Cryptocurrency and blockchain advertising are a whole different ballgame when it comes to marketing and strategy due to the number of changes that are always occurring the industry. Many factors come into this, such as market volatility, innovative technology that can seem complex to understand and negative press due to the sheer amount of market crashes that have occurred in a short space of time: 2011, 2013 and 2017.
Due to the fact that there is an investment element in the crypto-sphere, this makes promoting your business extremely challenging especially in bear markets, as people can attribute negativity in price as loss of value in the project.
However, with this guide to success you’ll learn how to truly expand your business and market share in this space and even go viral.
How to report and measure crypto marketing
There are a whole host of factors to consider when diving into this space: product, sales, customer base and so much more. Therefore, you must develop a strategic and measurable plan that provides results. This cannot be something that breaks the bank, and the focus has to stay on return on investment and track this with tools such as Google Analytics and UTM trackers.
Return on Investment
Return on investment (ROI) is fantastic for giving you an aim for how your marketing spend is working for your company.
A useful calculation for marketing ROI is:
(Sales growth – Marketing cost)/Marketing cost = Marketing ROI
You’ll need to be able to correctly budget and optimise your marketing spend tailored to your business needs. This will have to be tweaked and played with to see which strategies are working, or actually brining you in the largest ROI.
Google Analytics
One of the fundamental and free tools that is paramount is Google Analytics, as it’ll allow you to measure all your sites traffic, where it’s coming from and who is visiting your website. This can easily push you to turn website events into ad conversions.
UTM Links
UTM (Urchin Tracking Modules) are URLs that have several pieces of code attached to them, these are called UTM parameters, and they aid you in tracking each link in fantastic detail.
This is an example of what a UTM tracking link would look like:
https://www.growthchain.oi/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=engagement
You start with the link you intend to share; in this case it’s our homepage growthchain.io followed by a few parameters: source (Twitter), medium (Social) and campaign (Engagement).
So, what are these parameters?
The Source is from where your traffic is coming from, it can be any kind of platform and you can even go into great detail with this, tracking your exact source of traffic.
Once creating a UTM link you’ll also need to add in a medium. This is the type of traffic you will begetting: social media, email, blog and any other type of traffic.
The final parameter is campaign, this is the type of promotion you may be running. For example, if you’re trying to promote a giveaway on social media, you’ll have the name as ‘giveaway.’ If you then want to run some tests to see which campaign is delivering the best results you can then change this to ‘test.’ You can customise this as much as you want to get specific and detailed results.
In order to track and create UTMs easily, you can use a URL Builder, which will allow you to track all of your links across the web.
The Essential Social Media Accounts You’ll need
In this day and age, a social media presence is a must for a brand. This can be to educate consumers, promote new promotions or projects and to actually look like a legitimate company building trust through your audience.
Here are the most effective accounts that every company in cryptocurrency and blockchain should focus on.
Twitter is one of the go-to platforms for all information on cryptocurrencies and it has the ability to garner a great amount of attention making it essential to any marketing strategy.
Twitter is vital, not just for marketing purposes but keeping a community active and engaged with the content. You can post news updates, new releases, moreover you can then have highly targeted acquisition and retention promotions to either build a larger following or get more sign-ups/FTDs/purchases.
You can also partner up with ambassadors/influences in your niche to gain even more traction.
Reddit is the 8th most visited site in the United States, even surpassing Twitter in the number of active users and has one of the highest average visit duration of the list below supplied by SEMRush – check the link to see the most updated version of this list.
Reddit is incredible for cryptocurrency marketing as there is a real community feel within these subreddits. This is especially so in DeFi projects, with this community spending vast amounts of time on these subs. Therefore, marketing through here as projects such as Crypto.com and Tezos have been successful.
Another point on marketing through Reddit and targeting these groups, you’ll get to amore knowledgeable and invested subsection that are more likely to be first movers to a new product/project. Some subreddits like r/CryptoCurrency even offer 'moons' to redditors who are engaging, rewarding them with tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
Steemit
Steemit is a self-proclaimed new kind of attention economy. It is a blockchain-based social media DApp (decentralised application), which creates communities where users are incentivised with STEEM by sharing their voice and opinions.
With just under 7 million visits per month (with a strong segmentation of crypto-specific users), Steemit is essential social media for any crypto and blockchain marketing campaign.
As you can see in the image above, there is a strong representation from South Korea and the United States, but it is in fact a very worldly social platform that can reach a vast subset of people.
