How to Market your Cryptocurrency
There are different things you need to learn on how to market your cryptocurrency in order to get a better-targeted audience. Cryptocurrency and blockchain-based startups have skyrocketed in popularity. Therefore, initial coin offering (ICO) funding for startups has surpassed more traditional venture funding, leveled the playing field, and is an exciting opportunity for entrepreneurs. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with a good idea, can now fund their business with a crowd sale.
It’s no longer just about Bitcoin. Over 1,500 emerging altcoins (alternative cryptocurrencies) are in circulation, with great potential for use beyond currency. And more are being created on a daily basis.
We are in the early stages of this rapidly evolving technology, which has the potential to have a significant and transformative impact across industries. This includes online media and publishing disruption due to advancements in decentralized social media, content management systems, and advertising platforms.
This article will walk you through the steps of running a marketing campaign for your cryptocurrency startup. Simply doing the basics correctly can distinguish your crypto asset, raise brand awareness of your project, generate interest in your mission, and accelerate real-world adoption.
How do you market your own cryptocurrency?
By definition, all startups, including cryptocurrency startups, are risky. Because, many people in the volatile cryptocurrency industry come from technical or academic backgrounds, with little or no experience running a business or marketing online. Despite the strong technical foundation, this makes success more difficult.
How to market your cryptocurrency
- Maintain simplicity.
- Don’t be a problem in search of a solution.
- Be open and transparent.
- Customer-facing resources should be assigned to your cryptocurrency startup.
- Make sure your developers and marketers are communicating with one another.
- Take a massive marketing campaign.
- Begin building your prospect database as soon as possible.
- Establish a presence in areas where your target audience congregates.
- Create a hub for your project.
- It isn’t all about you.
- Be an expert in your field.
- Regular public communication is essential.
- In your marketing strategies, disregard the market capitalization and coin price.
- Make yourself available and actively manage your community.
- User-generated content is encouraged and welcomed.
- Make an effort to convert your fans into brand advocates.
- Take extreme caution when it comes to account logins, posting access, and user permissions.
- Make no compromises.
- Create clear internal and external guidelines.
- Keep all of your promises.
- Ship products and ship characteristics
- Keep track of mentions and links.
- Analyze your audience to inform your future marketing efforts.
- Evaluate and track performance on a regular basis.
Maintain simplicity
Don’t just concentrate on the technical details, buzzwords, and industry jargon. Explain things simply and thoroughly so that everyone understands the logic and idea behind your project. Present your business through words, images, and video. Speak in terms that non-technical people outside of the crypto industry can comprehend.
To grow and thrive, crypto-assets and the entire industry must become more accessible to non-tech users. Make an extra effort to educate your target audience.
After viewing your homepage, a layperson should be able to understand what your project is about. Having a real concept that people can understand is extremely beneficial to marketing and communication.
Don’t be a problem in search of a solution
The term “product-market fit” refers to being “in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Your product must meet a genuine market need. You must conduct extensive market research and speak with real people to learn about their problems and how your technology can help them solve them.
Don’t be a problem in search of a solution. Be a problem-solving solution. Pose difficult questions to yourself, such as:
- What is the project’s purpose?
- What exactly is the concept?
- What exactly is the business model?
Determine the purpose of your project, the real problem that your technology solves for real people or businesses, and what your brand and mission stand for. The best teams and products will fail if they do not find a market and do not create a product that meets the needs of real people.
Be open and transparent
Be honest on your website and other platforms. Describe yourself and your team. Display your backgrounds. What qualifies you as the best team to address the specific issue at hand? What is your background, and why should we believe you?
Position and distinguish your startup. Don’t be afraid to discuss your competitors and similar projects, as well as to benchmark yourself. By using positioning and differentiation, you can explain why people should believe in your product over competing projects.
But keep in mind that the bigger your idea, the more difficult it will be to realize and the more likely you will disappoint. Think big, but take it one step and one goal at a time. A startup should start small and take small steps toward a long-term overarching vision that can be revealed later.
Customer-facing resources should be assigned to your cryptocurrency startup
Customer-facing resources for your startup should include social media marketing specialists, blog writers, designers, storytellers, community managers, customer service representatives, and PR professionals. These will aid in communication, content creation, outreach, audience growth, and community management.
Are your resources limited? This could be one cross-functional position, several team members working on these areas for a certain percentage of their total time (similar to Google’s 20% rule), or even the founder herself taking a more active role in communication. You begin small and gradually expand your customer-facing team.
Make sure your developers and marketers are communicating with one another
Your marketing team does not need to include mathematicians, cryptographers, or developers. In most cases, they are identical to the people you are attempting to reach.
They are the individuals who will represent your company to potential customers. This is why communication between developers and marketers is so important. They must be in sync.
You want to help the marketers understand your project and its development progress so that they can better communicate it to non-technologists.
Without clear internal communication, there will be misunderstandings and a lack of clarity not only within your marketing team but also among those who receive their message.
Take a massive marketing campaign
There are many crypto-assets and startups, so if you want attention, you must engage in extensive marketing. It will be difficult to grow unless you spend time spreading the word about your project to a new audience. These are some of the activities you should do on a regular basis:
- Create great content and syndicate it to the major platforms.
