Adrox.io: Exchanges attracting depositors via influencers in the bear market of 2022

Hello everyone! I’m gonna tell you today how crypto exchanges attract depositors via influencers in the bear market by the end of the stormy 2022. 

One of the main tasks of a crypto exchange is attracting depositors. Our know-how is doing it via influencers. And the term ‘bear market’ describes the current situation in the market, as of December 2022. 

So how should a crypto exchange work with influencers?

First we talk about crypto influencers. They generate crypto content mainly / only: crypto trading, tech analysis, projects, NFT, GameFi, etc. There are quite a lot of these: 2-3k per planet Earth. 

Influencers typically offer 2 options: dedicated videos and integration. But if you’re an exchange and you buy a dedicated video or an integration, you never really get the results you expected. Because they don’t work well in the current market as they used to work in the past: there are huge lots of content by influencers, and the customers have already found their exchanges. There’s simply no new audience to direct to a new exchange. We have to work with the existing audiences who already have a few exchanges for their needs, who are already trading. So the ordinary purchasing strategy won’t give us the desired results. 

It’s extremely important to portray our influencers beforehand so that we know who gives us the best outcome. Segment the right influencers to get what you want. 

Fake audience vs real audience 

We need to understand that crypto influencers always fake their audience: up to 80-90% of their audiences are fake. It’s a huge business niche: companies create those bubble influencers to make money on content piece posting, dedicated videos and integrations. 

And it’s hard to differ a fake audience from a real audience: only an experienced crypto pro can do that without special tools. We have our own analytic platform for these tasks. They track geodata of those accounts that often doesn’t match the influencer’s home region. Often fake geodata shows countries like India, Bangladesh, Turkey, Uzbekistan where people are ready to complete simple imitation tasks for little money. It’s expensive to imitate real traffic from the US, Germany, France, etc. 

So you really should use an analytic platform to differ fake from real, whether it’s out platform or a similar one. Ours has a unique feature: it can track geodata of YouTube comments. Because influencers often fake comments too: it’s suspicious when your video has 10,000 views and 0 comments, right? Also, comments should be thoughtful and relevant to the video content. They shouldn’t be all positive or all negative: organic audiences have different opinions. Comments with 1-2 emojis and words like ‘cool’ and ‘awesome’ are definitely fake. 

You should work with influencers with their own communities, be it Telegram, Discord or another platform. If the influencer is just a face in the web, if he doesn’t communicate with his audience anywhere – it’s a bad sign. The number of the followers should also match average daily likes and comments, it means the audience is active. Keep in mind that only 3-5% of all crypto influencers have real activity. 

YouTubers make content with their faces. An influencer’s face is something people follow, it’s something they trust when that influencer recommends them a certain exchange. People trust people, not just images or videos, that’s the way we’re built. 

One more factor is content quality. It has to be exclusive, full of meaning and purpose. If an influencer shows us some figures saying the market may go up or down, and after it goes somewhere he tells us ‘well, I told you it should go this way but may go that way, too’… those influencers add zero value, the real traders don’t watch them. And exchanges need pro traders who make real money with their accounts. Pro traders watch in-depth content that simply can’t be made by amateurs. 

Another important aspect: CPM shouldn’t be $1000 – $3000. Keep it below $700. If an influencer wants more, there’s high risk of not converting users into depositors at a reasonable price. CPM / views ratio is also very important. 

Clear portrait of a real, high-quality, non-fake, active crypto influencer is the first half of your success. And the second half is… 

Hybrid purchase model 

How it works: 

• we collaborate with an influencer exclusively or order 5-7 videos; 
• the influencer has enough time to show his audience that he really uses our exchange, it’s not just one more collaboration for $1000, it really means something for him. Would be perfect if he uses our exchange as an example in his, say, tech analysis videos; 
• he uses our exchange consistently, no more one-time wow-videos with Binance, Coinbase, Kraken where calls each of them a perfect place to work with which is obviously a lie;
• your exchange and that influencer should create contents together: trading tournaments, for example. If the exchange allows copy trading, the influencer should use it so that his audience could copy his actions. You should practice 3-peer interactions all the time; Exchange-Influencer-Audience. The influencer may say in his TG: “Guys, I’ve been telling you about Bybit for a whole month already, they’re having a tournament this weekend, I’ll participate, find me in copy trading, let’s make money together and share experiences!” 

