Marketing Strategies That Work in the Blockchain Space with Mantas Ciuksys | S3 E47

Matas: 1:09

that part of community. It's critical. The acquisition part we're able to solve in multiple different ways, but that support part is just its community. It's absolutely finding your ambassadors and finding people who can be quicker sometimes to respond to other users than your own support team.

Joeri: 1:28

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm excited to see my guest back, who I met actually at the WebS ummit in Lisbon. And my guest today is Mantas. Mantas, and that is the only way I try to pronounce your surname, Mantas. How are you?

Matas: 1:52

Thanks, no, thanks so much for having me, and I think you're one of the first people to pronounce my last name correctly, so really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been one three months since WebS ummit. Plenty has happened in, both in Web3 and then at Tatum, and I'm looking forward to chatting a bit about marketing and Web3.

Joeri: 2:12

Me too. Yeah, three months it's really long, certainly in Web3. And then also I would say I'm here in Belgium. It's another climate. The time is changing all the time here. The weather is changing, but also the climate in Web3 is changing. But people are maybe now wondering Mantas you mentioned already Tatum. So, guys, Mantas is the VP content at Tatum. So for me a really interesting guest for the show. And yeah, and before we talk a bit about Tatum, maybe Mantas you can, yeah, in one minute or so, talk a bit about yourself.

Matas: 2:49

Yeah, so I'll try not to bore everyone with the details, but I, like everyone, I come from the world of Web2. And I've worked in multiple different businesses. If we're talking scale from startups to corporations, maybe the ones that are worth to mention are the social bakers was the social media marketing tool that was riding the hype wave of when social media started around 2007 and upwards. So that was a lot of fun. So a little bit of the more enterprise world that's Norton, that turned to to Gen Digital a little bit later. If brands like Avira, vast, they are all under that umbrella. And eventually I thought to do something crazy and to went into Web3 and don't regret it at all, and I was so glad I did because it's really like seeing the industry as an outsider. Fun seeing the industry from the inside your jaw drops. So this is how I ended up where I am right now.

Joeri: 3:52

Great. Yeah, that's indeed interesting Seeing it from outside and then being inside, and but that's already a small group. I see people that have a look at it on the outside because the world is still changing, people still needing to find out what is it exactly about. And, yeah, for our listeners, because we have you and me both people coming from Web2, of course, most of them looking to Web3. People are in Web3 can explain a bit about Tatum's, about the platform and how you are streamlining blocks in application development for Web3.

Matas: 4:27

Yeah, sure. So, Tatum. io, if you go visit the website, it's essentially a set of tools for Web3 developers or even Web2 developers that want to build efficiently in Web3. I think we all know that for those building, those developers trying to build something in Web3, that it's not that easy. It's not that easy to use the pick a blockchain and start building and have an app running reliably and efficiently at low cost, pretty complex. So we're trying to take that and simplify it for all the devs that want to try Web3. And you can be a single dev or you can be a large business, as you'll see. If you go on Tatum. io, you'll see we have Binance as a client, we have big marketplaces, analytics tools, elliptic analysis, whatnot. So we have a wide range of basket of businesses and developers and we try to simplify it as much as possible because for wider adoption you really need that.

Joeri: 5:34

Yeah, indeed, simplifying terms, simplifying the development, simplifying because messaging is also, of course, really important. You say 3D Audit is also Web 2 in your rollout Tatum and also with your passion for marketing, yeah, what does the marketing look like? What unique marketing strategies do you believe are effective for promoting blockchain development path from Tatum?

Matas: 6:00

Great, great, okay, good question. I'm just from a point of view of overall the industry and then more specific. But, as maybe any kind of industry that starts, it starts from a very technical place. If you think about how the internet protocol started and whatnot, and discussions there or discussions around databases in the past, it really starts from a very technical place and I feel like that's where we are right now with it's changing, but it still feels very much very technical from a messaging point of view.

