Over the past decade, the public awareness of cryptocurrency has skyrocketed. As people begin to understand what blockchain technology is, and the countless applications it has, more and more are turning to this field. With a rise in public interest, investment has also risen. This increase has rapidly led to new blockchain businesses starting in this area.
One common mistake that new blockchain businesses exhibit is a reliance on traditional digital marketing methods. Instead of seeing blockchain as a new field with distinct strategies, precautions to take, and content areas to move toward, they use tried-and-tested methods that they’re familiar with.
The main problem with this is that traditional tactics aren’t nearly as effective in this new technological area. In this article, we’ll dive into the core differences between blockchain marketing and traditional marketing, demonstrating exactly why companies need to take these distinctions into account.
What Focuses Does Blockchain Marketing Have That Traditional Marketing Ignores?
Digital marketing has morphed and shifted continuously over the past 20 years. With the rise of the digital age, marketing tactics like billboards have steadily been supplanted by online adverts and SEO content marketing. Yet, even within this advanced digital space, new distinctions are starting to arise.
The world of blockchian, although a relatively young industry, has risen through difficult circumstances to arrive where it is today. You’d be hard-pressed to find an industry that has the same amount of scams and fraudulent activity. The strength of blockchain, its decentralization, also poses as an area that many nefarious individuals take advantage of.
With this in mind, the social community that engages with and follows blockchain requires a different quality of communication, impacting all marketing materials that a company releases.
Here are the four biggest differences between blockchain marketing and traditional marketing:
- Focus on Trust – With a difficult history, it’s going to be nearly impossible to find investors in your blockchain project if you’re not first able to establish trust with your audience. Focus on including transparency as a core part of your brand identity, demonstrating the central function of your project wherever you can. Before diving into investment drives, always focus on trust, as the blockchain community needs this to fully get involved in a project. While traditional marketing can just focus on selling a product, blockchain must always prove its own legitimacy first.
- Stronger Community Participation – Many blockchain projects come with a financial aspect, whether that be a unique cryptocurrency or another digital asset. Once people begin to invest, their financial stake in your business will drive them to become much more involved than they would normally do with other brands. This leads blockchain projects to often have very strong brand followers, helping you to build up a devoted community. This can become extremely useful when launching new iterations, or requesting user feedback.
- Different Social Channels of Contact – Within the world of traditional marketing, the main social streams that marketing managers will focus on are sites like Facebook and Instagram. These are relatively terrible places to focus on when it comes to blockchain marketing strategy. Discussion around cryptocurrency was banned for many years on sites like Facebook, meaning a number of alternative streams of marketing have arisen. While you can use sites like Twitter, other channels like Reddit, Telegram, Discord, and Steemit will actually be more beneficial to your brand.
- Movement Speed – News travels fast. In the world of blockchain, it travels even faster. As this industry progresses so rapidly, you need to ensure that you’re continually releasing new information. News headlines can change radically over a 24-hour period. In order to stay on the forefront of the industry, you’ll have to release more frequent, shorter campaigns that stay in people’s minds. Without a constant turnover, you’ll quickly fade out of public perception at a rate that would be unheard of in traditional marketing.
Across these three core areas, you’ll rapidly be able to pinpoint core differences that blockchain marketing demands. Focus on pandering to these areas, and you’ll rapidly break into this new world of PR and marketing.
Final Thoughts
When creating marketing campaigns within the world of blockchain, it’s important for your business to consider the distinct field of marketing that you’re entering into. With a much higher degree placed on trust, it’s important to give yourself time to build up a community around your project. These individuals won’t come out of the woodwork overnight, but will devoutly follow your project once involved.
Don’t treat blockchain as the same as traditional marketing, just because there is some overlap. Focus on the areas of distinction and you’ll be well on your way to creating effective content for your crypto audience.
