You are the only hero in your crypto journey.

Written by: Damian

Translated by: Block unicorn

Recently, I had dinner with a friend in a small town in Hungary, discussing marketing in the cryptocurrency space. Being in the same industry, it's hard not to talk about cryptocurrency with others. After all, my family and old friends don't understand this field, and I believe many readers of this article will feel the same way.

This friend shared with me a painful experience he had with a cryptocurrency-native marketing agency (not naming names here). I found it both amusing and understandable, as he is not a marketer after all. I felt sorry for the time and money wasted by his team. So, I reminded him, "Listen, I told you not to hire a marketing agency because there are no 'good' marketing agencies."

I continued to explain to him that expecting marketing agencies to proactively do the work for you is completely wrong. They won't shape your brand, won't understand the nuances of your project, and won't break through creatively because their attention is divided among multiple clients.

As a startup, you may be deprioritized compared to big-name clients, which is a harsh reality; for marketing agencies, big-name clients may be more valuable, not just because of their existing retainers. Logos and influence on their websites are a universal currency, especially in the cryptocurrency space. Retaining the most "valuable" clients is one of the most important things for marketing agencies to keep their business running.

So, are marketing companies really useless? Not exactly. I know that most people working in marketing agency teams put in 8 to 10 hours of full-time work every day, serving multiple clients. The value their clients receive comes from narratives that clients already know or are aware of wanting to leverage or images they want to project. Marketing agencies should only be used when there is a need for greater short- to medium-term output to create content or help run activities in the plan.

McDonald's Marketing Problem

Marketing agencies are a tool, a means to an end, not the X factor that miraculously makes your marketing great through their own initiative. Don't get me wrong; marketing agencies often tout their expertise in branding and technical concepts, leaving small projects with the impression that agencies will help them find their footing. Also, don't be misled by another logo x logo collaboration on the marketing agency's website, because you know that their collaboration with that big-name partner might only last a month before the agreement is terminated.

A truly excellent cryptocurrency "marketer" needs to understand their company's product stack better than developers do. However, employees at these marketing agencies, under current salary levels, have no incentive to do more work beyond the 8-hour shifts they have already completed.

Imagine if your salary was the same as a McDonald's manager, but you had to understand concepts like oracle, database, ZK, MEV, AI, lending, staking, and re-staking. Would you take that job?

In terms of the structure of marketing agencies, you might have some senior managers who perform decently or even excellently at work but never engage in significant face-to-face communication with clients. Good senior managers are busy delegating work to their teams and strategizing based on client feedback. Some managers have to manage up to 7 or 8 accounts simultaneously. Bad managers spend their days doing… frankly, as far as I know, 8 hours of calls? That's inevitable.

On the other hand, junior employees who earn meager salaries but genuinely want to learn more domain knowledge and contribute value to clients never get the chance to do so. These earnest junior employees are ready to do the groundwork to learn the details of the project and build the right narrative, but they are hindered by mid-level managers who focus more on quantity than quality. If every client demands a top-down marketing campaign, marketing agencies will be forced to make business decisions and sacrifice the priority of company time. This doesn't mean the marketing agency model is completely broken; it's because managers lack the ability to manage client expectations.

It's understandable that senior management doesn't want to lose business or have disputes with clients, but in the long run, for the sake of both the marketing agency and the clients themselves, managers need to be more honest and say "no" more often. Project teams also have a responsibility to understand that these agencies can never fulfill the role of a good in-house marketer.

Think of those excellent marketers who have learned, engaged, and built connections in this field through their own determination and have thus gained opportunities. You can see them in projects as community managers (@thisisfin_), growth leads (@0xMista), marketing leads (@lou3ee), or narrative leads (@kramnotmark). The reason they are more successful than marketing agencies is fundamentally because they are deeply immersed in the field.

My view on marketing is that you either immerse yourself in the field or you don't. If you don't, it will be hard to find any source of creativity because, after all, you may not understand or even communicate with your audience. This is a big problem because, you know, market research and "marketing" are inseparable.

Extractable Value from Marketing

If you are a project considering hiring marketing help, hire a marketer directly. Hiring a good marketer for the first time is like promoting the first general of a new division in your army. They will be responsible for leading their division; whether to hire more marketers or marketing agencies is entirely up to them.

If you hire a marketing agency, they need to have a strong plan. The marketing lead needs to reach a stage where they can effectively hand over the memo to the agency for execution, thereby bringing the maximum benefit to your project.

For example, if your marketing lead needs to publish four blog posts a month. If the marketing lead provides all the necessary resources, then the marketing agency can help them write half or even all of them. If the marketing lead can implement a good strategy, effectively delegate work to any support in the marketing department, and achieve results that help business expansion, then they are an excellent marketing hire. If the marketing agency can complete the required work, they are a good agency. The key is that the utility of the marketing agency is complementary to the success of the project, provided that their clients are "good."

For instance, if the project hiring the agency is itself boring or has not found product-market fit, then no marketing agency can save it. If a project has many interesting things to say but doesn't know how to express them, the marketing agency can't solve that either. But if you are a project that knows exactly what it needs to succeed and only needs executors, then marketing agencies will excel at that, provided you can manage them like an in-house team, meaning regular updates, guidance, and checks. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, it's best not to make an agency your first hire.

I assure you, those marketing agencies that promise to operate at four times the performance level of in-house hires are talking nonsense, and frankly, this kind of self-promotion is bad marketing in itself. Instead, the added value is much simpler (and boring): if you need an extra pair of hands to get the work done and have connections, they might be suitable for you. This is why in-house hiring is better: you have the opportunity to teach or give the hire time to learn proactively, at which point they have almost no reason not to excel in the business they are engaged in.

Poor Communication

Overall, both agencies and projects have a corresponding problem: they are both terrible at communication, which is interesting. Agencies that are responsible for effective communication over-promise their services, leading to inflated expectations. Projects accept this misleading information and raise their expectations while failing to actively manage their external teams. This often results in a lose-lose situation. There are no winners predetermined from the start, nor are there "good" marketing agencies. You need to actively ensure your victory as a project, whether or not you collaborate with an agency. Ultimately, you are the only hero in your journey.

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