Alexandra Nicorici - Five marketing strategies you are sleeping on in 2025

So, normally I'm used to being the MC, so like I let everybody else do the talking, but I haven't done a presentation in like forever. But hopefully you're going to enjoy because I thought of bringing like a bunch of examples here. So, um um I hope you're going to find the the talk interesting. Uh and I kind of tried to make it for a little bit for everybody. Um, the reason why I wanted to talk about five marketing strategies you are sleeping on in 2025 is because a lot of the things that you're going to see here might seem very uh easy to understand or you like, oh yeah, of course this is what you're going to talk about, but like there are very few people that actually do it.

So that's why I brought I brought them up and especially because I have a bunch of examples to give you. So um yeah, but to give you a bit of a context of who I am, I've been working web two uh the very popular word uh for more than 10 years and I've been in web 3 for about four. I've been working with early stage tech startups. I run a web3 marketing podcast which is I think right now the only one remaining or like that's been the only one standing for the last two years. And I got awarded um uh I got rewarded as rising woman in blockchain uh by bitcat.

she was uh um they do this blockchain for her awards uh and they gave it to me during the Shifi summit in Singapore last year. Um I also run a web3 marketing hackathon. Um I've already done two editions because a lot of people complain about the fact that hackathons are only for tech people and developers and like there are so many um nontechnical folks that would like to do something a bit more different. I ran two uh events already. One in Devcon last year in Bangkok, one in uh Denver doing ETH Denver.

Um and you're going to see a bunch. I'm going to give you I'm going to talk a bit about the the hackathon a bit later. And you're going to see some um some numbers as well a bit later. Uh the third edition right now is going to come in Argentina during Dev Connect. So it's going to be a year in the making, let's say, with the the third uh the third one.

Uh last guy did it for 2K. call him then he's no longer in business. Basically that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have this presentation. Um because a lot of times uh that's what the industry feels like and looks like um and if you look um I don't know how many of you know about Safari. Safari is like one of the biggest uh um committees of web3 marketers.

They're in this like web3 growth landscape in 2024. Um, and apparently like only that 10 to 20% of them are still active. I still know a couple of them. Some of them are kind of dying off. Um, and I looked at some stats and apparently 42% of web3 startups die um within the first year just because uh the first reason for that is the product.

Obviously we do build a lot of product projects and like that's why we have a lot of hackathons for devs as well. But like the biggest issue is always that you don't know if there's a product market fit. Um, but I also looked at the numbers for web two and apparently it's a very similar percentage and it's also a very similar reason. I mean obviously for different context but yeah um the first thing I want to talk about is like founder marketing. I know a lot of founders don't want to talk about uh don't want to be the face.

A lot of them stayed in the idea like I can be anonymous and my community is going to grow because my product is so great. But it's not always the case obviously. Um and the reason why it's very important is because so first of all what is it is like when the the founder is leading the the team and the product itself and it's kind of becoming the voice of the the product. Um so basically um it helps engage the community and um and everything you're building there. Um it's very important for three reasons.

Authenticity, narrative control. so he can always be there to talk about um to control the narrative if it's like good or bad or like uh hype things up. Um and it's also community magnetism. People like love to see a person. They don't really like to see bots as we were talking about that a bit earlier.

Um and it's also obviously it's a lot more emotional and if you look at the why it works is that 92 of people trust recommendations from individuals which is a very very high percent. Um companies with active founders on social media see 3x higher engagement across uh uh their official brand uh channels. Uh VC back projects um often see funding announcement go viral when the founder is also very active in that. Um there were also there's a project called um Clutch Wallet where the founder actually built her Tik Tok and that's kind of how she managed to get funding because everybody's asking like oh what's your database like what kind of people do you have in your community and she's like well this is like 100,000 followers on Tik Tok so that's kind of how she managed to to get backed and uh founder space lady uh founder le spaces and consistently out of outperform form corporate uh communication obviously with a lot higher percentage as you can see between 40 and 60 which is very very high um if you look at a couple of examples I brought you three very different examples one of them is Jesse from from bass obviously he's very active on Twitter but he's also very active on Farcaster um and a lot of people like follow his voice and follow his narrative and um got on because of him not just because of the hype. At least I got unforcasted because of him.