Matas: 6:34

If you think about why choose one blockchain over the other, if you go on the websites of different blockchains, the language is it's targeting developers, it's pretty technical. Yet there's this our goal for everyone is to onboard consumers, but I think from a point of view from the outside world of consumers, it just looks overwhelming. There's so much new vocabulary to be learned. And then we do a bit of a mistake in the world of Web 3, where we just love speak difficult language, because it feels like we're really understanding, we really get it and layer 1's, layer 2's, layer 3's, ZK rollups, whatever. We feel like that's how we know what we're talking about, but I don't know if it's doing us from a point of view of messaging and just the overall marketing. It's really coming down to the basic principles of the marketing that has worked in Web 2. And it's understanding. So what the hell are people actually trying to solve? What is the problem that they're trying to solve with this specific solution? Why do they need blockchain? Let's be honest about it. Maybe sometimes it's just to make money to get. If that's it to get rich quick, then let's be honest about it and address it that way. If it's about speed, then make that the message, as opposed to the technical jargon. So this is maybe the first aspect that I'm noticing.

Matas: 7:55

The other part that for people maybe stepping into the world of Web 3 from Web 2, that's uniquely different, I think, to this industry is how little you know about your customers sometimes, especially if you're targeting individual consumers, and that's because it's somehow integral to the world of Web 3 and blockchain. At the same time, everything is visible to everyone, all the transactions. But from a point of view of the user, you have a wallet address and I really know that personally. It's a challenge for me and a mental switch that I have to make, coming from a world of marketing by whatever Emails, whatnot you have everything about the user first name, last name you can send an email and say hello, Joeri, and it works every time Not in Web 3, and people somehow have a bit of a blocker when you try to be very personal and reveal identity and market in a kind of a personalized way.

Matas: 8:52

So that is a challenge that we have to overcome, not just from a point of view of whatever messaging or how you create content, but from how your infra works and how you connect the dots in terms of reporting. How do you know that one, the same user did one thing and that same user did another in your tool? That's definitely a challenge bigger than in Web 2, I would say.

Joeri: 9:15

Yeah, and actually they have other guests on my podcast also into marketing and that are looking at strategies to really know who the users are, who the consumers are, by just combining data, free domain names, and trying to find who are these people on Twitter and trying to target them by combining binding, all of that. Is that something that you see happening, or maybe a strategy that you are also using for Tatum?

Matas: 9:42

Yeah, so there's two ways to think about it.

Matas: 9:45

So of course you have to make a good attempt at connecting the dots as much as possible, because you want to see trend lines.

Matas: 9:56

You don't need to have absolute numbers, you just need some trend lines that tell you whether your business is doing well or not and if a specific channel is contributing to the overall results of your business. And for that you don't need to match, say, 80% of your users. You can just at least have some kind of direct, directly attributable tracking for some maybe 10% of your users, to see trends. But for get absolute numbers it's going to be really hard to get accurate measurement of where you are. So a lot of your results will look like you do something on one channel and then all of a sudden you see a lot of, say, direct traffic or traffic that's not attributable, and you have to get comfortable with living in that world a little bit. When you're marketing sort of one to many in the world of Web3, if you're doing marketing where you're targeting, let's say, enterprises only, you have a different problem, but if you're doing one to many, it's going to be a lot of work in the dark.

Joeri: 10:55

Yeah, obviously you need, as a marketer, you need to have your audience in mind and you need to be able to reach them and, as you said, it's one too many. It's difficult to measure also, but then for your VP of content. So for me it's interesting to understand how you approach and content creation.

Matas: 11:14

Yeah, content. Maybe I want to demystify a little bit this, this roll off of doing content in the business overall, and why would you want to do it a period? So for me, content is a kind of a way to. It's a value exchange between the user and the other end and the business and it's in that exchange you essentially bring in someone into your business at different levels of their, the funnel of the business funnel, going from awareness to maybe all the way you can pull in something, someone through content into your funnel that are ready to purchase your solution and your content kind of functions and all that fun. It's almost like a business function and we're taught.

Matas: 11:56

When we're talking content, people usually feel talking about some kind of maybe social posts, maybe a blog, maybe, and the way when I think about it, for me it's really just any way that your brand really touches the user.

