Strategies for Marketing Success in a Shifting Landscape – Interview with Polygrowth CEO Simon Moser

The cryptocurrency market has reached uncharted terrain, with the current bull run showing significantly different behaviour compared to past cycles. Bitcoin has remained the market leader with a market dominance of 55.92% (at the time of writing), while altcoins have had difficulty gaining traction, and once-trendy industries like play-to-earn and NFTs have lost steam.

This shift in market conditions has profound implications for how crypto projects approach marketing and communications. To discuss all of this, I have the opportunity to interview Simon Moser, the CEO of Polygrowth, a leading content marketing and PR firm in the cryptocurrency space.

Let’s dive in.

How are the changes in this crypto market cycle affecting the marketing strategies that crypto projects need to employ?

The current crypto bull cycle, if you can even call it that, is certainly much more challenging for altcoin projects than previous cycles. Of course, this might still turn around in a couple of months, but for now, we have to assume that things are different. To me, it seems that the remaining investors are a lot more skeptical when it comes to deploying their capital. Additionally, there are hints of user fatigue regarding new ecosystems and platforms. As such, converting users is becoming more difficult. In times like these, it’s important to focus on delivering value much more than running clever ads and marketing stunts.

The use of AI-powered marketing tools has been on the rise in the crypto industry. How are these technologies influencing how crypto projects communicate and engage with their target audiences?

Obviously AI is everywhere today, but in my opinion and experience, marketers should rely a lot less on these tools than they’re currently doing. Nowadays, there are many projects that use AI for everything, from writing articles, social media posts, and discord messages to creating images, videos, and audio content.

In most cases, tech-savvy users (who are dominant in the crypto space) have seen so much AI content that they can easily identify it as such. They’re tired of listening to the same robotic voice that everyone uses for their info videos. They see if an image was generated by an AI from a mile away. And they can feel if a text was written by ChatGPT as it uses the same expressions over and over again.

As novel as it is, AI content is very unoriginal and it’s starting to bore users to death. There are certain cases where it’s smart to use AI because the impression on the customer won’t really matter, but for important communications and marketing, you should rely on human creativity.

Additionally, it’s very obvious that Google isn’t a fan of it either and heavily penalizes AI-written content. So, it’s best to avoid it for blog, website, and PR content altogether.

In the current marketing landscape, can projects entirely rely on sponsored articles and Kol activities compared to organic news coverage by journalists?

There’s certainly room for all of these activities depending on a company's marketing goals. When it comes to growth, KOL marketing is probably still king. However, there are so many bad actors in this space now that it becomes vital to double and triple verify the KOLs you work with – it’s crucial to stay clear of fakefluencers with botted traffic. And, of course, KOLs are anything but cheap these days. Still, they’re a crucial part of virtually any crypto marketing campaign in 2024.

Organic news, on the other hand, are excellent to build authority and a good reputation in the industry. They can certainly attract new users and help you grow, yet it’s mostly about establishing your project as a legit player. This is especially useful when it comes to institutional audiences, such as VCs, market makers, exchanges, etc.

Sponsored posts are usually a waste of money, though they can make sense as a last resort if you really need to reach a certain audience and can’t find an organic way to get media coverage. For example, we recently had a client that needed to reach programmers in the crypto space. There’s only a handful of developer-focused crypto media, and when we exhausted all options to secure earned media coverage in those, we had no choice but to go sponsored.

What advice would you give crypto startups to navigate the evolving landscape of trends like NFTs and play-to-earn, and effectively establish credibility?

NFTs and P2E are unforgiving industries this cycle, at least so far. It’s important to focus on value creation for users rather than throwing around buzzwords and organizing flashy campaigns. Other than that, working with top KOLs and securing top tier media coverage will certainly help in establishing credibility.

Looking ahead, what trends do you foresee in crypto marketing, and how is Polygrowth preparing to lead in this evolving space?

User behavior is changing across the board, not only in crypto but also in other industries. It’s pretty obvious that legacy media are slowly losing their standing as user-generated content becomes more popular. While newspapers, magazines, and other publications are still crucial pieces of a balanced communications strategy, spending is rightfully shifting toward KOLs and influencers in this environment.

As a top content marketing and PR agency, we acknowledge the significance of this trend and are working on establishing ourselves as a key service provider in this field – with real, high ROI-generating KOLs rather than botted fakefluencers. Going forward, we’re looking to weave traditional PR into KOL marketing and thus achieve highly effective campaigns in the crypto landscape.