Launching a crypto project is one thing, and marketing the project is another. Considering the competition in the crypto space, simply placing a few ads won’t automatically result in crypto marketing success. You need a fool-proof crypto marketing strategy that involves different verticals to see your web3 project truly reach its potential. But how?
Lunar3 Capital, the investment arm of Lunar Strategy, focuses on growth in the crypto and web3 sphere. We know what it takes to succeed in the web3 industry.
Here are key crypto marketing strategies that can help catapult your crypto startup ahead of its competitors.
9 Crypto Marketing Strategies That Will Make Your Project Successful
Having a well-thought-out crypto marketing strategy can greatly influence how your project is perceived by your target audience. With the global interest in the world of crypto marketing, the right approach can make a significant difference in your project.
Here are the best marketing strategies for crypto projects that are best known for being effective:
1. Interact With Your Crypto Community
One of the most crucial marketing strategies in the world of cryptocurrency is maintaining frequent interactions with your crypto community. Since crypto is still a developing field, there exists a lot of interest in the topic, and the community is steadily growing.
By interacting with your crypto community frequently, not only are you updating them about your new products, goals, and plans, but you are also given a chance to know what else is happening in the community.
Interacting with your crypto community is one of the best ways to stay updated on all things crypto and to share any new ideas you have about the crypto world with your followers.
Here are 5 steps to building an engaging crypto community.
- Welcoming community spaces: Create warm, welcoming spaces with clear guidelines and friendly communication to keep your community safe from spam and scams.
- Open dialogue: Encourage open conversations and provide easy ways to resolve conflicts, ensuring everyone feels heard and valued.
- Building together: Work together to create a vibrant community by sharing interesting content and organizing engaging activities.
- Safe and secure environment: Implement strong security measures to protect everyone's personal information and assets.
- Teamwork makes the dream work: Collaborate with trusted community members and volunteers to ensure we have the resources we need to keep things running smoothly.
2. Email Marketing
Email crypto marketing allows crypto companies to better understand their audience and optimize their content tailored to the crypto industry based on various factors, such as the demographics and region of the audience.
Here is how crypto marketers can get started with crypto email marketing:
Building an Email List:
- Airdrop campaigns: Distribute free cryptocurrency tokens.
- Opt-in forms: Include on landing pages for subscriptions.
- Gated content: Offer exclusive material for email signups.
- Discord community: Engage users and offer rewards.
- Social network bios: Add signup buttons for convenience.
- Content upgrades: Provide additional gated content in blogs.
Segmenting and Customizing Emails:
- Personalization: Build trust with customized emails.
- Cryptocurrency heatmap: Keep customers informed about industry updates.
- Targeted emails: Send relevant emails based on behavior.
- Drip campaigns: Use automation for relevant emails.
Avoiding Spam Filters:
- Dedicated solutions: Use email services with cryptocurrency solutions.
- Compliance and deliverability: Stay compliant for better deliverability.
Optimizing CTAs:
- Call-to-action: Use clear and compelling CTAs.
- Language and specificity: Be specific and use trigger words.
3. Host and Give Informative Interviews
Podcasting and taking up interviews where you explain and discuss the crypto world helps customers and audiences understand what your crypto company does for them.
Being informative and accessible makes your audiences show interest in your company and cryptocurrencies in general.
Here is how your marketing team can incorporate podcasts into your crypto business marketing strategy:
- Craft your crypto brand’s story: Branded crypto and blockchain podcasts allow companies to share their narrative authentically, showcasing their personality and values. This unique storytelling sets them apart, creating a deeper connection with the audience that competitors struggle to emulate.
- Establish thought leadership: Engaging crypto podcast content positions your brand as an expert in the field, delivering valuable insights and interviews that build credibility and trust with your audience.
- Forge partnerships and collaborations: Branded crypto podcasts offer opportunities to collaborate with influencers, industry experts, or complementary brands. These partnerships expand your reach and create unique, credible content that resonates with your audience.
4. Content Marketing
Crypto content marketing has become extremely relevant in the past few years. Since cryptocurrencies are still a relatively new concept, most people are not very knowledgeable about the crypto landscape.
Since there is very limited information on this new trend, leveraging this lack of information and creating useful and accessible content about cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), and blockchain technology can help crypto companies become more accessible to their audiences.
There is a lot of scope for educating the masses about cryptocurrency and its importance in today’s world. And using the right content marketing strategy can go a long way in changing the face of the company from just being a crypto company to being a crypto leader.
Here are 5 steps for effective crypto marketing.
- Step 1: Get to know your target audiences: Kick off your crypto content journey by getting to know your audience deeply— their backgrounds, interests, and dreams. Engage them through surveys, chats, and data dives to create vivid personas.
