TL;DR
- Digital marketing can educate, engage, and inspire your crypto ecosystem
- A thoughtful approach to digital marketing can mitigate regulatory risks
- Digital 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 digital marketing—done right—often distills complex ideas into content that’s easy to understand.
You may be bursting with questions about crypto digital marketing. Love that! 🙏 Read on to learn everything important about crypto digital marketing in 2024.
What is crypto digital marketing?
Crypto digital marketing is digital marketing that adapts to the unique needs and preferences of blockchain companies and ecosystems. Crypto digital marketers recognize the opportunity to educate many people about blockchain technology, while understanding that an opaque regulatory environment can make digital marketing feel risky. Crypto digital marketing can enable cryptocurrency and blockchain projects to bring credible information to the marketplace—in a variety of mediums!—while minimizing the risk of regulatory non-compliance.
Crypto natives, generalist audiences, prospective investors, developers, and many others can benefit from an effectively targeted digital marketing strategy. Let’s better understand crypto digital marketing by looking at some of the key ways that digital marketing can meet the needs of various stakeholders. At its best, crypto digital marketing can—
- Educate: This one’s pretty major—digital 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 core marketing objective is to inform your target users.
- Engage: The best digital marketing makes interacting with your content feel irresistible for your crypto or blockchain community. Positioning digital 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 obvious go-to for fostering community engagement.
- Inspire: You don’t just need a community—you need rabidly engaged fans. Digital marketing that uses storytelling can bring your community to life by forming emotional connections. The best digital marketing produces oodles of content that community members genuinely love to watch and read.
Digital marketing is a strategy that’s usually initiated by a founder or marketing director to raise awareness and the top line—but a successful digital marketing strategy can elevate the entire crypto or blockchain ecosystem.
Pros & cons of digital marketing for a crypto project
Digital marketing for your cryptocurrency or web3 project can unlock some amazing opportunities—but that doesn’t mean a crypto digital marketing strategy has zero drawbacks. Keep reading to get your head around the pros and cons of digital marketing for your blockchain company.
Where crypto digital marketing can shine
- 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 digital marketing can do better
- Requires expert resources to create aesthetic content with technical accuracy
- Requires time to master all facets of effective digital marketing
- Time until a positive ROI is usually 3-6 months for an organic digital marketing strategy
- Demand for digital marketing never really ends for your successful crypto project
Understanding the risks of crypto digital 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 voided.
What are the biggest risks of pursuing a crypto digital marketing strategy? Let’s take a careful look—
1. Risk of regulatory non-compliance: This one’s worth repeating—digital marketing may feel like it raises the risk of trouble with regulatory authorities. Any crypto or blockchain project engaging in digital marketing needs to stay informed about applicable regulations and important trends. Focusing on organic digital 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. Digital marketing for technical products and services needs to be rooted in research, journalistic integrity, and fact verification.
3. Risk of blending in: Digital marketing that’s boring is a waste of resources. The risk of blending in is always present, and becomes more likely if you use unexceptional talent—or, gasp, AI—to “check the box” on digital marketing. Another predictable way to blend in and produce unremarkable results is to inconsistently prioritize your digital marketing efforts.
How digital marketing is moving on chain
Hey—did you know that digital marketing can occur on a blockchain? Digital marketing innovations that use blockchain tech are pretty neat. Let’s learn more about on-chain digital marketing by digging into some specific use cases and examples—
- Decentralized digital content distribution: Blockchain technology can enable digital marketers to distribute content directly, rather than needing to appease the gods (ahem, search and news feed algorithms). Producing high-quality content can enable participants of blockchain platforms like Hive and LBRY to even earn cryptocurrency rewards.
- Blockchain-verified research: Digital 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 support on-chain content management.
- Token-gated content: Crypto digital 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 may 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 digital marketing
Are you wondering about how your crypto or web3 project can get started with digital marketing? Your first move is to answer some key questions—like about who will plan and execute the digital marketing 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 digital marketing—
- What are your goals for digital 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 digital marketing goals?
If answering all of these questions feels overwhelming, then you can find someone to do your digital marketing for you. Your options range from hiring a full-time team to working with an independent digital marketing consultant.
Is digital marketing right for your crypto ecosystem?
Perhaps you’re actively pondering—should you really be investing in digital marketing? That’s ultimately your call. You can use digital marketing to build—rapidly or incrementally. Determine which business priorities rank at the top, prepare a digital marketing strategy that maps closely to those priorities, and make sure that you’re proud—really proud—of all the content that you produce.
