Interview with Maria Spiring, EnCata Marketing agency
Creating an effective marketing strategy for blockchain or crypto projects is both fine art and exact science. In our new exclusive interview, EnCata Marketing agency founder Maria Spiring shares practical advice on the subject.
Maria, hi! Please tell our readers a bit about yourself and your professional background. How did you start working with blockchain-related projects?
I started organizing business events 15 years ago. My company MAS Events had large international corporations among its clientele and was in the Top-10 event agencies in Moscow. Then I took a short break to focus on other business ventures that included working with startups: consulting, tech project management, acceleration programs, fundraising. Gradually, the range of customer requests expanded to include marketing, and in 2018, with partners from EnCata, a Belarusian fund and engineering accelerator, we decided to open a joint agency for working with tech startups, including blockchain projects.
Which of your blockchain and cryptocurrency marketing projects do you consider to be the most important?
I am especially proud of the two conferences held last year as parts of the Iskander.events series. The first one is theTokenomics conference in Tallinn and the second is the Unblock Community in Hong Kong. During these events, 7 projects received funding from investors, largely due to the excellent P2P communication format we have chosen to implement alongside the panel discussions.
How do marketing campaigns for blockchain and crypto projects differ from those in other business areas?
An important aspect to pay attention to is the difference between the target audiences that need to be interested in the venture. One kind of information and presentation of certain aspects of the project is needed for investors and another — for the end-users. Those who will finance the project and those who will use its services can be completely different people.
Which platforms, in your opinion, are the most important for the promotion of blockchain projects?
First of all, it is crucial to use not just the crypto-oriented information platforms, but ranking sites as well. It is also important to provide educational resources that raise the general level of consumer and investor awareness of the project. Interviews with the project leader are instrumental in building trust in the project itself and in the business as a whole. As a rule, investors prefer to provide funds to a specific person.
In your opinion, what are the most common mistakes that cryptocurrency project teams make?
First of all, it is vital to launch an investment PR campaign and focus on the initial fundraising for the realization of the project. Most often, teams try to raise funds by direct sales instead without sharing enough information about the project and building trust in it.
We often come across projects with very low awareness of their direct and indirect competitors. I consider it very important to design your market presence not just by looking at other players in the same sector, but also by taking into account all the client experiences that are in this market.
There are 3 key questions you need to answer to craft a successful marketing strategy: How do the users solve this problem now? Do they really have this problem at all? How to convince them that solving the problem your way will be most effective?
The territorial affiliation of the project and the national market that it targets are of vital importance. Do not try to immediately capture the global market. Start on a local level.
Has the approach to promoting cryptocurrency projects in 2019 changed compared to the period of the ICO boom in 2017?
Of course it has changed! Trust-building and market localization have become the key factors. In 2017, the entire promotion focused on a large pool of very small investors who were interested in a quick return on small investments, and most of them did not even care if the product has an MVP, real users or a long-term growth plan. Nowadays marketing is focused on a small pool of large investors who need to be sure that the product will have a growing user base and their long-term investment will show considerable returns.
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