Situational Marketing in Web3 [case study]
How a historic Bitcoin ETF approval sparked a viral situational marketing campaign in the crypto space.
Heads up, I’ll be brief and let the story do the talking.
The situation
On January 11, 2024, the approval of the Bitcoin ETF was a landmark event in cryptocurrency history. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler voted to approve Bitcoin ETFs, and Crypto Twitter went wild. For those not privy to, crypto enthusiasts often joke about SEC activities on Twitter 👿
The marketing
So, at CoinStats, we swapped the Bitcoin logo on our app and web platforms with Gary’s photo.
<ad> For those who might not know, CoinStats is the top crypto portfolio tracker, trusted by over 1 million people worldwide 👑. </ad>
Btw, only some of the user generated comments are included in this article, but the good news is that the screenshots are clickable if you want to dive into all the juicy user-generated content.
After that, we sent out a notification to our app users. It looked like a transactional notification, but was intentionally incomplete.
To measure the success of any situational marketing case, user-generated comments are essential—stats alone don’t capture the full picture. I believe UGC (user generated content) will convey the story better than I can. For those interested, the stats, including data from Google Search Console, App Store search, and social media analytics, are at the end. 😉
“I will never cancel my subscription”
One CoinStats user said they’d never cancel their paid subscription because of situational marketing (check the screenshot below). Who was asking what situational marketing is for?! Is it boosting brand love? 🧡
“…almost made coffee come out of my nose”
Who engaged?
In crypto, big accounts do not often engage with brands without an incentive. This time, we saw users with large followings engaging. Here are some of them below.
So, the app crashed…
The situational marketing activity and the push notification did too well, and the app crashed. Back then, we had a technical issue; our infrastructure wasn’t scaling with the increasing user volume. Imagine we’re in the middle of it, and the app crashes. Fortunately, we got it back up quickly.
I imagine my face looked something like this at that moment 👇
“Crypto culture and memes” matter
We saw how a loyal user was advocating for his favorite product because the company understands “crypto culture and memes”… Check out the screenshot below.
“Got to love for this, I.Am.Dead”
このせいでアプリ落ちてるの笑う
Merci à celui qui a décider de rajouter Garry
لوگوی بیتکوین در
Just in case you don’t understand the language, the translation is on the screenshot below :)
Even on Telegram and Instagram, people were buzzing!
UGC screenshot dump
I can’t include all the screenshots in this article, but if you’re curious, you can check out the main tweets on this Google Sheet.
Negative feedback 🤗
For full transparency, we received around 5 comments with negative sentiment. Here is one. 👇
Stats (for nerds marketers)
Social media
Here’s a snapshot of the engagement we tracked:
UGC tweets (comments are not included) – 142+
UGC total impressions - 41,500
CGC tweet impressions - 690,000 (organic + sponsored)
The total number of followers who tweeted – 451,000
CoinStats Twitter timeline engagements 👇
Google search
Organic, branded Google search traffic reached its highest level in the past 16 months.
App Store search
App Store downloads from App Store search hit the highest in the last 12 months.
🔴 It’s worth noting that BTC hit $48k for the first time in two years on the same day. So, we don't know the exact attribution.
Credits:
Gary icon design: Arthur Mashinyan
Social media engagement: Narek Vartani
Idea, execution: Tigran B. Mkrtchyan
It's your turn now
What would you have done differently in this case? Got any comments or suggestions for this article? Drop them in the comments—I’m open to discussion.