Matas: 12:10

It could be a landing page, a website page, it could be a tweet, it could be an email, so all those different touch points. For me it's like that is essentially content and what you place in that space that has to that is dependent on what the function of that specific channel is for your business, the part of the funnel that you think the users that are going to see the content are, and that's how I think about it. When I'm building content for Tatum specifically, I'm looking to see that I'm able to have content at each step of the funnel, so from awareness, say, to purchase content, to content to retain and activate the users. That's how I'm thinking about it. And then it becomes a game of measuring that whether you have enough, whether you're getting enough attention. And it could be one content piece that's giving you enough attention. It could be 10. Right, but it's a game. It becomes a game of math whether you have enough to pull in enough fireballs to meet your business objectives

Joeri: 13:13

It's a complicated way of maybe no, no, it's not a complicated way, and for me it makes sense, of course, as a marketer, when I'm also explaining these to clients, but they don't always get it that. They want to make sales and they want to, depending on your approach. I like the content approach to, depending on who your target profile is, or your audience. Most of them are maybe not aware about work to you, they're not aware about the problem they have, or they're not aware about a solution, or they are not aware about the items of. Depending on in which phase they are, different kinds of content can help them out, obviously. And then, of course, measuring is a thing depending on where you are in a customer journey, and you already said it's not, so not always easy to measure, because you cannot measure everything. How are you doing that? Are they doing because measuring if it works or not?

Matas: 14:08

Yeah, so luckily, at some point in your funnel you don't actually need to measure the exact user and that's where the world is. Maybe it's very similar to the world of Web 2 and Web 3. It's the internet, for both businesses functions the same way unfortunately or fortunately maybe, for those going into Web 3 and you do measure content the same way. That's essentially. Do you generate enough impressions at the top of the funnel and maybe it's just you don't have to read about Web 3 marketing to understand how you do that. You can read about Web 2 marketing and basically, do I have enough impressions at the top? Do I have enough impressions turning into side traffic or whatever? It doesn't need to be side traffic, but whatever place you put in the next part of the funnel, and do I have enough of that attention turning into something meaningful for the business? Each of those decisions will lead to slightly different metrics that you track in that part of the funnel, but essentially it's principles of Web 2 that work in the world of Web 3.

Joeri: 15:12

And actually, okay, you have content in different channels. What are, like the most popular channels that you are using for Tatum?

Matas: 15:21

Yeah, you, yeah. So for us what's working the most? So it's the website, it's our GitHub community and it is our Discord server, and we have way more. But any business that you have strengths and weaknesses, and it's important to double down on your strengths unless your weaknesses are really turning like causing pains to your business and using customers because of them. It's that we identify those that have impact and we invest significantly more into making them work even further.

Matas: 15:54

Stepping into the world of Web 3, I was skeptical. How much of a role is Web going to play, because it's so important in the world of Web 2, it's pretty much everything and I can confirm that to my finding that it still is the case in Web 3. Most of your business is generated through the website and actually the users themselves in Web 3 versus Web 2, they're very used to this Web experience. So I would say any business needs to figure out in Web 3 also how best kind of website needs to function and what you want to have there and how you move your users through that part of the journey as well.

Joeri: 16:34

Yeah, yeah, I agree the website is still the central point, but then you mentioned GitHub, discord, so the community aspect of it, probably even more than Web3. That Web2 is a central point, but maybe can a bit comment on that, on how you're using community or building community.

Matas: 16:52

Yeah, it's a mysterious world in Web3, and I think it means multiple things. It's used in different ways. There's one of them it's the sort of the liveliness of the community that kind of supports a project. Then there's the community of people who are actually like builders underneath it and they enable each other to troubleshoot problems, solve problems, and that's how we see it. Very much operating at Tatum as well, there's that. It serves a function of, say, getting more impressions, more views, pulling in more people to the business, absolutely.

