Created in 2009, the crypto market is one of the most fast-developing spheres. Attracting thousands of users every day, it symbolizes new money revolution, decentralization, and endless opportunity. And this opportunity is well-used – the global cryptocurrency market size was valued at $1.49 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $4.94 billion by 2030.
The Crypto market is attractive, innovative, and promising, so many are willing to catch this train to the future. Naturally, it is getting overcrowded, and just a brilliant technology is not enough anymore. The main challenge of crypto & blockchain projects is to differentiate, which can be achieved by building a solid brand through community-driven marketing.
Let’s look how some of the top crypto projects have built their marketing strategy and what tips you can adopt on the road to success.
Community-driven marketing for crypto
A strong foundation for a new or rebuilding crypto project lies in the community that supports it. Digital coins and blockchain protocols require an ever-evolving and expanding the public network to function.
Therefore, the key to the success of cryptocurrency marketing can seem straightforward – get a lot of people to know you, trust you, and love you. However, you have to keep in mind that community matters when it does the promotional job for you, growing the liquidity of your project. But how to generate a positive community vibe and incentivize sears to promote your technology in practice?
The example of well-marketed cryptocurrencies like Solana or Terra that made it to the top-10 crypto coins list shows that a systemic framework must be adapted.
We divide it into 5 stages: awareness, trust, education, engagement, and momentum
5 pillars to crypto & blockchain marketing
The key for crypto & blockchain projects to grow is by establishing a strong community and then letting it grow and develop the ecosystem through decentralization of marketing efforts. In other words, you need to build a community and then navigate & support its organic growth as an evolving decentralized entity.
At 42DM, we analyzed how top crypto projects grew and scaled and developed a framework that can help any crypto & blockchain project do the same.
Awareness
You have come up with an idea, and started fundraising to implement it. Next, obviously, you need to tell the world about it. Therefore, the first step of your marketing efforts would be to generate awareness about your brand.
In practice, it means you need to get more brand queries through a web search and see your community grow with new followers.
Terra, a public blockchain protocol with a goal to bring Defi to the masses, has established its community and market presence precisely through PR and cross-community partnerships.
In the year of its founding—2018, Terra had been mentioned as an “ambitious crypto project,” “the future of money,” “a stable coin project,” and “the next generation of digital money.” The press releases went out in media such as TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Tech in Asia, CoinDeck, and Fortune – all in august 2018, when the project was launched. Terra appealed to the broad international community, establishing partnerships with those who believed in the project’s aspirations.
The year of 2021 seems to be the second investment, marketing, and media whip for Terra as they have released multiple large press releases during July 2021. It’d been called “the hot cryptocurrency,” “an assembler of an all-star roster of investors,” and “a rapidly gaining momentum project.” The platform for press releases – influential ones in the crypto market – TechCrunch, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg.
Like other successful cryptocurrencies, Terra made a clear first step by making the market and potential audience aware of their product by providing valuable content to the influential media. This can be done through PR, influencer marketing, partnerships, and events.
Trust
After making the world know about you, the next step is to build a trustworthy relationship with the community. Trust can be tricky to achieve, but it is the basis of the crypto market itself. Your goal here is to create a positive community vibe – so that people engage with you and leave nice comments about you.
Harmony, a secure blockchain with key innovations in state sharding and peer-to-peer networking, is an excellent example of how to build trust. In 2018, Harmony received $18M funding from several investors, including Hong Kong’s Lemniscap VC, Australia’s BCA Fund, Singapore’s UniValues Associates, and Silicon Valley’s Consensus Capital. Getting a large amount of money at the start from significant investment funds across the globe proved to people that the project has potential and is trusted among industry leaders.
Then, the company’s efforts continued towards receiving acceptance from trustworthy sources. Articles about the company’s development process, updates, and success stories kept appearing in all leading industry media in the US and across the world, alongside thirst-party reviews on the potential and development of the startup.
Harmony also focused on personal brand for the team that creates the project, proving their expertise with previous experience. The team included alums from Web 2.0 giants like Google and Amazon. Harmony’s founder and CEO, Stephen Tse, has spent time at Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Harmony employee Leo Chen had articles written about him since he decided to leave Amazon for this crypto startup.
So, trust is a complex community vibe that requires many outsider opinions. Try to get as many people as you can to love you and write about you – and it will make your community trust you.
Education
You got it. People know about you and trust you. Now, it is time to convert them into brand advocates by making sure they really know what your project is and how the tech behind it works – through education. The main goal at this stage is audience growth.
Crypto and blockchain can still be the unknown waters for regular people, generating a strong demand for education. Most successful crypto & blockchain projects invest heavily into educating content, including how-to guides, video explainers, and even whole courses with a single goal to make your technology straightforward to the community so that they can spread the word about you.
The good thing is that educational content can be produced easily anywhere. Fantom has an educational blog that provides the Fantom community with insights and skills to understand the crypto world, like their recent “Into the Metaverse with Fantom” piece. They also have a youtube channel with video explainers. Solana has their own podcast, where discussions happen between industry leaders, their own team,, and community developers. Education can and should also be practical – through forums, discussions, and tasks that community members perform.
The main focus at this step for any new or re-launching project should be providing valuable educational content to drive engagement and quality community growth.
Engagement
Imagine – you have a community that trusts you and understands you. It is time to build the decentralized marketing ecosystem we talked about in the beginning, an unstoppable marching of your project’s constant development. A supportive community will be your biggest fans if they are engaged with you daily.
Crypto is global, it is everywhere, so users expect great accessibility. To satisfy the audience, a crypto project needs to be everywhere through the means of mass communication. Crypto, at its core, is also accessible to everyone, creating a community where identity, nationality, and often even language are not barriers, and participants can grow closer by exchanging memes, discussing ideas in live chats, and joining in hackathons.
Solana, for example, set the goal to be everywhere their community can potentially be, saying, “You name it, we’ve got it.” From blogs, podcasts, and live forums to hackathons and industry events straight to free “Solana collective” programs where everyone who is passionate about Solana can join the community and become a key contributor to the ecosystem – the brand has to offer something for all.
The only requirement for joining the Solana community one way or the other is to be passionate about the project. This makes people dig into technology, learn to understand the product, and become its advocates. There are always new exciting things appearing so that Solana fans never get bored.
The key lesson – once you’ve got a positive vibe in your community, you should work to engage them through omnichannel community interactions constantly. You need to keep your audience’s attention to win the race. The moment you stop doing it and the narrative changes, there are others who would take your place
Momentum
When you are having your momentum and your project is growing rapidly, it is the right time to push further and spread this effect with influencers, reviews & PR, and, of course, the community buzzing around. This is your chance to use your main asset – your community that you’ve been diligently building up with all of the above-discussed methods, to work for your scaling.
You can do this through engagement mechanics, ambassador programs, and community engagement & contribution programs – test and see what your audience reacts to!
Conclusion
People know about you, understand you, and trust you, they use your product & share the success to generate demand – the 5 things that are crucial for a successful development, and scaling, of crypto projects. This can be achieved through systematic efforts to attract the right community and give it a direction in the form of education. Then, you let go and let it grow by itself.
Awareness, Education, Trust, Engagement & Momentum – 5 pillars that lead to the success of crypto & blockchain marketing and let projects scale and skyrocket. This is what growth marketing agency 42DM believes in and implements with our clients, who come to build their crypto marketing with us.