BitcoinTalk
At one point in time BitcoinTalk was one of the most used platforms for the discussion of digital assets. With nearly every crypto at the time having its own BitcoinTalk thread. Although it’s a bit outdated at the moment it is still highly trafficked with a high crypto-focused audience.
BitcoinTalk can be used to shout about your company/foundation in an ANN thread, just make sure you read all the necessary guidelines before you make a post.
TikTok
TikTok is one of the fastest growing social platforms with the ability to educate users using concise, yet informative clips to really be seen as a trustworthy brand that shows a lot of influence in the blockchain area.
TikTok has over 500 million active users. With these short clips one will be able to truly bring their project to a large range of prospective customers/uses.
Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn
You’re already probably acquainted with these platforms but having all of them will ensure your brand has trust and authority.
One major aspect that should be looked into is the brand tone of voice, although this should be carried into each platform, you’ll have to take in the nature of the social site into consideration. For example, LinkedIn is used in more of a B2B professional manner whereas Instagram’s audience skews younger and more visual.
Realistically, you could hire one social media manager to dedicate their time, focusing on these platforms to give you a needed boost in this area.
Prioritisation
Prioritisation of social platforms is key. You’ll need to understand which one is best for your company and if the audience you’re targeting will give you the best response in terms of engagement.
Getting to grips and mastering each platform will take time. If you want real people, a community and first movers I would try targeting Reddit first as you’ll get the most genuine responses and the chance to build a great community.
However, if you’re more established and want to keep your followers updated on the latest news and events, you’re running then Twitter would be the most ideal platform.
If you have the staff and resources to expand and focus on more, do it, but if you’re in a smaller stage of the company’s lifecycle then focus on what will benefit you most.
Community
Build your community and following organically, do not pay for bots, fake follows or unrealistic engagement as this will only harm you in the long-term.
People can now tell from a mile away if a company’s engagement is real or fake and the lure of looking legitimate with a high follow-base is lost by looking untrustworthy by having a fake community.
Blockchain Browser Marketing
Want to market your blockchain company on a browser that rewards its users with cryptocurrency for viewing advertisements?
BraveBrowser
Brave is an intuitive and revolutionising the web.Many people accept that they’ll be tracked, their data will be mined and sold off to the highest bidder. Brave gives the user control of their privacy.
Brave rewards the user for simply using the browser and even rewards the user for doing so in its own cryptocurrency, Basic Attention Token (BAT). Brave gives the user the option to join the Brave Rewards Program, which sends privacy respecting ads to the users, who are then rewarded with BAT.
This may not sound ideal for a blockchain company, but on the contrary, this is a subset of individuals that are already earning crypto, and the majority have a firm grasp on the technology and uses.
Diving into the case studies from Brave we can see a lot of success with the campaigns, as the more attention the users are paying to the advertisements the more they could potentially earn.
They also have an audience that is higher income, educated, with an age group in themillennial and gen X. What is more interesting though, is the high level of crypto users and the claim the individuals are first-movers and interested intechnology. All which could prove to be vital in a marketing campaign.
The best types of ads that can be run on the browser are:
· Sponsored imagery, showing on the user’s dashboard
· On browser push notifications (average of 8% CTR)
So how much does crypto and blockchain marketing cost?
There are differences between the costs of digital marketing campaigns and ones for blockchain marketing.
But price isn’t everything successful campaigns can be run on a lower budget, but one of the first questions you’ll need to ask yourself is: what my marketing budget is?
An Average promotion can cost anywhere from £1,000 to £15,000 depending on what you want to achieve with the campaign, and you must have specific requirements for the agency to achieve.
One thing you must do, is really think about what type of promotion you want to run and the spend per month. I would suggest a longer-term campaign over a shorter one and you’ll be able get a more accurate representation of the promotion.
Budgeting may change as you shift money from different areas of marketing, or there’s a large event coming up that needs to be front and centre.
One way to prepare a marketing budget would be to set aside a specific marketing allowances every month, and up this budget right before a major event.
Getting, reporting and improving KPIs in cryptocurrency and blockchain companies
Key Performance Indicators are vital in companies to ensure that they keep growing these metrics can be used to evaluate the campaign’s success from the view point of your company.
This means that these parameters are what you build your marketing campaigns around i.e., you focus on your key metrics in order to increase the value for your company/department.
Main KPIs for the Blockchain
· Goal Completions
· Brand
· Traffic
· SEO
Let’s dive into these metrics and explain how and why these KPIs are paramount, and we’ll understand them fully.