Matas: 17:33

Then there's a part where, if you don't have a vibrant community in your Web3 business, people use that as a pretty much a choice to invalidate your business altogether. They're like, okay, there's no, even if your marketing looks really great and your website is perfect and whatever your prices are amazing. Your message is clear. If they go then to whatever you say, whether it's Discord or your GitHub or somewhere else and they see no community, they feel like they're going to be left alone in that project. They'll feel a little bit like they're building a loan and often especially for businesses like cars that market to developers really know that they can turn to other developers for help when they're stuck. So for us, that part of community. It's critical, that's business, quick, critical. The acquisition part we're able to solve in multiple different ways, but that support part is just its community. That's absolutely finding your ambassadors and finding people who can be quicker sometimes to respond to other users than your own support team. It's just enabling those people to be successful. It's pretty integral, I would say, in this industry.

Joeri: 18:47

Yeah, Okay, you mentioned the communities, you mentioned the website. You can, of course, there is organic way to grow. There is also a way to use ads and how much maybe do specific campaigns? Yeah, how does it work for Tatum? Tough question really, Just me are you using, are you guys using like paid campaigns too, or is it?

Matas: 19:12

I'm saying it's a great question, but it's a tough one because I still don't know what's the right kind of channel mix between organic and paid in this industry, and there are a couple of reasons. So there's also one factor, just a technical one, that sometimes you just ads being blogged because Google or whatever other advertiser suspects that you're doing crypto advertising, which is not allowed and it's not correct like we're advertising developer tooling. But well, the reality is that it turns your ads get turned off sometimes, which is annoying and you have to restart them and monitor them. The other thing is that the amount of, I think, ad blockers used among developers and just more kind of tech savvy people it's very high and so you're competing against a behavior that's a limiting factor and you're pushing against that and it's it's again so another obstacle. So now you have two things competing against you, and then there's this kind of notion. Every developer I talked to, they will tell you that they just hate advertising. They just they're all just tell and you have to take it with a grain of salt.

Matas: 20:25

But I think there's also when I look at businesses and there's tools to, so you take a look at that, like how many Web3 businesses advertise and paid advertising like the traditional channels, let's say, if we're calling like PPC or Reddit advertising or not, not that many. You can see that there are spend trends. Maybe someone enters the market, they try, they push some spend and they probably realize that, man, this is really hard and this is the position that we find ourselves in as well. It's really hard For me. The world of paid is can I spend a dollar and get $3 back? If I can do that, let's keep going, and you can always figure out how to do that to a certain scale and that's how it's worked for us at Tatum. We're not pushing more money until we know that we can get a put a dollar, we get $3 back. If you're able to connect those dots, then paid works for you.

Joeri: 21:21

Yeah, but that's indeed a matter of trying, testing, see what works. Sometimes it can also be interesting if you have a really good piece of content, to make sure that more eyeballs come on that. But, as you see, you need to be careful with if you use the traditional platforms, because they decide if you're going to reach, is it going to be stopped or whatever. But, of course, maybe your blockchain company using blockchain technology. How can blockchain technology itself maybe be used or useful for marketing campaigns?

Matas: 21:56

A great question. So this is going to be my wish list. So, if there's people in other referee companies listening to this, one thing I would love is to find some kind of an effective way to use the wallets as a means of messaging other wallets in a way that is widely adopted. There is many tools like this exist, but from a business point of view, I just don't see it being implemented enough. So that's where because we use wallets in our business too and we see the kind of wallets that our customers are using, and I don't want to be air dropping random NFTs into those wallets. That's just like a practice everyone hates. But how else can I reach these people that are interacting with my business through the wallet? I haven't found that solution. If someone has that, just please message me on whatever LinkedIn Telegram you'll find me. I would love to see that.

Matas: 22:48

The other thing that and I think it's a solution to one of the problems that I mentioned is that there's this kind of unidentified user in the world of Web 3 that poses challenges to your business. It's some kind of using Web 3 as a way to measure or check credibility of the user. Just check that they're a real user the amount of bot traffic in this industry is wild and this would be a solution, essentially some kind of NFT gating, some kind of like the world ID even idea that you can have a verified user enter your site and it's verified through blockchain. That, I think, is going to happen sooner or later and we're looking into that as well, but I'm saying yet. So when you talk blockchain technology in our business, when I look at how we operate, I wish there was more. I don't think there's enough functionality in our business. Honestly, and most of them it's not just us, I think it's just the early stage of this industry, but where I see problems, where I think blockchain can solve them, so that's maybe the current snapshot.

