Together with our senior PR lead Seva Nau, we explored how smart PR can cut friction across the funnel and strengthen conversion. Does PR actually make each marketing dollar more likely to do its job?
Why and when Web3 marketing gets expensive so quickly
Marketing is consistently one of the most demanding expenses. And the starting social capital of the project defines the real marketing budget the teams need. Think of it like a progress bar: the closer a project already is to the filled-in side in terms of social resources, the cheaper it is to push it toward full completion.
Projects with existing communities or partner ecosystems usually spend less. Projects entering the market with zero visibility tend to face the highest costs because they start by buying attention in a crowded, skeptical environment.
And of course, marketing often becomes cheaper when there’s something to lean on. In many cases that solid footing comes from PR.
Where PR can create the largest savings
The effect is often most visible at the early stage: pre-launch, presale, or the go-to-market moment. This phase activates every acquisition channel at once, from lead generation and paid traffic to KOLs and business development. Newcomers who stumble upon the project almost always research it first. They check if the media had ever covered it, if the team speaks anywhere, if there are any progress updates. At the start, without much stable background to check, the project might be fragile and vulnerable.
PR builds this environment ahead of time, and it tells the team’s story their own way. Reviews, interviews, and other context-rich mentions help ease friction and can improve the conversion of first-touch channels. PR also sets the early narrative, positions the team, and gives the project a visible footprint before marketing spend ramps up.
What “saving with PR” actually means
Savings don’t come from literally cutting placements or negotiating cheaper influencers. They come from more users reaching the target action with the same budget. PR may increase conversion by reducing drop-off between first touch and evaluation. And that often leads to a lower effective cost per lead, user or sale participant.
The central takeaway is that PR doesn’t directly make marketing cheap. But it makes marketing more likely to convert.
How PR fits the overall marketing strategy
A solid PR foundation answers four basic user questions:
- Who you are
- Why you exist
- Why you’re trustworthy
- Where you’re going
When this context is already visible, verification becomes quick and painless. Users don’t exit the funnel because they can’t understand the project. In this sense, PR works like the base infrastructure. It doesn’t replace marketing channels, but supports them and can reduce their loss rate.
Across all channels PR tends to act as a multiplier. Few examples:
- Cold traffic. PR doesn’t warm cold traffic by itself, but definitely helps users who arrive from other channels glide further down the funnel. When people look up the brand and find publications and updates, they tend to convert more consistently.
- KOLs. A KOL is the admin of a community and reputation is their main asset. If the brand looks empty, negotiations become slower and more expensive. With a visible PR footprint, the project often appears more credible and lower-risk, which can lead to better terms of collaboration.
- Paid traffic. When users see an ad and then google the brand, absence of information leads to immediate bounce. That inflates CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). PR can curb this leakage by giving users enough proof to continue the journey. Smart media presence can also prime the audience. When an ad hits someone who has already come across your project, they’re simply more willing to interact with it.
- Community. Communities respond strongly to visible activity: publications, mentions, updates. These signals reinforce trust, decrease churn, and maintain engagement.
How to measure PR’s contribution
PR is difficult to isolate as a single channel because users rarely act after one touch. They discover the project in one place, verify it in another, and make a decision somewhere else. PR shapes the verification stage. That means the most useful metrics are the ones showing whether the brand is findable, understandable, and credible when people look it up.
Its effect shows up in two groups of metrics:
- Visibility and presence – awareness, citations, mentions. These are the indicators that users can easily locate real information about the project.
- Conversion-related outcomes – registration, participation, purchases, follow-through. PR doesn’t guarantee conversion, but it can reduce the drop-off that usually happens when users fail to find trustworthy signals.
These two groups together show whether communication helps people move from “I saw it once” to “I’m ready to act.”
How PR lessens the chance of costly FUD or crisis fallout
A project that communicates consistently tends to build a more resilient audience. When people regularly see updates, context and open positioning, they become less prone to panic when something negative appears. The baseline loyalty grows, stress reactions soften, and the community tends not to abandon the brand at the first sign of trouble.
In an actual crisis the project needs a separate communication flow, but the groundwork is what determines the starting point. A steady PR foundation can make it easier to explain the situation, maintain trust, and prevent FUD from snowballing into something worse. It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it can significantly temper how sharply the audience reacts and how long the recovery takes.
Final takeaways
Smart PR can reduce marketing costs by increasing the efficiency of acquisition channels. It may strengthen conversion, lower CAC through decreased drop-off, and build the trust users need before taking action. It supports the community, protects reputation in high-risk moments, and gives marketing a stable footing.
At Outset PR, we work to show that PR isn’t noise or decoration. It’s infrastructure that, when built early and used consciously, makes it easier for brands to grow without overspending.
