How to drive revenue x5 in DeFi and build a growing Metaverse: AMA with the CEO from CoinStats and MetaVRse Co-founder
Epic Web3 Weekly Newsletter
Hey, Web3 builders 👋
This is the Epic Web3 Newsletter — a weekly dose of best practices & insights from the top industry experts to help you boost Web3 products.
🎉 Two exciting events are coming up this week!
On September 14, we’re meeting up with Alan Smithson, co-founder & CEO at MetaVRse, to talk about building a Metaverse that is growing up.
MetaVRse has been working on the gigantic virtual shopping mall “TheMall” for seven years. More than 100M square meters offer space for more than 100 spacious business areas. It’ll become even 8 times larger than the Dubai Mall.
But how much does it cost to build a Metaverse? And how will it change the future of commerce? Hop on the AMA-session to challenge Alan and get your answers.
P.S. All live sessions are available with the Epic Web3 subscription — enjoy it with a 7-day free trial.
It’s getting hotter! One more event to enjoy this week:
On September 15, Narek Gevorgyan, CEO at CoinStats, is joining our AMA-session to share secrets on how to grow revenue x5 in DeFi by 2023.
His company experienced a 400% user growth and a whopping 1000% revenue growth. And we couldn’t help but ask him how to achieve such great results, what were the biggest challenges and how did they solve them. Join the event to ask your own tricky questions.
🧑💻 Go viral with the help of others. Community Insights on how to work with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) in Web3.
Marketing in Web3 is often built on influencers’ promotion and recommendations. And if you’re reading this, you probably have a KOLs campaign launch on your task list.
We asked Kate Khan, COO & co-founder at Skill Labs, to share how KOL campaigns differ between Web2 and Web3 and how to make the most of them for a marketing strategy.
Skill Labs is a platform that helps investors, games, and players find and join the best performing guilds.
— First of all, who are you?
I’m a COO and Co-founder at Skill Labs, with more than 7 years of experience in a rapidly growing start-up environment. I’ve a huge experience in operations, project management and influencer marketing in Web2 and am currently making use of the best practices in Web3.
— How many influencers do you work with now?
Skill Labs has been working with key opinion leaders for almost a year. Now there’s a pool of 127 influencers we work with on a regular basis, and we update it every month.
— Do KOLs campaigns differ in Web2 and Web3? How?
Yes, they’re a bit different from Web2 which is mainly explained by industry specific:
1️⃣ Influencers’ lifetime is much shorter than of those in Web2, where a personal brand is built scrupulously for a long-time before they get regular paid offers;
2️⃣ Web3 influencers are much more reluctant to work on a performance base, that’s why the cost of a promo post doesn’t usually correlate with actual value they add to a project;
3️⃣ The general number of relevant influencers in Web3 is relatively small as the industry is young;
4️⃣ Everything in crypto is moving really fast. You can easily engage some of the top ones one day and release a campaign post the next, which is a much rarer case in Web2.
— What’s your way to work with KOLs at Skill Labs?
No matter what social media you use, every campaign’s a project with three key stages:
Planning
Executing
Controlling and reporting (aka closure)
— What does a planning stage include?
Each channel has its own peculiarities. Let me describe how it looks on Twitter, as this is one of the most important social media in Web3. Beforehand you need to define the following:
Campaign goal (brand promotion, converting leads to customers, getting your survey filled for further analysis, etc.)
Timeline
Budget
Other essential factors that might affect your campaign (geo, demographic, etc.)
I decide on channels, geo, and other factors after the timing and budget, because usually, these two are less flexible. If you work at a crypto start-up, congratulations! It all should’ve been done yesterday and at zero cost.
— Clever thought! And what about an offer message for influencers?
After you’re done with defining the main points, it’s time to prepare content for your influencers. Cooperation offer messages are where you must cover most of the potential questions (project name, links, 1-2 sentences about what you’re building, and campaign details).
I also recommend to draft 3-4 options of the materials and distribute them among the influencers, so users will not see the same post all the time. Here you can find the text example we use at Skill Labs.
— Great, and what does an execution stage look like?