Another example is Leon Abu. He runs a marketing agency. They don't even have a Twitter page for Unfungeible, which is the name of their marketing agency. And the reason for that is because he drives he's one of the biggest drivers of the communication for for them. Um, and imagine he he's he was betting on NFTs and everybody was like, "Bro, they're dead.

They're they're not coming back." like, "No, I do believe this is how it's going to work." He and he he builds all his communication around that. Um, and it seems to be working for him. I'm not exactly sure what he's been doing lately because I haven't followed him so much.

Um, but and maybe one of the reasons is because he recently told me that a lot of his audience are male males. That's why he does a lot of the way he communicates is like very male friendly, let's say. Um, but somebody else if you look at Maggie Love, she runs the biggest community for women in web three called Shifi. They do have a a course as well. I've done it like two years ago.

And a lot of people love her and hate her at the same time. It's like, oh, I don't like Maggie. She does all this like girly stuff. But at the same time, she brought so many women. Like in my seventh cohort when I applied, there were like 400 women per cohort.

So the every cohort is like every four months. and the way right now I think there were like over 4,000 application in the last one which is pretty insane if you look at like the two-year uh growth. Um and she leads with a very a very different way that the the the other two uh gentlemen do. Um but I I wanted to like bring you also a female example um for you to for you to check her out if you don't already know her. Um something else I wanted to talk about as well like to touch on is team led marketing because I think from founder marketing is like team led marketing.

Um and here we have two examples. Uh Emily and Maria they work for hype. Hype is another marketing agency and they kind of took over the space. They run the biggest uh community for marketers in this space at least not on Telegram. They have you see almost 800 members.

It's pretty active. um they hire I mean they build their um a lot of the communication is very attached to hype and they manage to hire really quickly they manage to um to get uh clients to work with them and so on. So it's a common effort everybody from the team kind of act um um acts as a BD let's say uh more or less to the way they communicate. Um, another example that I have is Angelina who's the HR or head of people, whatever they call it right now, uh, at Alchemy. Um, she does an amazing amazing job like getting people to know about alchemy and make making people happy.

uh last year she saw that uh I think you know like they have this t-shirts with like my mom thinks I work at Bitcoin and I actually saw that on Twitter like on LinkedIn before it got popular and I told her like oh my god I want a t-shirt she's like pass me your address I'm going to send you a t-shirt and she sent me a t-shirt like couple of days later it was at my door um and obviously like I would always appreciate the way everything she does and especially because like Alchemy right now is what a company from Romania and she's been at least she came at least once here, but she told me she's going to be here a lot more often. And then another example I have is Migi from Son. Um, he started doing this like communication uh around like Sophon and making like Sophon look cool. And I don't know if you I don't know how many of you are active on Twitter, but like Louie for example, he used to work for Luxo and he recently left and now he's doing videos. So he's also promoting a lot of the project that he works for.

obviously he's pretty well known in this space as well. So like there's like enhancement on top of enhancement. So you basically get all all these people to talk about like how cool is software and like whether anybody should should be using that. Uh and then you have communityled marketing. This is an example of like how people have been raving about like how they got into the season 14 of Shifi.

There are actually a lot of these kind of examples but I only saved one so at least I have an example for you guys. Um the second one is um the cards from unis swappy that from unis swap basically that I'm going to be um I'm going to show you just in a little bit of like how they look like. Um initially I thought like Nikico is somebody that like is a just somebody that got them but he actually works for them but it still work it still counts as a team marketing if you want to call it like this. Um, the second thing I wanted to touch on was K marketing because everybody hates KS like let's be honest like but at the same time everybody puts money into KS. So it's a vicious circle that nobody knows how to get out of.

