TL;DR
- Content marketing can educate, engage, and inspire your crypto ecosystem
- A thoughtful approach to content marketing can mitigate regulatory risks
- Content marketing represents a unique opportunity for many blockchain organizations
One of my favorite ways to learn about a blockchain project is to request that the project be explained very simply—“like you are talking to a 10 year old.” Simple descriptions can be hard! Crypto content marketing—done right—often distills complex ideas into language that’s easy to understand.
You may be bursting with questions about crypto content marketing. Love that! 🙏 Read on to learn everything important about crypto content marketing in 2023.
What is crypto content marketing?
Crypto content marketing is content marketing that adapts to the unique needs and preferences of blockchain companies and ecosystems. Crypto content marketers recognize the opportunity to educate many people about blockchain technology, while understanding that an opaque regulatory environment can make content marketing feel risky. Crypto content marketing can enable cryptocurrency and blockchain projects to bring credible information to the marketplace while minimizing the risk of regulatory non-compliance.
Crypto natives, generalist audiences, prospective investors, developers, and many others can benefit from a soup–to-nuts content strategy. Let’s better understand crypto content marketing by looking at some of the key ways that content marketing can meet the needs of various stakeholders. At its best, crypto content marketing can—
- Educate: This one’s pretty obvious—content marketing is the typical solution to educate many different stakeholders about your product. Everyone from developers to your sweet grandma can benefit from some type of education about blockchain—but luckily your only content marketing objective is to inform your core users.
- Engage: The best content marketing makes interacting with your content feel irresistible for your crypto or blockchain community. Positioning content creation as a collaborative affair—such as by supporting user-generated content—is a cost-effective and engaging way to build your blockchain community. Social media marketing is the typical go-to for fostering community engagement.
- Inspire: You don’t just need a community—you need rabid fans. Content marketing that uses storytelling can bring your community to life by forming emotional connections. The best content marketing produces oodles of content that community members genuinely love to read.
Content marketing is a strategy that’s usually initiated by a founder or marketing director to boost the bottom line—but a successful content marketing strategy can elevate the entire crypto or blockchain ecosystem.
Pros & cons of content marketing for a crypto project
Content marketing for your cryptocurrency or web3 project can unlock some amazing opportunities—but that doesn’t mean a crypto content strategy has zero drawbacks. Keep reading to get your head around the pros and cons of content marketing for your blockchain company.
Where crypto content marketing can shine
What to love the most about crypto content marketing—
- Establishes thought leadership and credibility
- Educates current and potential users
- Boosts interactions among community members
- Builds trust and loyalty with target audiences
- Fosters community & engages superfans
How crypto content marketing can do better
Some drawbacks of crypto content marketing—
- Requires expert resources to create content with technical accuracy
- Requires time to master all facets of effective content marketing
- Time until a positive ROI is usually 3-6 months for a content strategy
- Demand for content marketing never really ends for your successful crypto project
Understanding the risks of crypto content marketing
The wisest among us tread cautiously when promoting a blockchain or crypto project because of the imperative to comply with all applicable regulations. The opacity and changing nature of the regulatory environment creates non-compliance risk, which can be mitigated but not entirely eliminated.
What are the biggest risks of pursuing a crypto content marketing strategy? Let’s take a careful look—
1. Risk of regulatory non-compliance: This one’s worth repeating—content marketing may feel like it raises the risk of trouble with regulatory authorities. Any crypto or blockchain project engaging in content marketing needs to stay informed about applicable regulations and important trends. Focusing on organic content marketing—as distinct from paid advertising—is a smart and generally conservative strategy that many blockchain projects choose.
2. Misinformation risk: Publishing content that’s inaccurate, misleading, or poorly researched can do more harm than good. Your brand’s reputation can suffer or your community’s trust and enthusiasm can erode. Content marketing for technical products and services needs to be rooted in research, journalistic integrity, and fact verification.
3. Risk of blending in: Content marketing that bores people is a waste of resources. The risk of blending in is always present, and becomes more likely if you use unexceptional talent to “check the box” on content marketing. Another predictable way to blend in and produce unremarkable results is to inconsistently prioritize your content marketing efforts.
How content marketing is moving on chain
Hey—did you know that content marketing can occur on a blockchain? Content marketing innovations that use blockchain tech are pretty neat. Let’s learn more about on-chain content marketing by digging into some specific use cases and examples—
- Decentralized content distribution: Blockchain technology can enable content marketers to distribute content directly, rather than needing to appease the gods (ahem, search algorithms). Producing high-quality content can enable participants of blockchain platforms like Hive and LBRY to even earn cryptocurrency rewards.
- Blockchain-verified research: Content marketers wishing to publish high-value research—perhaps in the form of a whitepaper or case study—can use blockchain technology to store and validate all supporting data. Blockchain-as-a-service companies like Factom can support on-chain content management.
- Token-gated content: Crypto content marketers can create gated content—like exclusive newsletters, interviews, and resources—that require ownership of a particular cryptocurrency. Unique content can also be gated using NFTs. Gating content with a digital asset can convey the value of your exclusive content and boost demand for a cryptocurrency. Platforms like Unlock Protocol support token-gated access.
How your web3 company can get started with content marketing
Are you wondering about how your crypto or web3 project can get started with content marketing? Your first move is to answer some key questions—like about who will plan and execute the content strategy, and how to pay for it. You can begin thinking about answers to these other key questions, too, all of which are relevant to crypto content marketing—
- What are your goals for content marketing?
- Who is your target audience?
- Where do your target users hang out?
- Which types of content does your community prefer?
- What are your stakeholders’ most urgent needs?
- How do you envision achieving your content marketing goals?
If answering all of these questions feels overwhelming, then you can find someone to do your content marketing for you. Your options range from hiring a full-time team to working with an independent content marketing consultant.
Is content marketing right for your crypto ecosystem?
It’s crypto winter—should you really be investing in content marketing? The answer is probably yes. Crypto winter is your time to build—incrementally. Determine which business priorities rank at the top, prepare a content strategy that maps closely to those priorities, and make sure that you love—really love—all the content that you produce.
