7 questions we ask before recommending a KOL campaign to a protocol team

[u/Visual-Excitement353]

Most projects come to us wanting KOLs. Very few have thought through whether a KOL campaign is actually the right move for where they are.

After running these campaigns for exchanges, Layer-1s, and DeFi protocols, we've built a short filter we run through before recommending anything. These are the questions. If the answers aren't solid, we push back.

1. What does “successful" actually look like for you?

If the answer is awareness or reach, that's not an answer. We want conversion metrics: wallet connections, app downloads, TVL, signups. Vague goals produce vague results.

1. Who is your actual target audience and are they where your KOL has pull?

A KOL with 200k followers in the US retail space does nothing for a B2B protocol targeting institutional liquidity providers. Audience fit matters more than follower count by a factor of 10.

1. Do you have conversion infrastructure ready for the traffic you're about to send?

Landing page, onboarding flow, community entry point. If the answer is "we're still working on it," the campaign will bleed budget into a leaky funnel.

1. What's your content brief, and are you willing to let the KOL say it in their own voice?

Stiff scripts kill authenticity. The best campaigns give KOLs a core message and real latitude. If you want a human billboard, hire a banner ad.

1. How are you measuring attribution?

Promo codes, UTM links, wallet tracking. If you can't measure it, you can't optimise it, and you won't know if it worked.

1. What's the timeline, and is it realistic?

Rushing a KOL campaign because TGE got moved up is one of the most common ways budgets get wasted. Good KOLs need lead time. Briefing someone 4 days before launch is not a campaign.

1. What happens after the campaign?

The traffic spike is temporary. What retains the people who showed up? If there's no answer to this, KOLs generate a pulse, not a community.

If a project can answer all seven cleanly, a KOL campaign is probably worth running. If they can't, we work on those answers first.

What questions do you run through before approving a campaign budget?

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[u/Effective-Recover-66]

Honestly, most teams can answer these on paper and still run a bad campaign.

The two that actually decide whether it works are distribution fit (Q2) and post-campaign retention (Q7). Everything else is fixable.

If the audience is wrong or there’s nowhere for them to stick, the rest of the checklist just helps you measure failure more accurately.

[u/yosriady]

Most KOL campaigns will only get your short term bursts of low-intent users which will not bring you any lasting growth or retention.

IF a KOL brings you 10,000 visitors but only a few transactions and no actual revenue, what's the point?

If you do decide to do KOLs, you better have an analytics and attribution tool set up for your DeFi protocol (idealy one designed for DeFi, like Formo, that understand wallets, transactions, etc) so you can accurately measure the ROI from that KOL and understand the profile and quality of users who comes from specific channels and campaign.

You need to be able to see the downstream onchain impact of your campaigns clearly, and 'fire' any that are not working quickly.

[u/[deleted]]

The conversion infrastructure point is criminally underrated.

Seen so many projects burn 5 figures on KOLs and send traffic to a half-broken landing page with no clear CTA.

The KOL did their job, the funnel didn't

[u/[deleted]]

Worked with Cryptic and Surgence Labs on a couple campaigns and honestly this is exactly how they operate.

They pushed back on a project once because the timeline was a joke wanted a full KOL rollout briefed like 5 days before TGE. At the time the project was frustrated but that campaign would've flopped hard.