Um, I thought of like talking about K marketing with a twist. Let's see. Um, and I wanted to like show you some numbers as well. Um basically what happens is that a lot of the um a lot of like very big accounts are botted. Um a lot of them are doing the exactly same campaigns over and over again for like very different products.

So that's why like they um dissolve the the authority that they have in front of their audience and especially when it comes to like DeFi projects. uh and a lot of like de have f uh fake followers that I told you like 30 to 60% of large scale als are are bought it which is like pretty insane and if you look at their engagement like it's really easy to spot that um um something else like when it comes to budget and otherwise that the average web 3k post cost between 1 and 15k uh and that's not a joke depending on like follower count and niche um project report um customer acquisition cost ranging from 50 to 250 per user through KL campaigns which is like if you ask me they're very very high numbers. Um then you have 53% of web three founders said KL campaigns were moderately effective. So like it it means that it doesn't always work. Obviously really depends on the project and like what you do and like where you are with your branding and so on.

um and only for 11% found him um highly effective. But as I said, it really depends like that's what marketing marketers like to say all the time. They can never give you a proper answer. Um and then um as I said like a lot of the a lot of them use the same people and then uh 40% of web3 users report mistrust and influencers because we've seen a lot of examples in the last couple of years how people were trying to trying to influence you to buy stuff and then they were like total rug pulls. So what do we do?

We go niche. So we go with micro influencers. If you ask me, it's not yet something that it's widely used. I would like to see a lot more of that because I think if you look if I look at my engagement, if I look at the engagement of people with like 100k, I have 4 point something on on Twitter, but like all my followers are organic. Um I'm pretty sure that I many times I'll have a lot higher engagement.

Um then if you can go multi- channelannel so if you go on like forecaster and Twitter and uh Telegram or mini sites or Telegram groups and so on they normally perform better because they're like um closer um they're they're smaller they're tighter communities then you have u the impress the conversion improves the khost spaced um post a call to action with the collectible mint. Um here I'm not 100% sure if that still works but it's been a very widely spread um tactic. And then basically the idea would be to use them as uh creators not broadcasters. Um because if you want a broadcaster you do father marketing I guess. Um so let's look at some examples.

Um, for example, um, they're not exactly, now that I look at it, I'm not sure sure like that I I chose the best example. I wanted to talk about like this campaign on Bounty Caster where you can bring like speakers and sponsors, but it mostly this is like more like community-led um type of thing. Uh, but at the same time, uh, and the second one, I think it's pretty much the the same uh the same kind of example. Um but something else um um a project that I've discovered recently is Blockbook. Blockbook wanted to like they actually changed their product like quite a lot in the last two years.

They used to be like the way they build the product initially was very was not great for the type of market that we're in right now. right now. Basically, they the way it works is that you can put your content. You you decide what kind of budget you want. Um, so for example, you can put you can I can post a podcast episode and I can tell people I have a $100 budget or like $200 budget and I will pay anybody like based on the types of views and how many views you have and how much engagement you have.

Um, anybody that does a snippet from that for like I don't know 20 seconds, 30 seconds can get paid from that. And basically that's why it's like so great as a brand ambassador program. It's something that is not widely spread yet. Um, and I know they're still like in the early in the early stages of their development, but I've had some really cool campaigns that they run with like a bunch of projects. And I thought um it's interesting because you can also have Kws, but you can also have a lot more like normal people like content creators, micro uh um microkols to um to be helping you and to to kind of monetize.

Uh monetization has been like a a very big issue and it's been widely spread and talked about for like quite some time. Um the third thing I want to talk touch on is like web to marketing in web 3. You would might wonder how is that possible? We can actually do that and I want to show you some examples of like how it worked if you ask me pretty effectively and pretty cool. One of them is like there's some posters that UNISOP posted recently.

