Inside Look: Mercuryo CMO On Data-Driven Marketing

Once again, Mercuryo is shedding light on what’s going on behind the scenes of a cryptocurrency financial service. Here Evgeny Skoropisov, Mercuryo Chief Marketing Officer, will answer several questions about his job, its peculiarities and tell something about himself as well. Before reading this post, you might want to see other materials about our team: Mercuryo Lawyer Alexandra Ivanova, Customer Support Manager Tigran Hakhunts, and about our Sales Managers Dmitry Pustovalov and Arthur Firstov.

How did and why did you arrive in Mercuryo?

I’ve become interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain in 2016. I bought my first mining equipment at that time to learn how to mine Ethereum and learn its nature. In 2017, I was already in the marketing department of one of the biggest advertising companies related to blockchain. You might say that in our industry one year equals three: the speed of development of the crypto market is amazing. In 2018, I have joined Mercuryo which at that time was just a little startup. I fully endorse the values of our team and believe that finance must be more independent and decentralized than today.

Can you describe your client base?

We are currently focused on two client bases. The first one encompasses all users of cryptocurrency who want to buy or sell crypto funds in our wallet. We can call this group B2C. The second base is created by all exchanges and financial services wishing to provide their clients with an opportunity to buy and sell cryptocurrency with fiat bank cards (Visa and Mastercard), and engaging with them is the B2B aspect of Mercuryo. Our average wallet user is a male from 18 to 40 years old. It’s great that 30% of our clients are women — and contrary to primitive stereotypes, we rarely see their complaints in our customer support deck.

At a current phase of our work, Mercuryo is still restricted to work in some regions, for instance, we are not yet working in the United States. Despite this, we are covering almost the whole world and we can see people coming from very different countries: many clients from Korea, South Africa and Russia. Of course, Europe is always active with key leaders being the United Kingdom and Germany. The mass adoption of cryptocurrency is taking good speed in these states.

Please tell more about Mercuryo community and how you maintain it.

In the long term, the project vision and culture is very important for people using it and the project itself. Many projects in the crypto world are still alive only because they give promises and make bold statements. Instead, Mercuryo is a down-to-earth company focused on actual business. Our community judges us by our real achievements. Communicating with Mercuryo audience is not just posting news or info messages, it’s also a process of constant dialogue and win-win cooperation. As we listen to our users and their proposals, we can upgrade the product without testing any features which only hypothetically might improve the experience with Mercuryo wallet. While we realize that even when the product is working fine, there won’t always be positive feedback, but we are paying great attention to all complaints. Our support team works 24/7, and we have a stable channel of communication between the Marketing Department and the Support Department to ensure no user complaint goes unnoticed.

Can you tell our readers about CMO’s day-to-day activities?

Of course! At the moment, I’m in Asia and I get up several hours before other team members based in the West. I use this advantage and start my day with reading emails, checking analytics, chats from colleagues all over the world. Afternoon is the time of online conference calls and I also start reviewing current project and activities requiring my participation and control. Throughout all day, I help my colleagues with their tasks, optimize their time and build quality engagement channels between the devs, support team and product-oriented departments. It’s very important to have clear communication and goals for the day, and this is why I dedicate a lot of time to the management of my department.

Outside your job, what are your hobbies?

I like mountains and nature a lot. I absolutely love travelling, alpine skiing, rafting or just camping with my friends. I also like talking with people from different countries and cultures, visiting non-mainstream places and learning the local lifestyle to better understand the country I’m in.

It’s a common knowledge that crypto ads are banned in Google and Facebook, how do you manage to attract new audience?

The cryptocurrency sphere is poorly-regulated or completely unregulated at the moment. Many state governments make chaotic statements but it’s a very complicated matter and we are far from consensus in this regard. During the Bitcoin boom, many suspicious projects and total fraudsters crawled out of the woodwork and it’s because of them big ad dealers like Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media have banned the ads of crypto projects.

And of course, these restrictions have made the work much more difficult to fair market members. We didn’t have big losses from this because our marketing strategy is quite diversified. Aside from classic media buying or context ads, we are actively developing in the areas of ASO, SEO, SMM, word of mouth; we are engaging with bloggers and influencers all over the world. Our PR department is extremely productive as we see the growth of brand awareness every week.

What analytics system are you using?

This is going to sound as a truism, but I trust only in data. That’s why using our own Business Intelligence (BI) system and a few dozen other resources is crucial for us. We are not limiting ourselves to one system only. All new activities are passing through A/B/n testing in advance with further optimization based on results.

Is Mercuryo doing all the work in marketing or there are some outside agencies?

At the beginning of our journey, we did attract small advertising agencies. Today we are hiring professionals only and do all of this in-house.