Interview with a Crypto PR specialist Diana King – what crypto projects have to understand about PR

Q – Hello! Introduce yourself to our readers, please. Tell us a bit about your crypto journey, how it’s all started and your background in the PR industry.

Hi! My name is Diana King from Lever8 agency, thanks for having me tonight! I began to work with cryptocurrencies around 5 years ago. It’s all started with a Smile-Expo company. They were focused on the event management and allocated me on the Blockchain conferences projects. I worked for two weeks there, and as soon as they saw my performance, they promoted me to the PR director, so I worked for 3 more years with them.
Then I was invited to be a marketing director in the crypto magazine. I was involved in a partner’s management mostly with other publishers like Crypto Compare and Investing.com.

Q – Which are the better ways to attract the audience using PR in crypto? What gets more engagement, reactions, maybe some specialties you can share with us?

Well, the key PR feature, in my opinion, is when some projects orders PR services, they don’t have to expect the press releases only. So PR, as I see it, is a communication establishing, Networking. In accord to this, the main task of PR is to connect the client with the right person, convert the client’s message, initiate the dialog between them, and later make it turn into the action.

The first step to attract the audience in crypto is to understand which goals the project is trying to achieve. If the project is seeking an investor – this is one type of communication, there are very few ways of making it. In other words, you don’t have a second chance, you have to calculate everything, work on strategy and it is going to be the one way of searching. If the project looking to be published on the respective info sources, to appear on the information field, to gain more reputation and boost the image of the company – it’s another way of strategy if they just need a press release – it’s a third way of approach.

Q – How do you think, would it work if the crypto project was given to the non-crypto PR specialist?
Let’s imagine that we assign the project to the trusted PR specialist, but he has zero experience in crypto. Will he be able to adapt quickly and make a good start for the company?

– When you hire a PR specialist, you expect him to have a specific pool of contacts, making you receive new opportunities in terms of your business development. Plus it will take a lot of time to get used to the topic, it’s pretty uneasy. I needed a few years to have a detailed understanding of how things are working here exactly.

Q – Can you tell us more about your main channels for the clients searching, or they just come to you on their own? How does the process of finding a client is arranged?

– Well, I trust in the word of mouth mostly, and it’s the most effective channel for the client attraction. Somebody recommends me as a specialist and they come to me on their own, to receive help with a project. These people already have an understanding of what we made for the previous project of their friends\collegues etc. Recommendation is the first thing on the PR market. How do you get a recommendation? You should be an active member of a community, attending the events, speak with everybody in person, tell them what you are doing and how you are doing that, but it’s all should be in person.

Q – If we are speaking about mass media that you are cooperating with, which sources are most effective, and should they be crypto-related only?

– This depends on the project, because every single client that comes for our services, wants to be published on Forbes. On the other side, you don’t always understand the reason for the crypto project,  to appear on Forbes. The publication on Forbes doesn’t change the weather for the crypto project at all, considering the fact that crypto stock markets, for example, usually appear on Forbes when they got hacked. Spending 3 months on Forbes bureaucracy (it takes up to 3 months to push the post on Forbes approximately) to release the article that is totally irrelevant for the audience of Forbes readers. I constantly try to explain it to many projects, nevertheless, some of them just assume that we can’t make it, but I had a lot of articles released on Forbes btw.

Q – How do you measure the campaign efficiency? How good was the PR campaign flight?
Which metrics can show the value of the campaign from the client’s perspective?

– It much depends on an agency too. I can say that we always negotiate all KPI’s with a client. They pay us the price we agreed on and we organize them 3 post articles and something in advance, for example.
There are a lot of special software made for analyzing it but for me, the most important thing is to agree on KPI’s and follow them strictly. Why we are doing so? Because we are an agency and we always work on a few projects at the same time. It means that we can’t make more for the project that they paid for, even if we would want to make more. We often agree that during the PR campaign there will be publications on the specific sites at the chosen time. In addition, we track how the news we posted affected other mass media, overall reach and the performance of separate info sources, so we could offer the most relevant sites for the client.

Q – The last question is that maybe you can give a piece of advice for the projects that want to hire a PR agency, how to not to spend their money on nothing, what should be noted at the first sight?

I don’t recommend to spend money on PR to project, that doesn’t have money, to hire PR agency. There are too many startups that think that PR will cover all the questions in regards to their unfinished technology or the customer’s flow. PR can make an impact on the reputation and informative noise in mass media. It slightly affects clients, on investor’s decision making, because when investors seeing that we are opened, then they will be more intended to make an investment. There is no need to consider PR as a first need tool. Quality content, specialists that work in the company are much more important. Every part of a team should understand how the project works because I see a lot when not everyone in the team can briefly explain the details about their project. Besides, I would recommend creating a PR campaign in collaboration with a marketing campaign. It might sound obvious, but not many projects are doing so. Not many owners are introducing their marketer to the PR agency and they make strategy together. The most common thing is when they are just separated units, but it’s not correct at all. Marketer, PR specialist, SMM that will place ads too. They all should collaborate.
 
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