The First Branded Crypto Verb? Earned Media Will Make It Happen

Hey all, thanks again for dropping into the newsletter this week. If you have any thoughts or feedback, feel free to tweet at @MarketMix_. You can also DM me at @bradmichelson.🔺

This week’s issue is sponsored by Blockworks

Day after day, we hear about the announcements, the fund raises, and the product launches coming out of big crypto and fintech startups.

It’s exciting, don’t get me wrong. But I want to hear the real stories.

That’s why I’m excited to share the new Blockworks podcast: Empire.

Hosted by Blockworks Co-founder Jason Yanowitz, Empire reveals the personal struggles, bold moves, and tough decisions that founders in the crypto industry have gone through.

Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

I had an interesting realization the other day: There are no crypto products who have become verbs. I don’t “Coinbase you some bitcoin.” And you don’t “BlockFi your Ether.” Despite that, these and other brands have become synonymous with their specific product categories.

What does this look like?

• Coinbase = easy place to buy and sell crypto

• BlockFi = earn interest on your crypto

Think back to the first time you heard about these companies. Did you see an ad about them on the subway? Did see a full-page ad in a newspaper?

Absolutely not. You most likely heard about these brands through your friends and community.

This is one of the most amazing parts about the crypto industry: crypto marketing’s silver bullet is earned media. Yet most companies haven’t figured it out yet.

But first, what is it?

Well, to put it simply, earned media is any promotion, content or mention of your brand that you did not pay for or create yourself. In the traditional sense, we’re talking about PR, where the goal is to get publications to interview or write about you. But earned media goes way beyond just that. Now this category extends to things like social media, word of mouth, customer reviews, and more.

Earned media is also at the essence of internet virality. And in our industry, all of the popular brands have adopted this as a primary channel in one way or another. For good reasons, too: 78% of consumers are influenced by social media when making a purchasing decision and 82% of consumers proactively seek referrals from peers before making a purchase.

So over most U.S. consumers rely on their networks to make product purchase decisions. Think about this applies to Crypto Twitter. Consider the characteristics of the wider crypto community:

• On one hand, we’re curious early adopters with an affinity for financial products

• On the other hand, we’re skeptical consumers with trust issues when it comes to brands and corporations

• BUT, willing to listen to people they trust about trying new products

It kind of fits perfectly within those data points.

That is the tightrope all crypto marketers have to traverse every day. Finding your way across is making crypto brand worth talking about.

But let’s look at the wider consumer tech market for some inspo here. One of my favorite growth stories is that of Airbnb. Ross Simmonds, who writes one of my favorite newsletters on marketing and growth, published a great breakdown of Airbnb’s path that inspired this week’s issue.

He talks through how the company’s current success is largely driven by their amazing SEO presence online. But that came as a byproduct to their massive earned media success.

“Airbnb has been covered by New York Times, Huffington Post, CBC, Techcrunch, Fox, MSN, Time, Bloomberg, CNN and more. It was linked to as a place to stay on the official Tokyo 2020 Olympic site. It's linked to by thousands of universities and government websites. It's collected some of the most valuable 'links' available online organically and through public relations.”

Airbnb’s ability to get in front of mainstream media press has been a massive boon for their brand. They own many of the major travel accommodation related search terms for popular destinations around the world. They’ve accidentally, then purposely, created an unbeatable marketing moat for themselves.

But possibly most important of all, Airbnb is now the verb associated with short-term rentals.

All of this because Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO, decided to make earned media the first priority in filling their company’s funnel:

“The top of the funnel is actually PR… We got more than 0.5 million articles in the last year, in 2020, and we had as much share of voice as most of the other major travel companies combined.. And that's how we really built the brand of Airbnb – more than anything, probably, is PR. Second is brand marketing. We think of brand marketing as education and as an investment.”

It’s hard to know who is positioning themselves to become the branded verb of crypto, but it’s only a matter of time until it happens. Earned media’s ability to not only lift brand marketing (create a story behind the brand) and performance marketing (increase in SEO and direct traffic) can’t be underestimated, particularly for brands in our industry.

I’m curious who you guys think is best positioned to become our space’s first branded verb as the bull run continues through 2021. Reply here or tweet at @MarketMix_ to share your takes. I love hearing your takes.

Who’s Hiring Marketers in Crypto?

• Email Marketing Lead @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Business Intelligence Analyst @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Social Media Manager @ Blockworks [APPLY]

• Blockchain Content Producer @ Topshot [APPLY]

• Community Lead @ Uniswap [APPLY]

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to share Market Mix with your friends. 🔺