What are the core services and deliverables?
Six service lines cover most of the industry. PR: press releases, tier-1 media placements ($6.5k-$9.5k per placement at market rates), journalist relationships, and narrative development. Community: Discord and Telegram setup, moderation, engagement programming, and ambassador management. KOL marketing: influencer sourcing, vetting, negotiation, and campaign coordination across X, YouTube, and Telegram.
Content and SEO: blog and thought-leadership production, keyword strategy, and increasingly AI-search optimization (AEO/GEO) so the project appears when people ask ChatGPT about the category. Paid acquisition: campaigns on crypto-permitted channels — X, crypto ad networks, programmatic — navigating the platform bans that block naive approaches. Launch coordination: orchestrating all of the above into a TGE or listing moment.
- PR and tier-1 media placements
- Community building and moderation (Discord/Telegram)
- KOL sourcing, vetting, and campaign management
- Content, SEO, and AI-search (AEO/GEO) visibility
- Compliant paid acquisition
- Token launch and listing campaign coordination
How is crypto marketing different from regular marketing?
Three structural differences. First, ad restrictions: Google and Meta heavily restrict crypto promotion, so the paid channels that carry web2 startups are mostly closed — organic, community, KOLs, and earned media do the work paid ads do elsewhere. Second, the audience: crypto-native users are marketing-hostile, anonymous-forum-driven, and detect inauthenticity instantly; repurposed web2 campaigns fail on contact.
Third, the stakes concentrate around events: a TGE or exchange listing compresses a year of marketing consequence into a two-week window. Timing and coordination — embargoes, KOL sequencing, announcement order — matter more than in any other vertical. Agencies without crypto-native experience get the tone wrong and the timing worse.
What does a typical engagement look like month to month?
A standard retainer month includes a strategy call, a content calendar executed across blog and social channels, 1-3 media placements or pitches in motion, community programming (events, AMAs, engagement campaigns), KOL activations if in scope, and a report tying activity to numbers: coverage secured, community growth and engagement, search visibility, and conversions where trackable.
Timelines vary by service. PR placements take 2-6 weeks from pitch to publication. SEO and AI-search visibility compound over 2-6 months. Community growth shows in weeks but retention quality takes a quarter to judge. Launch campaigns run 8-16 week arcs. Any agency promising material results in the first two weeks is describing activity, not outcomes.
What should a crypto agency NOT be doing?
Walk away from agencies offering guaranteed token price movement, coordinated shill armies, bot-inflated community numbers, or undisclosed paid promotion dressed as organic sentiment. Beyond the ethics, these tactics now carry real consequences: exchanges run social forensics before listings, and manufactured engagement patterns are detectable and disqualifying.
Also treat skeptically: agencies that cannot explain which regulations touch your marketing (securities-adjacent language, jurisdiction-specific promotion rules), and agencies with no opinion on AI search — in 2026, if your project does not surface when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your category, a growing share of your discovery funnel simply does not exist. An agency not working on that is optimizing for the last cycle.
How does Chalk Labs cover these services?
Chalk Labs runs the full stack — PR, SEO/AEO/GEO, KOL coordination, performance marketing, and founder branding — with retainers starting around $3,000 per month and every account led directly by the founders. Shilika Jain handles PR and narrative with 500+ placements and 50+ launches behind her; Rahil Jain runs growth engineering, analytics, and the AI-search work most crypto agencies have not built capability in yet.
We are deliberately boutique: fewer clients, senior attention, and reporting that shows what your money produced in placements, rankings, citations, and pipeline — not impression theater. If you only need one service line, we scope one service line.
Questions we hear about this
Crypto-specific, in most cases. Ad-platform restrictions, crypto-native audience norms, exchange and regulatory constraints, and launch-event mechanics all punish generalist agencies learning on your budget.
PR placements land in 2-6 weeks, community growth shows within a month, SEO and AI-search visibility compound over 2-6 months. Judge the first 90 days on deliverables and leading indicators, not final outcomes.
Placements secured with links, organic and AI-search visibility (rankings, citations, mentions), community growth with engagement rates rather than raw counts, referral traffic, and conversions where trackable. Impressions alone are not a KPI.
No, and anyone implying it is a walking red flag. Agencies control awareness, credibility, and distribution — not markets. Marketing amplifies fundamentals; it cannot substitute for them.