideas as they come out and then you just have to put in the hard work the time of developing those ideas into your blog posts or videos or podcasts but I think that keeping your eyes open there's so much happening in this space and it's growing and evolving so rapidly if you keep your eyes open for the ideas as they come to you they will come to you and that's how we're adding value to this whole ecosystem is by cheering new ideas I mean I'm adding value right now by telling you how to create a marketing program you're adding value by distributing this through your podcast

and doing all the other great work with this podcast so there's tons of value to be added just keep your eyes open and then develop those ideas what are some of the other channels to where people should publish their content those are the big ones but you also medium LinkedIn the big ones and then Twitter YouTube yeah so I think that people often try to take on too much and just doing social media is a full-time job some days it feels like right and you know something like telegram is is all-consuming in that once you open a telegram channel the expectation from your users it's gonna be that you're Manning at 24 hours a day so I think you should strategically decide which

channels you want to engage in and which you don't and that's really important and it's gonna vary by the type of project that you have right so but make it make a conscious strategic decision and don't try to do it all at once unless you you know have so much money in the bank that you can hire an army of social media folks but even then if you have other people doing your social media you need to coordinate with them so another thing we do manual is we create a weekly list of talking points so these are basically as we're working with a client we'll say here are the stories for this week that we want to plug in to and we're always on the lookout for a news story

something that's trending in the news that we can talk about from our clients perspective so in other words if it's some kind of privacy initiative and you find out about some kind of big hack of a major corporate database you can say you know this hack could be avoided privacy is important more now more than ever and here's a project that's trying to solve that so by kind of working your way into the news and then developing a list of talking points which is just a Google sheet that we keep and then we meet weekly with the team and share that Google sheet that ensures that everybody has a consistent message if you do have a larger team managing social media and PR and blogging that everybody can be on

message with the same saying the same things cool how do you go about tying the brand into these comments or opinions or stories that you publish it is important not to sweat too much about tying the brand in because it starts to feel like an infomercial so I've mentioned our company a couple times in this podcast but you notice I'm not sitting here saying you know constantly repeating the name of our company and that's by design what we're trying to do is add value to the ecosystem and then you know if you have something interesting to say and people find it

useful bill they'll naturally remember you so it's much more important to add value to find an interesting idea find an interesting angle and communicate that then to try to get the name of your brand out there because people will smell that they sniff that out but when you're really adding value in a sincere and honest way then they they get that as well and that reflects positively to build trust mm-hmm good point I mean there's there's so much content on you know in this whole crypto space on YouTube Twitter medium and all these platforms I mean how do you cut through all the noise there sometimes it can be overwhelming and if you think about all

the content out there and how could I ever have anything to say then it can feel kind of overwhelming at the same time there is always room for good original ideas and good original thinking and if you really believe in your project and you're passionate about it and you're passionate about the ideas behind it people always respond to that passion they always respond to really interesting smart people who have an original something to say so for me personally I look at it as like a lot of the content that that I'm developing through our company and sharing out on LinkedIn is with my wider network of colleagues who don't really understand

blockchain many of the folks I've been working with my throughout my technology career they don't really know that much and if I can share blockchain technology with them in an accessible or user-friendly way then I can add real value to them and they're not necessarily even the type that would be on YouTube looking up blockchain I can introduce them to it and in so doing AB value to their lives and their careers so there's always a way to add value using this content and my suggestion is follow your own vision your own ideas and don't don't worry too much about what everybody else is is doing in the content space mm-hmm yeah good point

what kind of marketing strategies have you seen recently that you felt were very different or very good or very well executed in this space there's this company doc dot dot IO and they are kind of a LinkedIn on the blockchain so a next generation of social media platform and my friend Richard Castle ein sent me an invite and I got an automated invite from Doc that said Richard Castle is inviting you to join doc and I checked it out and then what they did that was so brilliant Manuel is what you login and create an account they say would you like us to import all your LinkedIn contacts I'm a big LinkedIn following

I'm like 5,000 followers on LinkedIn so I sat there for like half a day thinking through do I really want to send everybody in my an invite to doc but here's how they got me here's what they did they said you can earn tokens you can earn tokens and this idea of earning tokens is the most brilliant marketing strategy - crypto enthusiasts because we all know even if the tokens are worthless right now someday they might be worth something so this idea of earning tokens in that language earn the word earn is really important from a marketing standpoint as long as you're saying that truthfully but the other

thing was making it so easy to pull in all my LinkedIn connections so after I sat on this for half a day I said I guess I'll do it and I sent out the document to all 5,000 connections and would you like to know how much I earned man well probably not a lot forty six dollars forty six dollars for my entire professional network but I I did learn something really really valuable out of that which is that that that mechanic works really well for marketing it's kind of a viral loop they've created I think it's brilliant and they have I think they just passed half a million

users on their blockchain in like four months Wow - users on the blockchain not on their service but on the blockchain and that's pretty remarkable growth for a blockchain company right yeah but I mean that exactly has very little to do with what you just said right create constant content videos articles I mean it didn't do that they just had a clever idea with you know basically paying you to do something well they had a viral mechanic that was built into the platform so I do think that that is a valid and really smart marketing technique if you find a way to do that and the classic example is hotmail back in the early days of the web hotmail was the first free wet service and they had the brilliant idea that every hotmail message a little ad

at the bottom that says brought to you by hotmail gave today mm-hmm and so every message that was sent out using hotmail became an ad for hotmail and they just had write a crazy growth just incredibly had seen anything like it and this is back in the days when you know free email did not seem like a viable business strategy it seemed kind of insane and and they made it work right but that's maybe a good good thing to kind of wrap up too I mean you you mentioned the article strategy you mentioned the video strategy to publishing on the channels but then still you need also an mechanic that helps you onboard users in your business model well in helps and the greatest

mechanic of course is word of mouth the greatest mechanic is giving your customers and your users such a great experience that they want to talk about it to other people so ultimately that's what we all have to be focused on I like to say many well that the blockchain is about people people have to use the blockchain in order for it to be valuable so we create these blockchain projects but we have to have a user acquisition strategy meaning we got to find a way to get people on it and once they're on it they have to be delighted they have to be thrilled and that's old-fashioned customer service that's talking to your customers that's learning what they want and that's responding quickly to what's working what's resonating with them and getting

rid of what's not so we really have to be relentlessly customer focused and that's the viral mechanic that everyone can do and in fact the most important marketing technique of all listening to your customers hmm what else would you like to see change maybe in the way that companies into space approach their marketing well I'm tired of the white paper the white paper to me needs to die and in its place should be a business plan a business plan so when you're launching a new blockchain project I don't just want to see a white paper with the technical specifications I want to see a full-on business plan and most importantly in that I want to see how you're going to

acquire customers what as part of that I want to see financial projections I want to see your projected profit and loss I want to see all the things that any investor of any company would ask before they put their hard-earned money into your prod and so that's something where we're passionate about and we're really leading the industry and doing is creating business plans instead of simply white papers mmm cool yeah jaundice is really cool I mean I learned a lot today even though we just spoke relatively short and I really enjoyed this conversation many thanks for taking time today thank you for all the work that you do thank you for your podcast and everybody should remember to

rate and review Manuel's podcast 5 stars and leave reviews he's not gave me to ask this but it really does help thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on the podcast website the blockchain and us comm to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel staggers and I thank you very much for listening [Music]