- Step 2: Craft content with heart: Create content that speaks to your audience’s passions and aligns with your mission. From insightful blogs to engaging videos and infographics to inspiring podcasts, tailor your content to touch hearts and minds.
- Step 3: Tell stories that resonate: Weave narratives that inform, inspire, and connect. Collaborate with crypto experts to add depth and credibility, making your content more relatable and impactful.
- Step 4: Engage where they are: Reach out on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Medium, meeting your audience where they spend their time. Dive into niche communities on Reddit or Discord, building relationships and trust.
- Step 5: Listen, learn, and improve: Listen to your audience and learn from their responses. Use analytics to track performance, optimize your strategy, and keep evolving to better connect with your audience on a human level.
5. KOL Marketing/Influencer Marketing
KOL Marketing stands for Key Opinion Leader Marketing. It is one of the effective crypto marketing strategies that makes use of influencers who have a loyal fan base and are quite popular and known for being experts in the field of crypto.
Since they have an expert opinion on all things crypto, they are capable of dictating what trends are more likely in the crypto world. As their followers are very likely to follow their opinions, a crypto company could take the help of the Key Opinion Leader or influencer to market their products and the company itself.
When done rightly, KOL marketing has a lot of potential to influence audiences into showing interest in your crypto company. A consistent, honest, and loyal company can make great strides using KOL marketing as people will want to buy the products of a company that actually cares about consistently and with transparency.
Here are 5 things on how you can incorporate KOL marketing.
- Identifying the right KOLs: Thoroughly research KOLs whose values align with your brand and whose followers match your target audience. Look for those who are active, engaged, and genuinely interested in the projects they endorse.
- Building authentic relationships: Approach KOLs with sincerity, taking the time to build genuine relationships based on mutual respect. Engage with their content, offer value, and demonstrate your commitment to the community.
- Collaborating on valuable content: Work with KOLs to create valuable and engaging content, such as interviews, tutorials, or reviews. Ensure the content adds value and aligns with both your brand’s objectives and the KOL’s expertise.
- Offering transparent incentives: Provide incentives for KOLs to promote your brand, but ensure they are transparent and comply with regulations. This could include exclusive access to products, events, or affiliate programs.
- Monitoring and measuring performance: Track KOL marketing campaigns using metrics like reach, engagement, and conversions. Adjust your strategies based on performance to optimize results.
6. Doing Airdrops
Doing airdrops and announcing giveaways is one of the crypto marketing strategies that are used by crypto marketing agencies. Airdrops pique the interest of your audience. Any crypto company that does airdrops and giveaways has the advantage of letting its audience participate, which is something a lot of people enjoy.
Here are the 6different types of airdrops you can choose to go for.
- Standard airdrops: Tokens distributed freely to a wide audience, often for simple tasks like joining a Telegram group.
- Holder airdrops: Tokens given to existing holders of a specific cryptocurrency, rewarding their loyalty and encouraging them to continue holding.
- Referral airdrops: Participants earn tokens by referring new users to a project, fostering community growth and engagement.
- Bounty airdrops: Tokens rewarded for completing tasks or contributing to the project, such as writing articles or developing software, helping achieve project goals, and engaging the community.
- Exclusive airdrops: Limited to a select group, such as early investors or influencers, creating a sense of exclusivity and generating excitement within the community.
- Fork airdrops: Tokens received during a blockchain fork, where holders of the original cryptocurrency receive tokens of the new coin, as demonstrated by Bitcoin Cash (BCH) during its launch.
7. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most powerful tools for any type of marketing. Several social media marketing channels like X, Linkedin, Reddit, and YouTube can be used to spread awareness about your crypto company or inform your customers about a new product in the crypto market.
A post about an upcoming event, airdrop, or sale on social media apps like Reddit and X can generate a lot of interest and attention, especially in the crypto world. You could even announce upcoming events and giveaways on a popular podcast that is frequented by the crypto community to spread the word about your company.
Here are 5 things on how you can get started with social media marketing:
- Understand your audience: Before diving into social media marketing, understand your target audience’s interests and pain points. Tailor your content to resonate with them, enhancing your social media strategy’s effectiveness.
- Leverage influencers: For promoting your crypto project, collaborate with crypto influencers who align with your brand and have a genuine interest in the crypto space. Their large following can help amplify your message and reach a broader audience.
- Create valuable content: Produce engaging and informative content for crypto enthusiasts, such as blog posts, infographics, and videos, that add value to your audience. Use relevant keywords and hashtags to increase visibility within the crypto community.
- Engage with your community: Build a community around your brand by actively engaging with your followers. Respond to comments and questions to foster relationships and interact with other members of the crypto community to expand your reach.