The execution stage includes three main steps: influencers search, stats check, and posting.
To find influencers for your project, I can suggest the following:
1️⃣ Start with a broad search: use popular hashtags related to your segment and check the profiles of the most popular and active KOLs;
2️⃣ Check the open ratings (at CryptoGraph Ratings or Luna Crush) and the influencers who promoted your competitors, if any.
3️⃣ If the list isn’t big enough:
a. Ask your community who they follow and read on a regular basis;
b. Check the initial list of the KOL’s and see who they follow;
c. Ask some influencers from your pool to recommend others they find relevant;
Usually this set of actions helps you to get a list of 150-200 influencers to reach out.
— What about the stats check?
I always advise you to ask for past paid promo campaign results from an influencer you’re going to collaborate with. They can easily find historic stats and share it with you.
Here’s an example of a rather solid conversion and one with low conversion rate, which might raise additional questions to the influencer:
Make sure that the post is no older than 2-4 weeks, as the crypto market is very volatile. After you’ve gathered previous promo stats, do make some calculations:
Cost per engagement: Price per post/ Total engagement (incl. Likes, RTs and comments), e.g. CPE less than 10 cents is considered as a great result;
Share of engagements in real to total audience: Total engagement/Number of followers;
Conversion to engagement: Total engagement/Total impressions (I’d recommend to set benchmarks as 10-15% and compare your results accordingly);
💡Micro hint: I always negotiate, even if the price is already good to go. I consider it all as a potential long-term partnership, and it’ll happen if the first, second and further promos will pay off and the numbers are good. It’s better to get 5 promo deals for $50 each, than to charge $100 once and to lose a partner because the final CPE is too high.
— How do you measure the results?
I always recommend measuring the results and gathering data 24h after the posts were made. When you have all the data, calculate:
Cost per engagement (median, average);
Total reach, impressions, engagements;
Rank the influencers to define the most effective;
Your own Twitter account stats: it’s not always the result, but it might bring you more new followers.
Accurately put all the stats in a summary file for further analysis. Here’s a brief template we use — you’ll see, there’s nothing complicated.
— Any final tips to protect you from scammers?
Always DYOR:
1️⃣ Check influencers' stats and always try to pay at least partly after the post is released. You can also check for any suspicious activity by using tech tools like Mainline, Twitonomy, or Influencity.
2️⃣ Check what other projects this specific influencer promoted in the past. If you see a lot of scam projects, it’s also a red flag.
3️⃣ At Skill Labs we always ask for a discount for the first cooperation as we call it a test promo. It also works as a good tool to sort out scammers, as they usually don’t agree on that as they know that their results won’t be good. But sometimes even good influencers don’t agree on a test at a lower price, so don’t rush to make conclusions.
If you have any questions, you can always reach Kate out on Telegram (@ekaterinahk) or leave a message on Skill Labs socials (Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Medium).
🥳 We announce our official partnership with Mobula.fi
Mobula is first and foremost an on-chain data aggregation platform used to analyze and interact with the vast majority of crypto-assets on the market (Tokens, NFTs).
Mobula is the Web3 version of CoinMarketCap which, in beta phase, is already used by more than 50,000 people to analyze crypto-currency prices in real time, to buy tokens at the best price thanks to its Multi-chain DEX Comparator and to interact with cryptos thanks to various features such as advanced search, wallet analysis or token recommendation system.
Their mission is to create the #1 data aggregator, and if you want to co-found it with them — join the adventure: Mobula.fi.
Everything in Web3 is fast-changing. But we can’t leave you without up-to-date news:
1/ Animoca Brands raises another $110M and $775M in total. With this funding, a leading investment firm and NFT game publisher is going to continue building an open Metaverse.
2/ Web3 startup Tesseract raises $78M to generate affordable renewable power and solve climate change. Aiming to tokenize the energy business, huh?
3/ The David Bowie estate plans to launch NFTs with OpenSea, but many Bowie fans aren't impressed. The star enters Web3 from beyond the grave to fight world hunger but instead triggers Twitter backlash.
That’s it for today! Hope you found this week’s dose helpful 👋
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Talk soon,
The Epic Web3 team