They they they put them on walls and um I think they were actually one of them was in New York in Permissionless. I'm not exactly sure if they were in Berlin during Berlin blockchain week, but I saw a lot of people on Twitter posting photos with that. So I thought like it's a very easy thing to do but still pretty effective um if you ask me. So the v virality possibility is quite high if you ask me. Another campaign that I've seen recently is also unis swap.

They've had this card as I showed it to you at the beginning with like unis swappy and basically they took influencers and they put them on this card. So they have this like pack of cards and everybody was posting the the the the card that it's with them or of them. Um and it's fun, relatable, engaging. So um people are very excited to collect it and to uh to spread the word about you. Obviously UNISAP is quite a big project.

So it's not it's not like uh nobody knows them, but I think like I wanted to show you that there's some very creative ideas that can be done. uh we even with like smaller budget because I don't think that costed them so much money but I think it was very creative and very effective at the same time. Another example that I'm absolutely obsessed with recently and I actually saw it initially on Instagram and then I saw it on Twitter as well because I was like well if it's on Instagram it must be on Twitter as well. This is uh Kraken actually hired this guy who's a fighter. I don't know.

Not very I I'm not very familiar with that, but it's and they hired this guy and they said like we just hired a new customer support guy uh and then let us introduce you to this guy and he's like do you want to know the price of Bitcoin? He did this like very very funny video um on um basically at the end of it like using Kraken and uh and stuff. I thought it was the type of videos that I've seen so far. They were not great. They're very traditional kind of thing, but like I feel like this was very creative.

I'm pretty sure they could they spent a lot of money on it, but at the same time I think it's fun. I think it's entertaining, relatable. The virality chance is also quite high. Um, see um the fourth thing I want to talk about is ad networks. The reason why I think their ad networks is like they're not highly used is probably because people don't know how to use them or people don't think they have enough budgets to use them, which is maybe true, but I think anybody should definitely try to at least like test them.

There are a lot of ad networks. I'm not exactly sure how many. I mean, I know some of them have survived the years. For example, I've been knowing dot for a long time. I've known addressible for a long time.

But, for example, like I know Spindle recently got sold. Um, Adex is actually a company from Bulgaria, so they're our neighbors. Um, so a lot of like other platform Slice was recently sold as well, but they do have this uh they still keep the name from what I know. Um and this is these are some stats that I took from addressable's uh presentation. They took it they did it for like um Cointelegraphs accelerated in Dubai.

Uh but I thought like the relevant for this for the purpose of this talk. Um and the question was like how do you target your ideal crypto users across marketing channels? Basically in web two you have like all these like social media channels that like everybody's like so familiar with. Then in web 3 you have like all this like blockchains and wallets and protocols but then like you wonder like who's actually in between. Um and basically companies like addressable or like likely like like all the others that you've seen recent like in the previous slide um basically are the intermediary between like web two and web 3.

Um how do you target your ideal audience? Basically I wanted to give you some examples. So you can go for active tra traders on Ethereum with over like 1,000 magic for example. So as you can see you can go pretty um specific which which I think is very very important um especially if you have a specific kind of campaign or um uh budget that you want you don't want to like splash and get like zero ROI. Um let's see if it um or like for example like you can um get active developers in the Ethereum ecosystem in this case uh Ethereum uh maxis and so on.

Um, basically something else I also find interesting in that presentation is like they were making a comp compar comparison uh between like bullmark and the and the bare market and the bull market gets like more um CPW rates but they're also a lot more competitive which is like obvious because everybody wants to uh to grow in the bull run. Uh but premium markets and emerging markets share the same grid grid be behavior which I found to be very interesting. Uh but at the same time in bare market um unless you're an established company premium markets and emerging markets may may um deviate by up to like 200%. Which I think is kind of understandable. Um uh but at the same time um I think we always go back to do you have a product market fit?

