How we broke Telegram and gained 1 million+ emails in 3 weeks with Maître

A Case Study on Mass Virality Evangelism and why Community is the future of Marketing.

The future is and will never be the same. Not just a banal platitude. Intrinsic to most things is progress and change, marketing is changing faster than ever with the rise of mass mobile adoption, internet adoption into new geographies and the race towards Margin 0.

Coupled with the fast-paced and fast-to-iterate ICO Market, we’re seeing the forefront of Marketing being fought in the ICO trenches. The best of the best marketers, growth hackers and agencies are trying to get their piece of the pie. However, and with most things, the majority of such actors don’t really understand this new industry, how it works and the implications on what marketing should look like for this future.

Community

Community is the future. As referenced in books and writings such as ‘Contagious’, the most powerful mechanism of marketing is word of mouth.

Signalers, Influencers and Authorities.

For products, projects and foundations that rely on Network effect, marketers cannot rely on large ad buys and CPA campaigns anymore. The product page is dying. The long form sales page with it. Western internet users are more astute, with technologies such as Clickfunnels and the tactics behind common conversion based marketing practices basically being common knowledge.

Introducing, Community.

You no longer have customers, you have fans.

You no longer have users, you have evangelists.

Your board is now 10,000+, feedback loops are much smaller and much more important.

You have an immense amount of increased leverage. With 10,000 raving fans, 50,000 raving fans or more, one can be strategically placed to blow up any initiative you decide to test.

This community is your audience, but also your sales mechanism. You’re not selling your product, you’re selling your network, your community.

The VC’s and sophisticated investors are no longer eyeing up your business fundamentals, they’re looking at how many Telegram users you have, how many commits to your open source repo you have, how many active contributors you have, how busy your reddit it, what the Twitter (Using NLP) sentiment is.

As one may imagine, having a large community with high engagement lends itself to momentum and pushing new PR/Content out with a high viral coefficient. This is incredibly beneficial for any Tokenised product that plans to go on, or is on, an exchange. As it’s now called ‘Token Marketing’, can almost be intrinsically linked to user adoption and your CPA. Having a large community/network, creates hype & momentum, ultimately leading to strong post-ICO marketing and close to 0 CPA’s.

Strong post-ICO marketing is hyper-necessary for ‘Token Marketing’, the marketing of your Token and it’s utility (Proposed high utility) within the protocol/application.

Ultimately, your marketing strategy has to be holistically based upon your network effect, or rather, how fans can utilise your product post-ICO. This should and arguably has to come from community, virality and word-of-mouth.

Case Study →Referrals: Current.US (Client) + Maitreapp.co (Referral Service)

Slowly we’ve been piecing together what it means to have a community, what community growth looks like and the best way to do it.

Some variables and things to consider:

1. Community numbers don’t mean anything unless they share, engage and refer.
2. Quality of traffic is everything.
3. The community has to be well prepared for management, engagement and viral marketing. Otherwise rapid growth can have very negative effects.
4. All efforts need to be holistically placed within the community funnel.
5. Geographies and languages are drastically more important to get right.

Brief from Client:

‘Build the biggest f**king community in Crypto’

So, with that detailed brief in mind, we set out to create a simple and effective referral mechanism, that had incentivisation on the backend for people to join up. We also had to make sure that we funnelled our traffic to the right places. Such that we could reuse an existing audience base, not have it spread thin over multiple different channels and have enough of an inflection of users for us to hit that ‘Hockey stick’ growth.

We hacked together a simple lander:

This would act as a go between. We could send traffic here, with the Ad ban, as it wasn’t an obvious spammy ICO Landing page like the rest.

We used Maître’s backend and API in order to create a ‘portal’ for referrers to track their progress. It was also utilized for the actual referral mechanism, as well as the analytics and tracking.

Coupled with this, we also funnelled the referrers into Telegram. This enabled us to rapidly grow an audience in one central place, which we could continually leverage for content marketing, event marketing and momentum.

We’d pass through all content into the Telegram, instantly exploding everything we pushed through it.

The actual referral mechanism reduced the CPA (Email + Telegram) by a factor of around 250X, exploding Growth by over 5000 Telegram members a day.

Once we hit a specific inflection point, critical mass, it was game over.

Omnipresence

The key to this strategy is to be everywhere at once.

Many make the mistake of trying to drip-feed small ad-buys, small amounts of content marketing. This is a poor idea in such a saturated market.

At it’s core, that means spending and marketing everything in a very short period of time, between 4 and 8 weeks. Timing it such that you can launch the project right after the hype builds.

It’s important to note that this should be built around both your TGE strategy and your product roadmap, to hit those milestones. If you market 8 months before your product launches because you haven’t built an MVP already, you’ll fail. If it’s to garner VC interest but you don’t have anything to back it up, you’ll also fail.

This isn’t a shortcut ‘pay-to-play’, but a way to stand out in a heavily disillusioned (As of 15/10/2018) market with poor user adoption.

Community is most likely the future of all things marketing, not just for crypto, but for industries such as gaming.

The 8760 is a hyper-flexible network of high-level experts that share a common culture, infrastructure and experience in the TGE & Consensus space. We work on projects ushering in the fourth industrial revolution, zeroing in on their Strategy, Investment, Marketing and Creative.