Cryptocurrency has had a turbulent two years. In 2018, what came to be known as the Crypto Winter, crypto prices tumbled to historic lows as the number of cryptocurrencies entering the market accelerated. Despite safe-haven cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum weathering the bear market and resurging in 2019, many other smaller cryptos did not make it. While most of these casualties were victims of a market correction, there is another narrative that can explain the tremendous fail rate of startup cryptos, altcoins, and crypto exchanges.
Most startup cryptos entered the market through an Initial Coin Offering or Initial Exchange Offering. Founders created the crypto asset, explain it in a whitepaper and then launched an offering. While this initially worked, today, with over 1600 cryptos in the market, this is not enough. What most founders may not realize is that, like any other product, crypto success requires a strong marketing push.
Crypto Marketing101: If no one knows about your crypto, you are stuck. Period.
In this article, Contentworks, an agency specializing in content marketing for financial services, crypto and blockchain looks at 7 marketing steps crypto founders can take to gain greater market visibility and build a stable and viable crypto business.
#1. Clarify your value proposition.
Crypto startup founder teams tend to be heavily technical. As a result, the value of the product can get lost in all the technical jargon in use.
For any product to gain market adoption, you must clearly and concisely communicate the value it delivers. As a crypto founder, you need to distill your crypto whitepaper into a 30-second elevator pitch.
This pitch will not only communicate your product’s value but also help you clarify what it is you have to offer.
From a marketing perspective, this is the most crucial step towards accessing a market, as it helps you determine what market to go after.
Takeaway: Distill your crypto asset whitepaper into a 30-second marketing elevator pitch that any non-technical person can understand.
#2. Get to product/market fit, fast.
That’s one of the biggest traps crypto founders face. Having a brilliant idea and writing a fantastic whitepaper does not mean there’s a market for what you are building.
The only way to understand how your product interacts with the market is to put it out there. You will only achieve product/market fit when a sizeable market segment finds enough value in your product to be willing to pay for it.
Crypto founders tend to jump this stage and head straight for scale. In the hope of gaining product/market fit and critical mass all at once, they fail to cross the chasm.
Instead of taking this dangerous path, launch your beta, promote it to select communities, and then ease your product into product/market fit.
Takeaway: Getting to product/market fit can be slow and painful, but it will help you avoid building and marketing something no one wants to use.
#3. Publicize your team and roadmap
A little-known fact about venture capital investing is that most big venture capital firms invest in teams, not products. This approach explains why when you launch your crypto, marketing your team and roadmap is more important than marketing your product.
Through transparency and openness in sharing team and roadmap details, you can help create a relatable image around your crypto startup. Moreover, your roadmap also shows the market that you have a plan for sustainability. No one will invest in a crypto that has no clear development horizon. Well, not in 2020 anyway!
Clarify your roadmap, publish it, and update your audience regularly.
Takeaway: Build trust and an emotional connection with your audience by showing your crypto startup’s human side and the plans you have.
#4. Ship product
Having a roadmap is nothing if you don’t ship product. Shipping product updates is a powerful way to communicate to your audience that you are actively improving your product.
When updates are few and far between, your audience will believe development work has stagnated or even worse, that your crypto has stalled.
Once you have a sizable beta user group, create a way of pushing update notifications to them, either through a newsletter or a Telegram channel.
Such updates serve three purposes:
● Evolve your product based on usage data and user feedback
● Update your users on product changes
● Boost engagement by reminding your users to use your product.
Takeaway: Communicating product updates is a useful marketing method that helps you build confidence and engagement among your early users.
DOWNLOAD LAUNCH YOUR BLOCKCHAIN ROCKET EBOOK FREE
#5. Target cheap user acquisition and engagement channels
User acquisition is a significant hurdle for crypto startups. Thankfully, there are many ways to reach users on the web. The delicate balance comes in picking the handful of channels to focus on to find the right users at the right price and an acceptable conversion rate.
The easiest and cheapest user acquisition channel is content marketing. Publish well-written content to websites like Medium, LinkedIn, and legit crypto sites to build awareness around your crypto asset. Also, create a Telegram or Slack channel, where you can field questions and interact with early users.
Mastering such UA channels can help you build initial traction for your product without spending a fortune.
Takeaway: Master and build communities around cheap and easily accessible user acquisition and engagement channels like Slack, Telegram, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Medium to gain initial traction.
#6. Build an ecosystem
Platforms like Uber and Airbnb are massive ecosystems with pervasive network effects. As these platforms have shown, such an approach can lead to massive organic growth.
As a crypto founder, building these features into your product can drastically reduce the amount of marketing your product needs.
Network effects: Early users invite other users who invite more users, who invite yet more users…You get the point. Revolut, a brand whose acquisition cost is single digit, relies on great community interaction, refer a friend schemes and word of mouth to drive sign ups.
In such a situation, your marketing responsibilities would be maintaining a consistent message that clearly explains your product’s value to every new cohort of users that joins. Important to note here, we are not talking about pyramid schemes or multi-level marketing ventures which are notoriously ridden with scammers. We are simply talking about creating an incentivised, motivated community.
Takeaway: Building your crypto into an ecosystem with network effects can lead to dramatic organic growth with minimal marketing effort.
#7. Leverage user-generated content
Big brands like Facebook, Twitter, and Google entirely rely on user-generated content. By empowering users to find value in expressing themselves, they have attracted billions of combined users.
Crypto founders can also harness the power of UGC by creating and moderating community hubs that allow users to express themselves. Whether through a Facebook or Telegram Group, invite users to participate and not just spectate.
You may need to employ a social media manager and community manager to moderate the content, but it can offer strong incentives for users to remain loyal to your brand and recommend it to others.
Takeaway: User Generated Content is a powerful community-building tool that enhances loyalty among users and extends brand marketing reach through shared user content.
Did you enjoy reading 7 Steps to Cryptocurrency Marketing Success? If you did then hit share. At Contentworks, our team of financial professionals closely follows market movements for FX, Crypto and other tradable instruments. We are proud to serve some of the biggest crypto and fintech companies in the world by delivering high-impact articles, videos, PRs and white papers.
Visit Contentworks at www.contentworks.agency