Do you have a um um do you have a good branding? Let's say um you can see here some numbers were based on audience segments which I thought uh might be interesting for maybe some of you to to take a look at as well. Um so average acquisition costs are a lot lower for traders and dev but are higher uh than they are for like gaming and gambling. Obviously uh a lot of that is due to like user expectation and quality of products. Um, and the last the last last thing because I only have like three minutes left.

Uh, I want to talk to you a little bit like the web3 marketing hackathon. Um, the idea was that I wanted to make something that was not done before and it's not u like nontechnical people can participate and I also thought like there's so many companies that need marketing help and like marketing agencies charge a lot of money. the process takes a lot of time but in this kind of hackathon it's easy um to um to do um to get like output and ROI like really fast. Um so we had over like 200 registrations at the at like both of the events we had like over I think actually the number is like 300 participants a very high submission rate compared to a normal like dev hackathon it was like a 5050 so uh participation rate so it's like a hybrid event like at both uh editions we had 65% women which is also very very interesting uh 50 plus countries Ethereum is the top interest blockchain um we also had I I think $25,000 in prize pool. Um, US and India are like the higher numbers of participants and we had people that register from like 70 plus protocols.

Uh, these are some examples of bounties that we were able to do. So like we had sponsors like startnet foundation and polygon as you can see like some of them are like very specific because they had to like go with like they have they have like a go-to market strategy. Some of them wanted to be a bit more creative when it comes to their ecosystem companies. Uh some of them wanted to like design challenge like polygon. They wanted to like um change the web 3 um like merch design.

Uh we also did a campaign with like quality integration for exportal which is a Romanian company obviously with like par chain. So so as you can see things can go in like very very very different ways. Um so these are some of the the companies that have supported us so far. Um there are a bunch of sponsors but we also had community partners. Uh in the last event we actually gave everybody that submitted like a po as a as a sign of gratitude and I'm very excited about it because like I hope I'm going to be able to to do a lot more um of that as well.

And then I have a three tools I wanted to talk to you about like very very briefly if I still have time. Yeah. Okay. Um, I was in a space recently and one of my speakers was talking about uh meme lord technologies. Apparently, he uses that quite a lot for to create like memes and to kind of stay uh on trend, let's say.

So, I thought that might be interesting for you guys to check it out as well. I I've known this information for about two days. I didn't give it a go yet because I had to come here, but um uh I definitely want to give it a go. and is he somebody that I trust quite a lot because um he does very good content. Um then something else that I've noticed recently is that like video spaces at least like the spaces that I host like they can go from like 150 to like 500 um uh people.

But if you go with video with live video, this is also an example from Emily. I saw like her numbers actually like went a bit down, but it's still like a lot harder, like four times higher, like five times higher than what you would normally do with like a normal um Twitter space. And they've also they've also hosted uh video streams on Twitter that got like four to 5K, which is insane if you look at like um the the numbers, but at the same time, I think you need to be a bit courageous to to experiment with it. Um, and then I also know there's another company that I found out recently. They're called Grow Three.

They're like they do they have AI agents that comment for you. I'm not a big fan of that because I see I think a lot of that a lot of them are just you can see their bots. But I was very surprised. I mean they sent me a bunch of case studies. This is one of them.

But I was really impressed to see the kind of growth that you see from there after they started using that. So maybe it is something to explore and I would actually like to use it for my um as a as an experiment for me as well. And the last one is KA that uh they basically do support they use they work as a AI analyst and also like an AI devil. So they can do like databases for you. They they can do a bit of community management.

the people that you actually work with, they can um do the creative work, let's say, and you let the the agent like do its work.

And yeah, that's it.

Awesome. Thank you so much, guys. Let's put our hands together now. We've already got two questions for you, so don't run off just yet. Um, very, very quickly though, because we've only got five minutes of the next talk.

Number one, any advice for understanding the web 3 space for non- tech newbies? Yeah. So, probably like the first thing that I would say is to go do the the Shifi course. I think that would be like the best way and the easiest way. Right now, it's a bit more expensive like than what it used to be, but at the same time, uh it is um I think you can you can also ask for a scholarship.