Goal Completions
First things first are setting achievable goals and working towards them. One of the main and overall KPIs should be attaining this target, analysing what went well and what could be improved on and adjusted.
Brand
Branding and brand awareness for cryptocurrency and blockchain is paramount, as once you start growing one of the main goals will be to be recognised outside of your specific niche.
Obviously not ever person who views your logo will instantly become a customer, but they will become familiar with it and if seen in a positive context could potentially be the deciding factor between your company and a competitor.
Ultimately, brand awareness brings two massive factors in marketing: trust and awareness.
A way to track this is by setting up a Google Alert for your company’s name and website.Therefore, if someone is posting, or speaking about your business you’ll be one of the first to know.
Another way is to build up a strong and engaging following on a platform(s) of your choice, here you’ll be able to see spikes in audience numbers based more individuals wanting to follow your project.
Traffic
Traffic is high up on the list of what you’ll be wanting to track for as the more people you can get on your website the bigger the increase on pretty much everything.This is from brand awareness to SEO ranking and acquisition.
This should be a major target, as you have the ability to drive a highly segmented, desired amount of the population to your website.
This can all be tracked through Google Analytics, as I mentioned earlier on in the guide.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Another fundamental KPI that actually delivers quite different results is SEO and content strategy. These two should be implemented in every cryptocurrency and blockchain project.
SEO is about gauging and understanding different search engines, with the most popular ones being Google, Microsoft and Safari. You’ll also have to discover what your target audience likes and what content they will return for.
As SEO is a different ballgame, we don’t put the focus on acquisition or a high ROI, these kinds of campaigns are traffic based and this could take a while to build a following.
SEO is something you should start with right out the gate, but it can also show great returns with an already established project that has not put SEO at the forefront of their marketing.
With great content, understanding of your audience, developing backlinks and getting content ranked could be a lengthy, perhaps daunting task. However, it is a way to build a truly loyal and engaging following.
SEMRush would be the best tool for checking your web ranking and SEO progress. You could even go deeper by tracking the best keywords to use, competitor analysis, ability to track your backlinks and the program even gives your recommendations on what you can expand on.
The Blog
Once you have built your knowledge of SEO and are developing a content strategy, you’ll need to include a blog in order to provide timely content or even to give constant updates to your followers.
Now there’s the issue of where to publish your content. Many blockchain companies all flockto Medium, but this is counterintuitive.
What should be done instead is to have all your content and blogs be done on your site.This ranks better for SEO and gets your audience on your webpage, where they could produce a 2nd or 3rd action, perhaps even a conversion.
Public Relations
We want clients to really keep up their skills once with left the scene, after we finish with the campaign, we want them to keep powering through without us, hitting milestone after milestone.
PR is paramount to building trust and authority and should be picked up early on and aligned with your business. This can be implemented in many ways, but one of the best is to combine this with your overarching content strategy.
From creating new, engaging content or even updates to your current project this can then be sent as press releases or picked up by creditable news publishers who will then feature these articles or updates on their pages.
Once this stage is complete the articles will be shared on social media platforms furthering your brand initiatives and maximising its impact.
The Impact of Blockchain Marketing
Blockchain has the power to disrupt traditional marketing landscape in many ways. We’ll outline the main breakthroughs:
Rewards
It’s a way to share rewards with the consumer. Brands can send micro amounts,incentivising the potential buyer no matter how small creates a better atmosphere for engagement.
Trust and Transparency
Blockchain can allow the advertiser to choose better publishers, gain improved results from a campaign and due to this transparency, it can even prevent fraud, such as fake clicks. This can reduce costs and even speed up transactions.
Verification
Blockchain has the capability to automatically update, gather, check, and store customer information/databases. Blockchain prioritises date-first marketing, therefore it is the perfect platform to generate ideas.
This data can also be extremely personalised and be used to effective targeting.
Conclusion
Ultimately, blockchain marketing takes an alternative approach to the mainstream and to get the most clicks you need to be ultra-segmented to in order to build an engaging community.
This can seem like a daunting task, but with the right strategy, planning, or marketing team you can achieve truly breathtaking results, drive prospective clients to your sites, build your socials and hit all KPIs set for your company.
Read More:
Blockchain PR and why you Need it
From The Blog
You may also like
GrowthChain is a disruptive web3 marketing agency looking to propel your customer base. We focus on DAOs, DeFi, NFT and Crypto projects.
GrowthChain Designed, 2023
.svg){kind=small}