- Participate in community discussions and assist others.
- Proactively contact various publishers and influencers, such as coin review sites and YouTubers.
- Make an appearance as a guest on podcast shows.
- See a more comprehensive list of places where you can promote your startup.
Begin building your prospect database as soon as possible
Every business requires customers. Whether B2B or B2C. You must begin working on product adoption as soon as possible.
Take the initiative. Contact your target market, cultivate relationships, and expand your prospect email database. Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. It’s an open platform with a direct line of communication, whereas centralized social media platforms can change their algorithms or business models at any time.
Contact and initiate potential partnership proposals with other crypto-assets and companies to see how you can collaborate strategically. Partnership news spreads quickly in the crypto world and can create synergy for all parties involved.
The sooner you begin, the better prepared you will be for the day your product launches and is ready to welcome the first customers. You will open the door but no one will come unless you start early.
Establish a presence in areas where your target audience congregates
You should not go to the audience; rather, you should go to the audience. Choose the platforms where you want to have an official presence. There are numerous options in the crypto space, ranging from Medium for text content, YouTube for video content, and Twitter as the primary social network, to Telegram, Reddit, Slack, or Discord for community hosting.
Establish your presence in places where people spend their time by creating consistent, professional-looking, and regularly updated profiles on the various social media platforms. Check that your branding, marketing, and social media presence are all in sync and tell the same story about your company and its mission.
Also, make certain that your content strategy matches the message to the medium.
Create a hub for your project
Telegram, Twitter, Discord, Slack, and other tools are great for growing your audience, but they’re terrible for keeping your content archives discoverable.
You could have a fantastic Q&A session today, but it will be lost forever in the noise of a large Telegram group the next day. After the first day, almost no one will see it. That is a waste of a great content opportunity that could have been better utilized.
Post, organize, and curate all of your content on your blog or website as well:
- A hub that you own the domain name for and control.
- A hub that is simple to search and navigate.
- A central location that Google and other search engines can find and index in their search results.
This way, none of your excellent content will be lost. People discovering your content even weeks or months after you’ve first published it will give it new life.
It isn’t all about you
When you look at the social media profiles of many cryptocurrency startups, you’ll notice a lot of self-promotional messages. There is room for that, but your first priority for your content strategy should be to create valuable content for the audience you are targeting.
Don’t just promote your own product; instead, join a larger conversation:
- Interact with the audience.
- Comment on the most recent industry news.
- Publish informative and insightful analysis.
- Concentrate on your team members.
Your content must be valuable. It should be compelling and encourage audience interaction in order for you to expand your community. Talking about how great you are all the time won’t get you very far.
Be an expert in your field
Maintain a personal presence on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. Serve as a resource by responding to questions. Because blockchain is open-source, crypto founders are actually much better at this than CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, who are rarely available, open, and engage
There are numerous examples of cryptocurrency founders who are very active and engaged on social media:
- Get inspired by Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum, the industry’s de facto authority.
- Or Angel Versetti of Ambrosus, who is constantly on Reddit looking for ideas and inspiration from the community.
- Or Jez San of FunFair, who responds to questions from the Telegram audience at all hours of the day and night.
Regular public communication is essential
Maintain regular communication with your community about what the team is up to. Some crypto teams communicate daily, while others, such as Request Network, communicate bi-weekly, while others, such as modum.io, communicate monthly, and some never post anything after their ICO pitch. You don’t want to be one of those people who never post.
You want to build trust in your team and the progress you’re making. You want to gain the trust and respect of your target audience. The primary means of accomplishing this is through regular, clear, and open communication.
In your marketing, disregard the market capitalization and coin price
In your marketing and communication, ignore the market cap and coin price. Forget about your position on CoinMarketCap. If Bitcoin rises, you will rise as well. When Bitcoin falls, you fall with it. Bitcoin rises, but you fall. You can’t win with these subjects.
You cannot control any of these in the short term, and focusing on them when everything is green can land you in hot water if and when the market turns and the price falls.
At least not in the short term, before going live and receiving paying customers. You should be unconcerned about it. You should focus on it, make no comments about it, and make this clear to your audience as well.
You have complete control over your communication, your product, and the marketing activities you undertake to expand your market. Because you have no control over your market cap or coin price, you should disregard all talk about them.
Make yourself available and actively manage your community
Some crypto communities are left to fend for themselves. This creates an inconsistent experience for both new and returning members of the community, and it does not reflect well on you.
Make yourself available and actively manage your community by starting and joining conversations, answering questions, responding to concerns, and genuinely considering audience feedback and ideas.
Crowdsourcing your funding isn’t the only thing you can do. You can also crowdsource ideas and feedback.
Monitor your community and the industry, take active steps to build an engaged audience, and be as responsive to questions and feedback as possible. This will result in a much happier and more engaged community.
User-generated content is encouraged and welcomed
Most brands on social media welcome and encourage user-generated content. Brands that perform best in terms of social media engagement typically have the most devoted fanbase.
Cryptoassets are fortunate in that they have a far more dedicated fanbase than most other industries.