Joeri: 23:57

Yeah, I see also opportunities, but indeed we need to have more adoption for people On the website. You speak about cookies, remarketing. All of that would be very difficult. It's already difficult. They say cookie is that? And then wallets can maybe be a solution, that people connect with their wallets and sharing what they want to share and so on.

Matas: 24:19

And the other thing is that I'm noticing that businesses are a bit unsure or less so in this part of the world, but maybe in US because of regulation and whether what it means for you to accept crypto payments versus not what it means for you to allow the wallet to be connected to your site. And if, when you're business at a certain stage, you also stop maybe just taking every shortcut and you start to look at a little bit of risk assessment and you're like what's really worth doing and anything that's super uncertain, you take a pause. You're like let's wait a couple of months, maybe it's not ready. So if that kind of sentiment exists in the market, it also prevents a little bit faster adoption of blockchain tech into regular kind of business as usual marketing.

Joeri: 25:04

Okay, yeah, I feel that too some hesitance, sometimes, that it's not ready, depending maybe also on the sentiment of the market. I don't know if you see that playing, but I see on the marketing side that people are building stuff and they wait and maybe the market is not ready. But yeah, sentiment that's something that is changing. How are you feeling right now? What are you at this moment the most excited about or what do you feel for yourself fulfilling as being in the content industry in Web3?

Matas: 25:39

Yeah. So I think one nice thing that I definitely see going to conferences and speaking to other businesses is just the level of maybe professionalism that's growing in these businesses and really trying to think longer term and just immediate value. We went through a phase where people received their immediate value very quickly and got rich and made plenty of money that they were able to invest and spend different ways. But I think more projects and more Web3 businesses are starting to think in terms of five years, 10 years and planning a little bit into the future, as opposed to how can we just get right to the next bull run wave and will exit and buy our Lambos, but they're thinking, no, we want this to be a sustainable thing into the future. And it's good because it's maybe stops making people chase money and they think differently about how to structure their teams and what kind of people do they really need to drive their business forward.

Matas: 26:54

There were quite a few layoffs, I think, in the world of Web3 in the past years and it's not necessarily a bad thing because it really allowed businesses to ride size, because it's easy to just keep hiring people when you have tons of cash, but when you have to be a little bit more. How do I survive the next couple of years? You start to think more efficiently and what does really make sense for you to do, as opposed to let's just hire someone just in case. So I think there's maturity that I'm definitely seeing and that's exciting for me.

Joeri: 27:28

Okay, and that's a really positive message to end this podcast episode with you, and you mentioned that people can find you on Telegram, maybe somewhere else. What is for you? Where would you like people to reach out to you or to connect with you?

Matas: 27:42

Yeah, definitely so go on, tatum. io. There's the community part of the menu, and you'll find all the channels that you can find us on. Definitely, join our Discord, probably the most fun you'll have in terms of our community. And also, if you're a developer, just go and copy the package snippet, install it and try it, Tatum, you'll see how simple it is to build with it. And also, don't shy away from contacting me personally on LinkedIn, on Telegram my first name, last name and we'll continue the conversation.

Joeri: 28:15

Great. If you're now listening to this episode. You and your regular listener here can find all these details in the show notes. There will also be an article with the takeaways from this episode. As always, Mantas, thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Matas: 28:30

Yeah, likewise. Thank you, Joeri, and I hope I get to see you in some conference sooner or later.

Joeri: 28:35

Yeah, it's a small world, certainly, of Web3 and all these amazing conferences. I start to do some speaking gigs also, so we'll be happy if I can see you again and probably it will happen next year and also to our listeners. If you want to meet Mantas or me and you are at these conferences, please reach out to us If you like this podcast episode. Yeah, it would be a pleasure if you can share this with people around you, because sharing is caring. Other entrepreneurs, marketers, people looking into Web3, please, developers, be sure to share the episode with them. If you're not yet subscribed, as I always say, this is a really good moment to do this and, of course, I would like to see you back next time, take care.