The Marketing Stack Behind Crypto Projects That Survived Two Bear Cycles

Coinbound, a crypto marketing agency, in 2018. Within a year, the market I’d built a company to serve had shed most of its value. Besides, most of the people in it had gone quiet.

The projects I was working with then split into two camps almost immediately. One camp treated marketing like a switch you flip on when the chart is green and off when it’s red. The other camp kept talking to their users through a stretch when there was nothing exciting to announce, no price movement to celebrate, and no obvious reason to spend money on distribution. 

Almost everyone in the first camp is gone. A good number of the second camp are still operating. A few of them are names you’d recognize without me telling you who they are.

Two full bear cycles later (2018 and 2022), the pattern has repeated with enough consistency. I’ve stopped calling it luck. The companies that make it through tend to run the same marketing stack. The tools and budgets differ, but the underlying structure stays remarkably the same. Here’s what that structure looks like, assembled from watching it work and watching its absence quietly kill otherwise good products.

They Owned a Channel No One Could Switch Off

Paid reach vanishes the moment you stop paying for it. Moreover, social timelines bury you the moment your engagement dries up. The projects that came through both downturns had built at least one channel they controlled outright. It could be an email list people actually opened, or a Discord or Telegram with a real conversation in it. It could also be a body of content that kept ranking in search while the broader market slept.

Community management is the least glamorous line item in any crypto marketing budget. It’s almost always the first thing founders reach for when revenue tightens. The survivors did the reverse. They staffed it harder in the quiet months. A community that feels supported during a bear market is more likely to stick around. And when the next cycle starts, it’s still there and still buying.  

We’ve run community for projects across both downturns at Coinbound. The retention numbers in month eighteen almost always trace back to whether anyone answered questions and kept things alive in month six.

They Earned Credibility While Everyone Else Was Hiding

A bear market is the best window you’ll ever get to earn coverage. Reporters have fewer launches to chase, and the noise floor drops. So, a project with a genuine story finally has the room to tell it. The companies that lasted read the timing correctly and pushed into earned media exactly when their competitors had gone dark.

Crypto PR is a standing relationship with the journalists at CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, Blockworks, and the mainstream desks. They cover the space when it matters. Crypto reporters are buried and under-resourced. 

A single editor might cover DeFi, an exchange hack, a token launch, and a Senate hearing in a week. At the same time, hundreds of pitches remain unread the entire time. Most of those pitches are noise. They could be anonymous founders, vague partnership announcements, or a token that needs liquidity dressed up as a milestone. 

Suppose a reporter is on deadline and needs a real number or a quote that won’t blow up in their face. They go to the people who have been straight with them before. You earn that spot by being useful when you have nothing to sell. Send the occasional tip that has nothing to do with you. Know which stories are genuinely theirs and which ones you’re trying to force. Do that consistently for a year, and you stop being a pitch in the pile. You become the person they call first.

My crypto PR team has booked north of 8,250 placements since 2018. That’s long enough to watch launch-week features get forgotten by the next quarter. An impactful coverage was almost always a reporter coming back a third or fourth time on their own. That only happened because the first story we gave them held up. 

They Worked With Creators as Partners, Not Slot Machines

The KOL pump model has died in front of me at least twice. Pay a large account to post once, watch the price tick up for an afternoon, and watch it hand the gains back by the weekend. Projects ran that played in 2017 and again in 2021, and both cleanups were brutal.

The durable version of influencer marketing looks boring next to it. You find a handful of creators whose audiences genuinely overlap with your users. So, a real working relationship with them, and run programs that last for quarters instead of afternoons. 

One client told us, six months into an ongoing influencer program, that it had become the lowest-cost channel for registrations. A number like that never comes from a single viral post. It comes from showing up in the same trusted feeds repeatedly until the audience stops treating you as a stranger. 

The key mental shift is treating influencer marketing the way you’d treat any other retention channel. The relationship compounds over time. A creator who has talked about your product three or four times carries fundamentally different credibility with their audience.

They Measured Something They Could Defend to a Board

Impressions are a comfortable metric in a bull market because everything looks like it’s working. The companies that survived the bear had already trained themselves to ask a harder question: did the marketing produce anything a CFO would put their name next to?

For most of crypto’s history, the honest answer was that attribution stopped at the click. You could see that someone visited the site, but what they did with their wallet afterward lived in a black box. 

For years, I could tell a client their campaign drove ten thousand clicks and then have no honest answer when they asked how many of those people actually connected a wallet or bought the token. The click was where a crypto marketer’s visibility ended, and the guessing began. 

That bothered me enough that it became part of why we built Mintfunnel: we wanted to follow the money past the click. Now it reads the on-chain side too – wallet connects, swaps, token purchases, NFT mints – so the report tells you how many people did the thing the token economy actually needs them to do, instead of how many saw an ad.

Once you can see which clicks turn into wallets, you stop spreading budget evenly and start concentrating it into the two channels that actually convert. That’s how the DeFi project Zivoe raised more than $8M with us: not more spending, just spending aimed at the actions that moved their raise instead of the ones that looked good in a screenshot.

The Stack, and What It Costs You to Build It

Strip the four pieces down, and the survivors’ marketing stack is almost embarrassingly plain. Own a channel nobody can switch off. Earn credibility while everyone else is hiding. Build real relationships with the creators your users already trust. Measure the outcomes you’d be willing to defend to your board. None of it photographs well during a bull run, when easy money makes every tactic look like genius. All of it is what stays standing when the easy money leaves.

I’ve run two marketing agencies through these cycles – Coinbound for crypto and Web3 brands, and Clickstrike for AI and SaaS companies – and the lesson travels further than I expected. Markets reward whoever is still talking to their audience when the talking gets hard.

If you’re building something you intend to still be running after the next downturn, the moment to assemble that stack is the quiet stretch you’re probably in right now, while you can afford to be patient with it. Coinbound has been doing this exact work – across influencer marketing, crypto PR, community management, and onchain-attributed distribution – since the first of those two bears. You can see how we approach it at Coinbound.

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