Overview
Even for a well-established company getting traction with a new product can be tricky, especially if the company works in an ever-evolving, highly competitive, and international market. This was the case for Huobi’s mobile app launch.
Founded in 2013, Huobi.com (HTX.com since 2023) is the world-leading Bitcoin and Ethereum trading platform, providing secure and convenient trading services for hundreds of digital assets. The company released their mobile app in 2020 and had been struggling in getting more traction with it post-release: not as many deposits came through the app compared to their more established website, and this is where we came to the rescue.
Getting a bit ahead of ourselves, we ended up developing a high-budget digital marketing campaign leveraging paid social ads to reach the target audience and drive downloads and engagement, but we knew it wouldn’t be enough on its own – we had to increase brand awareness and trust during the campaign to maximize its effectiveness and make sure that the leads we would bring in, would really stick around and become satisfied customers of the Huobi exchange.
This case study takes a look at how Ninjapromo developed a theme with a high visual appeal, tied it to multiple marketing channels, with the focus on PPC ads, brought in millions of USD in deposits in under 180 days, and even came away with some insights for our future campaigns, which we will share at the end of the case.
Planning and Trend Analysis
We started working on the case on July 1, 2022. Huobi chose us because, even though we haven’t worked with large ecosystems based around exchanges, we came highly recommended by other web3 clients and had a wealth of experience in the industry.
For projects of such scale we usually start with a strategic brainstorming meeting, to which we invite leading specialists even from the departments not initially involved in the work, so as not to miss any details and truly evaluate every opportunity to deliver value to the client. Our focus, as per early discussions with the client, would be on paid ads, but we were sure that the input from the social media and community management teams would be required, as well as the design and PR specialists.
We usually do it in free form as a team, with our strategists making sure we don’t miss any key areas that we must keep in mind, while keeping the primary goals in focus, which were:
Our team quickly assessed the situation on the crypto exchange market and reviewed the competitors, trying to decide what to do to attract more customers to make a deposit and start using the app. We used social listening tools and cross-referenced the results that they yielded with our own insights and knowledge of market trends.
It is important to remain aware of the context and trends of the market the client, Huobi in this case, is operating in. There were very few positive narratives happening in mid-2022:
- The year began with a descending trend fueled by a political and economic crisis related to the inflation rates in the US.
- The Terra (Luna UST) depegging fiasco impacted the overall sentiment towards crypto negatively.
- 2022 turned out to be the year during which the industry suffered the most hacks (both CeFi and DeFi protocols suffered terrible losses).
While being aware of some of the issues and user concerns, we made a tactical decision to focus on a smaller, yet more positive trend – memecoins.