Why Crypto.com’s Billboards Actually Make Perfect Sense
Billboards aren’t as effective as digital ads!
Considering we spend an average of 6 hours and 40 minutes daily on the Internet, why should a company target one specific geographical area with billboards when you can target the entire world at once? With the pandemic increasing screen times, and Facebook making it easier for to run crypto ads, isn’t it a no-brainer for crypto companies to fully invest in online marketing?
A Race to Capture Market Share
Contrary to common consensus, billboards aren’t a dying, inefficient, forgotten form of advertising. Let’s see why.
Firstly, let’s look at Crypto.com’s company mission — “Accelerate the World’s Transition to Cryptocurrency”. In simple terms — it just means getting everyone into crypto, specifically the Crypto.com platform. In a recent report, they predicted the number of crypto users globally to reach 1 billion by end of 2022.
Given the assumption of steady growth in crypto adoption, the next question is: “how do we get the largest piece of the pie?”. In other words, how can Crypto.com maximize user acquisition? Two simple answers:
- Having great products
Having an excellent product is the first key step to user adoption. Crypto.com has their Visa debit card, which is one of the most widely used crypto debit cards of its kind. Getting it is a no-brainer if you’re deep into crypto, and its relatively high cashback rates and benefits compared to traditional cards are attractive enough to get non-crypto users into their ecosystem. Their Exchange and DeFi services are also widely used core products in their ecosystem (more on these in a later piece).
2. Having great marketing
Now that you have a killer product, you need to tell people about it, how else would anyone know about you? Yes, there’s word of mouth like how Tesla did it, but relying solely on word of mouth has limited scalability and is more effective for products with high customer acquisition costs. Thus, we invest in marketing, both digital and traditional.
This brings us to our main question, is traditional marketing even worth it? Digital marketing obviously has a wider coverage so yes, a higher portion of your marketing budget should be spent online, we’ve seen this with the $100M FFTB campaign where the bulk of its presence remain on Facebook and YouTube.
However, as with almost anything requiring effort to generate results — there are diminishing returns. How do you overcome this? Revamp your advertising entirely and come up with a new video, or find another market segment to advertise to. The latter seems like a more plausible choice.
In a bid to capture the market share of crypto adoption as quickly as possible, we enter traditional marketing.
Traditional Marketing Actually Works
As the goal for Crypto.com is to get as many users on their platform as possible, investing in traditional marketing like billboards allow them to target a more general audience, and more importantly capture audiences not targeted through online marketing. The only variables here are circulation (number of people who pass the billboard each week), demographics (age, gender, income level, etc.) and impressions (number of people who actually see the billboard).
While you might think the ROI on traditional marketing isn’t as high, it actually contributes directly and indirectly to a campaign’s overall performance.
In the case of billboards, here are a few facts from a survey conducted by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America :
- Online activations including search, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram activity generated by billboards return about 4x the expected rate compared to other traditional marketing methods.
2. At the same time, it boosts the business effects of search by 54%, of social by 20%, and of radio and TV by 17%.
3. Billboards increase an advertising campaign’s digital search effectiveness by more than 40%, essentially giving online advertisements a boost.
4. Nearly 5 in 10 US adults have used a search engine to look up information after seeing or hearing something advertised on a billboard.
Coupled with having one of the lowest barriers to entry for non-crypto users (their Visa Card + easy onramps), advertising to the general public through billboards is perfectly justifiable.
Creating a Loyal Community
Traditional marketing works mainly by providing positive, lasting brand association. At the end of the day, the overarching goal here is to achieve BRAND AFFINITY — the emotional connection customers have towards a brand. This goes a level above brand loyalty, where customers go to a brand because they’re familiar with it.
Traditional marketing is the base for generating brand affinity, and it works a whole lot better than online ads. For example, the Crypto.com Arena is now the home of the L.A Lakers, one of the most popular NBA teams in the world. Die-hard Lakers fans will then associate Crypto.com with their favorite team, which eventually sways their decision-making when they decide to look for a way to enter the crypto space.
The strongest supporting point here is that Crypto.com is still only one of the few companies advertising on such a magnitude. It’s not hard to call them the leader when it comes to crypto advertising.
If you’re interested to learn more, I go into the $700M naming rights deal here.
Yes, Billboards Work.
Though traditional marketing methods may seem “old,” the reality is that they’ve stuck around for a reason. They’re not being replaced by digital marketing, they go hand in hand with digital marketing to create the perfect advertising campaign to create loyal fans.
While some might think investing in multiple marketing mediums might spread their efforts thin, one should see the long term goal of racing to capture market share in a rapidly growing industry.
And if you’ve read all the way till the end of this dull piece — I guess their marketing worked — you’re a die-hard fan of Crypto.com!