This hybrid model allows you to let the audience in little by little, engaging it gradually, reducing depositors’ attraction costs, raising their trade volumes at your exchange. 

You can start with as few as 3-4 videos, that’s like 2-3 weeks, then you scale it up to 3-4 months of collaboration. You need good influencers we portrayed above, from countries like Russia, Poland, Germany, France, Italy: no huge populations, no high competition between influencers. Say, English-speaking crypto influencers are 1000+ and German-speaking influencers are like 50-70. German top-10 influencers can bring 50 000 – 100 000 trades to your exchange per month. 

To summarize: 

1. portray the influencers, segment the high-quality ones;
2. use hybrid purchase-interaction model.

Non-crypto influencers 

They create content in all possible categories except crypto: food, sport, games, fashion, etc. Why using them? As you already know, the crypto audience knows all the big names in the market, uses several exchanges for their purposes. And it’s really hard to find the right crypto  influencers, to work with them consistently, to set reasonable amounts of money and get ROI. 

That’s why we often work (successfully) with non-crypto influencers now. Collaborations with them and their audiences are much cheaper, nowhere close to $500-1000 for the US, Germany, France or Italy we mentioned above. Non-crypto influencers’ CPM is a lot cheaper: $50-100. 

Important thing is to pick the right people in the right category. Your influencer should not just be a funny guy looking for some hype, he has to be a real opinion leader. And the category he works in should be close to crypto. One of such categories is hi-tech. We often find that tech influencers know a lot of stuff close to crypto, and their audience is also like this: tech-savvy and sophisticated. Another good category is  extreme sports: this audience is risky and looks for passive income. They don’t have to go deep in crypto, they may just use copy trading but they’re ready to take a risk. One more category is financial and fintech influencers: it’s simple, they already deal with money, and crypto is another channel where their audience can invest and earn. 

Give a valuable bonus to your audience 

Your influencer has to give his audience a substantial bonus, not a discount off something: a bonus they can use right now and feel its value. We had such case: an influencer offered $5 for the first 200 users registered with his promocode. $5 is a value everyone understands, people registered and did KYC verification easily. Such an offer only costs $1000, and a local food influencer integration campaign costs like $10 000. That offer boosted the campaign enormously: we attracted 15-20k users to our exchange coz everyone wanted those $5. 

And the exchange doesn’t spend those multiple $5 bonuses coz the minimal withdrawal amount is 10 USDT. Users have to deposit to be able to withdraw. They normally just add some more money to the balance, and use the $5 bonus within the exchange to buy some coins or in trading. 

You need to understand that this newly attracted non-crypto audience doesn’t make big trading volumes: they can’t trade well, they are not ready to make big deposits, to take a risk, to engage in trading for the whole day. 

Work with non-crypto audience is aimed at registrations and small deposits. They don’t convert into big trading volumes at once. We attract people to use other products: earn products, staking, farming, crypto loans. Such products have the needed margin to pay off. Also, we work with future: sooner or later they will start trading, staking, copy trading. And by that time those users will already have Binance accounts, installed apps, bonuses and verified KYC. So next time they want to enter crypto trading world, they’ll use your exchange. 

And the last piece of the puzzle is the sales funnel prepared by the exchange. You can’t afford a new user not being able to add money to his balance via bank card. If you only have ERC20 option, it means he has to have USDT on another account, and that’s not likely the case of a new user. The funnel and the product have to be fully ready to welcome non-crypto audience. It means you need fiat payment gateways, easy-to-use, simple and intuitive KYC verification process, squeeze funnel. 

Squeezing means that a user who just installed the app will have to follow the next steps: registration, KYC, the first deposit, joining the community… A high-quality squeeze funnel should allow the user to go from stage to stage seamlessly: coz that user is not hot, we should not cool him off. A newcomer may not be ready or know how to go through the whole process…

So, working with non-crypto audience depends on these few important factors: 

1. right influencers,
2. valuable bonuses,
3. funnels ready to work. 

Work with the right people, add value, be really useful for your audience and make sure everything is ready to roll, seamlessly. Collaborate with both crypto and non-crypto people, research and experiment, and don’t be afraid: the one who succeeds is the one who tries new stuff over and over again and never gives up. Audaces fortuna juvat, as the ancient Roman saying goes: fortune favors the brave!