Everyone has an opinion and wants to participate. The community has created a large number of crypto memes.
Brands in more established industries struggle to get many people to create content about them, whereas cryptocurrencies naturally receive a lot of user-generated content.
Encourage it, moderate it, participate in it, and republish the best content to your entire audience. It can only help you increase engagement and expand your reach.
Make an effort to convert your fans into brand advocates
Your community members can play an important role in your marketing success. They can assist you with marketing and word-of-mouth. Your completely free marketing machine.
Encourage your most ardent supporters to spread the word about you. Every decentralized cryptocurrency project requires a grassroots movement to gain traction and real-world adoption.
Organic buzz and word of mouth are always preferred, so investigate how you can gain natural traction from your audience first, but keep an eye on the other options as well.
Some projects have elaborate bounty, affiliate, and referral programs that incentivize people to spread the word about them in exchange for extra tokens or other rewards.
Take extreme caution when it comes to account logins, posting access, and user permissions
You should exercise strict control over account logins and posting access to the official brand profiles that you manage. Not everyone on your team should be able to log in and post to your social media accounts.
Most social media management tools allow you to configure different levels of user access and posting permissions. Only a few people should have the admin level, which allows them to post, and they should also be the ones who review and approve other team members’ posts before they are published.
There have been reports of interns running social media accounts, and these mistakes can be fatal in the world of investments and money.
Make no compromises
Some projects are overly eager to achieve success and social media engagement. They accomplish this by purchasing fake followers, using automated software to create fake hype, creating multiple accounts to create fake engagement, and other methods.
All of these phony activities are not worth it in the long run, and any serious business should avoid them. These tactics may cause irreversible damage to the company’s reputation, and the coin price may never recover.
Even if you pay for a large number of fake followers, you will soon discover that your community is dead and that you receive no engagement because no one sees the content that you post. It’s simply not worth it.
Create clear internal and external guidelines
Create clear social media guidelines for your team. Whatever they post on social media may be watched, considered, reviewed, and speculated on by the audience. Make it clear to your team what types of crypto-related content they should and should not post in public.
Prepare by having guidelines for how to handle various situations that may arise on social media. Everything from questions to negative comments to various crisis situations. You should have clear guidelines and instructions in place for dealing with these situations before they occur. While putting out fires, it may be difficult to think clearly. In such cases, clear guidelines are beneficial.
Do the same for your neighborhoods. Publicize your community guidelines and moderation policy. Be clear about what is and isn’t acceptable, and stick to the rules you’ve established.
This does not imply that you should form a cult and censor any negative posts that do not glorify your company. Free speech should continue to be protected.
Keep all of your promises
Keep your promises and hit your targets. Ship on time or ahead of schedule. Instead of overpromising and underdelivering, underpromising and overdelivering. Stay away from the hype and social media announcements of upcoming announcements. No promises are preferable to empty promises.
Ship products and ship characteristics
The best product is not always the winner. Being first to market is sometimes preferable to being a perfectionist and waiting for the “perfect” product. Deliver a genuine product as soon as possible. Even a minimum viable product would suffice.
By doing so, you will distinguish yourself from the vast majority of projects that are still in the planning or development stages and may never make it to market or be successful because they take their time while someone else eats their lunch.
Keep track of mentions and links
Cryptocurrencies are a growing industry, and if you’re doing good work, you’ll get noticed. You’ll also miss out on people talking about you and your projects if you don’t monitor your web mentions. Track mentions of your brand name, social media profiles, and links to your website to stay on top of the conversation.
Determine what people are saying and pay attention to the feedback. This can even alert you to any negative coverage so you can respond before things get out of hand.
When you’re first starting out, you can use free tools like Google Alerts to track web mentions, Hootsuite to track social media mentions, and Notify to have social mentions delivered directly to your team’s Slack channel.
Remember to search social media for people mentioning you but not mentioning your profile, such as if they only mention the name of your company, your symbol, or even your hashtag.
Analyze your audience to inform your future marketing efforts
Learn about your target audience by utilizing social media analytics, surveys, and questionnaires. This can help you conceptualize better content ideas for new marketing campaigns and point you in the right direction in the future.
It can also assist you in determining whether there are opportunities for you to organize offline events such as meetups or hackathons to bring the community together in person.
Evaluate and track performance on a regular basis
Regularly assess and measure the effectiveness of your marketing, content, and community activities. Set growth goals and key performance indicators such as total audience size, growth, traffic on your website, number of social media engagements, and token holders.
Compare your figures to those of your competitors. Benchmarking is simple in social media because most numbers are publicly available and can be easily captured and compared. Regularly monitor and report on this to help you understand how you are performing and learn what you can do better.
Conclusion
Those who are unfamiliar with marketing tend to focus on the number of followers. It’s a fixation. It is critical in today’s vain world to have a sufficient number of followers and members of a community. However, it is better to ignore the numbers and concentrate on connecting with the users you already have. Always be active on social media, participate in debates, share your thoughts, and become involved in the community.
The cryptocurrency market is crowded with projects, but if you want to stand out, be consistent, nurture your client relationships on a daily basis, and read our blog every week.