So, that's great. Uh at the same time, I think building in public really helped and it really helped me. I had no idea what Twitter was. Um I mean, I knew, but like I've never used it. Uh I've had this account for since 2009.

So I think I was still in high school or something. Um but like it really helped me move from like um LinkedIn like the type of content there to like Twitter. And I think like I used my Twitter to like understand what if people actually want to do a hackathon and like I think that's really helped me understand if it's if it can actually work. So yeah.

Okay. Great. More questions flooding in. Wow. So, solidity wizard wants to know, you said everyone needs Ko marketing, but why?

Um, endorsement basically it's like the same concept as in web two. Uh, so a lot of them I think like the K marketing has been very widely used for the longest time. Therefore, um, it's still something that even if it's not always very effective, it's still part of the the marketing strategy.

Okay, good to know. How would you mitigate risks in founderled marketing? What if your founder gets into a major crisis?

Um, I think an example of that is Mantel like when when they had that crash recently. He was like two months old. But at the same time, he he was also the one that got all the backlash, but he's also the one that managed to redeem everything. So, if I were to be short, that's what I would that's what I would say.

Good to know. Um, so more on K marketing. Um, we really need to track what these guys are doing. So, what KPIs should we use to benchmark them?

Oh, um, impressions if you ask me, engagement, and then conversions.

Cool. Keeping it simple. Does anybody else have any other organic questions from the crowd?

Well, there are a lot more.

Uh oh, there's more coming through. My god, look at that. Um, Consensus Builder wants to know, "What channels have you seen working to launch consumer crypto products outside of Twittercaster?"

I think like one of the main difficult issues we have as an industry is that we don't have enough consumerf facing products. Uh and then I think maybe brand ambassadors events uh for example like MetaMask right now does have a card and they do have this like very exclusive events with like K's and they've invited me so I'm very excited to go to I'm going right now to to etc and Khan so I'm very curious to see how this experience works so I can go talk about it as well. Um, but I think like at the same time probably companies like Addressable would be something that I would look into as well.

Good to know. Um, this isn't a question on the board. It's more of a question I have actually, but what are your thoughts on LinkedIn as a as a marketing channel for our industry?

I hate it, but she loves it. So, I think like I grew I spent two years growing my my account. I have eight over 8,000 followers. It got me nothing. Like zero anything.

I spent so much time on it. And I when I first launched my podcast, I was like, "So you guys found it on LinkedIn?" And they're like, "No, on Spotify search." And I was like, "Damn it." Uh, but if you if I go on Twitter, like the the story is totally different.

And I think on Twitter, people are like a lot more raw where on LinkedIn like everybody's just trying to be somebody that they're not. And that's my biggest issue. And but I do get a lot more a lot more people to reply to me on Twitter than I get people to reply to me on LinkedIn as well.

Okay. So, just not as much honesty and authenticity. And

but I think it really depends like what kind if you do have like a B2B product or like if you're a VC or whatever like I think um you would probably need to like have a stronger like LinkedIn presence, but if you do anything else probably not that relevant. And there actually a lot of companies in web three that don't have a LinkedIn page.

That's certainly true. Um, is marketing still marketing nowadays in an AI flooded market? From validator Victor.

Uh, I I didn't catch the presentation of my previous speaker from before, so I don't remember her name, but she's right. Like Dubai was flooded with like AI, AI, AI. Uh, if you ask me, I think this is going to fade soon enough and then we're going to go back to what we know to do. uh or like in the best case scenario use AI to our um to good to or make uh AI to work for good use but otherwise um I'm waiting for this hype to to kind of chill because I think it's no I don't like it.

Okay, pessimistic about AI there. Does anybody else have any other questions? Uh I've actually never seen so many questions on the board for one of these talks. So I think I think Alexander smashed it. Anybody else?

Okay. Well, in that case, let's put our hands together one final time. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.