How to Survive and Prosper in a Bear Market?
First and foremost advice is… stay calm. If the current state of the market is the end of the world, you are reading this from hell or paradise.
Why? BTC is a great believer in the quote said by Robert F. Kennedy “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly”
Need some proofs?
- April 2013: -83%
- December 2013: -50%
- December 2017-December 2018: -84%
- March 2020: -50%
- May 2021: -53%
- May 2022 — ?
So what you should NOT do as a crypto project executive to keep your project on track?
1. Don’t сonsider yourself a top-notch expert. Sometimes your community is more clever than you.
Do Kwon, who is TERRA co-founder, was warned a long time ago that the whole Terra ecosystem could be broken by anyone who is reached enough. Do Kwon decided to take it as a funny joke and even said that he has lots of millionaires among his followers, so let them try. Not sure that Do Kwon is laughing now.
2. If you are a project founder avoid the cult of the personality. It is one of the most common killers of crypto projects everything.
Daniele Sesta, then Andre Cronje, and now Do Kwon. Not sure that you want to replenish their ranks
3. Don’t do anything before defining the strategy
Where the market goes, there the project moves. Perfect “strategy” for the green market, but that could be your project killer in the period when BTC closed the 7th bearish week in a row for the first time.
But we totally understand that when the DDLs are burning, the community is trying to find the limit of your patience, and marketing budgets are reaching ZERO, building a marketing strategy is the last thing that comes to mind.
At the same time, strategy building is the main focus and expertise of specialized crypto agencies like SOLUS.b. Feel free to contact us on Telegram and receive a personalized pack of best practices. We are https://t.me/solustribe there.
SO WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
1. Strategy is not a fiction of mainstream marketing “specialists”. It’s a must!
While one of the marketing originators said that “The aim of selling is to satisfy a customer need; the aim of marketing is to figure out his need”, quite often crypto marketers don’t really realize who exactly is the customer of the project. Not mentioning competitors analysis, overall market analysis, estimation of supply and demand, etc.
When the market is going up, you could enjoy extremely bullish marketing metrics even without all that fundamental stuff. But once one understands that bears are winning the bears, it could be too late.
Action plan:
1. Conduct a custdev both vis your existing customers and those, who don’t use your product for some reason;
2. Become a spy for some time and try to be in the shoes of the customer of your competitor;
3. Spend some time analyzing your Google Analytics in order to understand which 20% of efforts bring 80% of traffic;
4. Gather your colleagues and find all the weaknesses of your product and marketing activities in particular;
5. Make consequences and create an action plan 2.0.
2. Educate the community, not just sell
Typical social media of crypto projects looks like this:
- Announcement of the partnership;
- Announcement of airdrop;
- One more announcement;
- And….one more.
So why should the world community trust you?
Stay real. Communicate with the community and show that your projects are backed by people, not social media planning tools.
For example, if you are representative of the DeFi Platform, where users could receive more than 20%+ on stacking stables, explain what is stables, why they could not be equal to ZERO, the importance of diversification, etc.
Action plan:
1. Find a crypto hamster;
2. Ask him to browse through your socials and explain “What is your project about?”, “ How to start using it?”, “Why it is better than other alternatives?”, “How could he earn with you?”;
3. If some questions remain unanswered, you have to do nothing but change your content strategy.
P.S. If you are aiming to target pro traders, you may conduct the same experiment but with a “pro version of a crypto hamster” ( We mean those, who have at least a basic practical understanding of crypto ).
4. Analyse your promotional activities (especially integration with KOLs). Does your promo bring additional value? Or it is just praise for your product? If the last point seems to be true — it’s time for changes.
5. Ask your community what they like you to tell. And then, create a content plan and show them. What’s next? Repeat.
6. Make consequences and create an action plan 2.0
3. Use “expensive” marketing approaches that are cheaper than usual
The list of the most popular crypto marketing approaches looks like this:
- Conduct a giveaway;
- Conduct an airdrop;
- Collaborate with the crypto promoters to boost the engagement;
- Make a few videos with a few random crypto KOLs;
- Launch Facebook campaign and be banned.
And you know, ”those approaches” could be extremely efficient during the green market, when the organic growth of your project could show almost the same results as all those approaches combined.
What are the best approaches for the bull market? You will not like the answer, cause the only right answer could be given only after you will come back to the 1st point and do some preparation
Action plan
Check the 1st point :)
4. Build long-lasting relationships with authoritative KOLs
Collaborating with crypto key opinion leaders is a must in today’s reality. But from first-hand experience of talking with the projects that are our clients, for now, we realized that sometimes that rule is being treated too literally.
“Every single crypto project is working with KOLs, so I will pay to 10 most popular guys and mark that milestone as completed” is an extremely wrong approach.
In terms of SOLUS.b agency we always help projects not only to make 1o video integration but also to create an army of ambassadors that will always support your projects both during the black and white phases.
Action Plan:
1. Analyse the traffic that was generated by the KOLs you have already worked with. The best ones could become your first ambassadors. But make sure that they are not the best from the worst;
2. Launch an ambassador program to gather together the most loyal fans of your brand that have at least 500 followers. If you manage to structure rules appropriately, tons of highly targeted traffic will be yours;
3. Make sure that your team has enough capacity not only for launching a few integrations with random KOLs but also for building long-lasting high-quality dozens of KOLs;
4. If you are not sure that the team has enough time for it, you may always contact us ( https://t.me/solustribe in Telegram). You can be sure that all deliverability is met, and your team won’t overdue the DDL just because of influencers’ caprices.
5. Be strategic, but stay reactive
The fact that you should turn into a strategic thinker does not deny that you have to continue keeping an eye on what is going on around you.
Simple Case: Binance has closed Russian transfers and withdrawals to foreign banks, regardless of country of residence.
DEXes that reacted quickly and launched appropriate PR activities received a great portion of the Binance users.
Action plan :
Sorry, there won’t be an action plan here. But some successful and not really successful cases of reactive marketing could be found in our blog.
6. Don’t spend your time that could be easily delegated to contractors.
Even the superheroes need to sleep. You could be an extremely professional marketing PRO, but either you or your well-managed team couldn’t handle everything all the time.
And what is obvious there is no need to grow the team for the force majeure situation. Having a good marketing partner is crucial in crypto, but unfortunately, you could face the SCAM here as well.
Action Plan :
The choice of contractors could be both the best and the worst decision for your business. That is why for this point, we decided to provide not only an action plan but also a full-fledged guide on choosing the contractor.
Follow the link to choose the contractor that won’t ruin your business
Basics Of Effective Cooperation with Blockchain Marketing Agency (solus.agency)
To sum up, even though the 99,9% LUNA drop became one of the most painful events in crypto history, it is one of the best moments to re-shape your imagination about crypto space and its rules.
The Crypto community needs to go through the hard times to understand that the crypto economy is not magic but a real economy that is regulated even without regulators.
It is not enough just to stay in crypto anymore.
If you want to survive in the crypto space, you need to stay strategic.
Frankly speaking, we were also using approaches from the second chapter during the rise of ICO in 2017. Therefore, our expertise doesn’t happen by chance. It’s the result of dozens of cases of working with crypto projects and hundreds of mistakes that you could avoid.
So if you want to keep your project on track during the bear market with a little effort — we are here to help. And nope, we are not going to promise you to attract millions of new users overnight, as it has usually been promised. But we promise to be strategic and reactive at the same time :)
Cheers,
SOLUS team.