- Track and analyze metrics: Monitor engagement rates, follower growth, and website traffic to evaluate the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Use this data to refine your strategy and improve performance over time.
8. Search Engine Optimization
Although a part of content marketing, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an efficient way of reaching a large number of people in a short while. It is one of the successful crypto marketing strategies to pay attention to.
Here are 7 key elements to focus on while incorporating this traditional marketing strategy.
- On-page SEO: For effective marketing, focus on optimizing elements on your website like canonicals, Core Web Vitals, URLs, and site structure. Conduct a thorough SEO audit at the start of your strategy.
- Off-page SEO: Build backlinks, citations, directories, and guest posts, and engage in link outreach to boost rankings and drive traffic through digital marketing.
- Content strategy: Create valuable, engaging content for both on-page and off-page optimization. Regularly update and expand content based on keyword research and industry trends.
- Keywords and research: Conduct relevant keyword research to target the right audience. Prioritize keywords with high conversion potential, even if they have a lower search volume.
- Site structure: Establish a proper site structure aligned with a silo report to ensure each page's content is relevant and optimized for specific keywords.
- Technical issues: Address technical SEO issues early on, such as canonicalization, duplicate content, poor mobile experience, messy URLs, and slow page load speed, to improve site performance.
- Backlinks: Build quality backlinks ethically and avoid shady practices. Focus on relevance and ensure anchor texts are optimized for target keywords.
9. Soft Marketing Strategies
Besides all these crypto marketing strategies that can give your company the edge in the market, there is also a wide variety of soft strategies that can change how your audience interacts with you.
Since cryptocurrencies and NFTs have created a fun trend that many people enjoy being a part of, keeping it fun and simple goes a long way in convincing potential customers that your products are the right ones for your customers.
Spreading the word about your announcements and new updates also helps generate more interest in your company and products. Having decent public outreach despite dealing with financial entities gives you the edge over other companies that treat the crypto world like most other finance-related fields. Teaming up with influencers or popular celebrities who are not necessarily related to the crypto world adds more interest to your company as well.
Since the goal of any company is to provide value to its customers, a crypto company should be no different. By making use of these simple yet powerful strategies, crypto companies can ride the wave of influence and information exchange with grace.
Crypto Marketing Campaign Examples
Several popular crypto marketing campaigns have become huge successes in the long run. Some of these ingenious campaigns have helped raise millions for their respective causes.
Here are three successful and popular crypto marketing campaigns:
1. Pudgy Penguins
Pudgy Penguins was a crypto marketing campaign created by Cole Thereum and Clayton Patterson. It used web2 marketing strategies to build an Instagram following, then created free GIFs and introduced its own branded toys in the hypermarket-based retail corporation Walmart. Pudgy Penguins was a collection of 8,888 cute, fluffy cartoon penguins, which were sold as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
2. eToro’s HODL campaign
eToro’s HODL campaign was one of the most successful crypto marketing campaigns ever made. It featured Game of Thrones actor Kristian Nairn in an ad that was self-aware and broke the fourth wall. In this ad, Kristian Nairn is seen disinterestedly refusing most of the ads he is given but then ends up in an ad by eToro saying the word HODL. HODL is an acronym for Hold On to Dear Life and is a deliberate misspelling of the word hold.
3. PayPal’s 2020 Crypto for the People campaign
PayPal started a new crypto campaign that allowed users of PayPal to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies in their Paypal wallet. They also used an ad as a part of the campaign where animated figures were transacting cryptocurrencies on the PayPal platform.
FAQs About Crypto Markting
What are the challenges of crypto marketing?
The challenges of crypto marketing include restrictions on crypto advertising and the requirement to establish individual partnerships with influencers and publishers for influencer marketing. Measuring return on investment (ROI) can also be complex due to the evolving nature of web3 technologies.
How can you prepare your brand for crypto marketing?
To thrive in the evolving crypto industry, businesses should stay abreast of market trends, build communities for data insights, and understand the blockchain market.
What should you keep in mind to execute a crypto marketing campaign successfully?
To successfully execute a crypto marketing strategy, it's essential to steer clear of misleading messages that oversimplify cryptocurrency, present platforms as entirely secure, or downplay trading risks. Avoid ineffective marketing by targeting the right channels. Focus on conveying the project's value through the whitepaper, team information, social media, project announcements, and blogs to build a credible and engaged community.
Conclusion
The crypto market is flooded with new projects every month. For effective crypto marketing in 2024 and to stand out from the noise, you have to adopt an effective cryptocurrency marketing strategy. An ideal crypto marketing campaign involves all - pushing updates, referral programs, airdrops, social media marketing, and email marketing. Further, you can also use SEO and content marketing to bring organic traffic to your crypto website.
