Today what I want to talk to you about is who should influence your marketing decisions. How to approach your blockchain startup marketing decision-making? What is that one thing that is very important to take into account and why? I feel like there are many things that are going wrong, if you don’t really have the right mindset into place. So what I’m talking about today is your user, whoever you are building, whatever your startup is building for. So why is it so important? It’s important because many blockchain founders think that they ARE their customer so they are building things for THEMSELVES. But it’s not always the case. And if your customer profile is DIFFERENT from yours, then whether you like your marketing ideas or not is completely IRRELEVANT. It’s very important to know who you are building the thing for and who is going to be your user, because the better you know that users, the better you will know how to approach them and how to attract them and how to make them actually want to use your product. So that’s the most important thing that you should focus on. Very often we have this common mistake of who blockchain startups are marketing to. Startups’ budgets are limited. Most probably you don’t have too much money to spend on marketing, which means that you have to be very strategic in terms of where you spend that money, how do you spend the money and how do you make sure that the money brings the right ROI and that your funds have been spent efficiently. Especially in the blockchain space where everything is quite expensive. Very often blockchain founders make different marketing efforts and spend money on things that they shouldn’t spend money on at all. Think if you are reaching your potential future users with those activities. Are you making sure that the future potential users are the ones who see the advertising, who listen to the influencer or who hear your speech at an event? If the answer is NO. Then no matter how amazing that activity sounds like, no matter how good it seems, it’s just going to be USELESS. So that is why the exercise of understanding who is your user is important. And I’m not only talking about the demographics of that persona, but also the psychographics of that persona. What are their problems? What are they looking for? Where do they get their information? What topics are they interested in? And then the more you know about that person, the better you will know how to reach them. So when I’m talking about mistakes let me give you one example from my past experiences during the ICO times. I’m sure you remember that many blockchain projects were spending tons of money on road shows and speaking at different conferences and events, and also on getting booths and sponsorships for those big conferences. I was among very few who was really against that whole idea and thought that amount of money was not worth spending and that it was something that shouldn’t really have been done at all for the ICO marketing. And let me explain why. ICO marketing was targeting the token buyers, right? So all the marketing efforts were basically targeting these people to make sure that they find out about your project and trust the project enough to want to buy your tokens. What happens when you are going to these road shows and to places like that? I don’t know if back then you’ve been to any of these conferences, but there were no token buyers on those events. Most of the startups founders spent tons of money, plus the travel and accommodation and everything else to go to an event where they were going to speak in front of the audience, which was completely IRRELEVANT and who were not going to buy their tokens. So who were in their audience? The companies like theirs who were initiating ICOs (in some cases even competitors). Also there were companies who were there to pitch startups like yours different services, such as ICO marketing or PR services. So that was the main audience. Those were the people you were trying to impress. Were these people going to buy your token? NO. Were these people going to be excited enough to go out there and talk about your project and promote it to others? NO. Was it worth the money? ABSOLUTELY NOT. What we did instead when, when I was doing, ICO marketing I was trying to figure out just the opposite. Okay, at these big conferences, they were not talking buyers…. So where were they? So I realized that they were in different small meetups. There were tons of different meetups all over the world, in different cities. They were very small – about a hundred people each but ALL  hundred people were potentially token buyers. So even if 10 people out of these hundred were going to buy your token based on what they heard during your speech, it still was going to be way better than the road shows and big conferences. And guess what? It was all FREE. So all you were investing was your time and energy and and preparation of this pitch, basically and it was free and it was way more beneficial and the conversion was amazing. So think of it from that perspective. Blockchain startup founders are trying to impress the competitors, trying to impress the people in the space. You are trying to convince the people that you don’t really need as users or customers. So who should drive your decisions in marketing? Your future user! Every time you’re thinking about different initiatives and activities and revising the budgets and making decisions about whether you should do something or not – remember about your user. Your marketing should be customer centric. So always remember the customer. Always put him in the center of your decision making. When many say blockchain marketing, they think about actually marketing to blockchain people and the cryptosphere. And what happens very often. They think that just because they have a token or use blockchain they need to market to the crypto audience. But guess what? If your end user is not the crypto audience, then crypto influencers are irrelevant because you’re going to get loads of coverage, but you’re going to get coverage among the crypto (irrelevant) crowd. If the crypto crowd or crypto person is not your ideal user base or your ideal user persona, then no matter how many people will see the YouTube review it won’t really matter. I mean, who cares? So please think about, are you who you are providing a solution for? Who are you going to try to acquire once your product or service is out there and where are those people. Make sure that you look at it from that perspective. Don’t get distracted by following the crowd and doing what everyone else is doing. Believe me sometimes everyone can be wrong. Sometimes someone does something and then everyone follows and no one really takes a step back to think about whether those things should be done or not. So just because everyone went to conferences didn’t mean that you had to spend tons of money to go to these conferences too. Just because everyone uses influencers doesn’t mean that you need to use those influencers too because maybe the influencer’s audience has nothing in common with the users that you’re trying to acquire. Definitely look at best practices,  look at what others are doing, but don’t take it for granted that it’s the correct way to do things. Just look at it from the perspective of future users and have them as a  guiding parameter for your decision making. I hope I managed to convince you and it made sense. Make sure that all your marketing decisions are user centric, that the user, your future user, your ideal client, your ideal customer is the person who needs to be in the center of everything. And make sure you subscribe not to miss any of the future content:) Previously published at https://anialexander.com/how-do-you-make-your-blockchain-startup-marketing-decisions/

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