The best thing I learned from crypto

Surprised so few brands are using it

Author

Ausra
April 29, 2024

Reading time: 3 minutes.

The way brands do marketing in the world of crypto and Web3 is completely different to that of traditional brands. It’s a big lesson I learned from being a part of this space and very few traditional companies are employing this tactic. Once you see the power of community, anythings else just… doesn’t make sense.

A traditional brand uses marketing as a way to talk at their customers: here is our product, here is how you can buy it. It uses social media to create content, in which sometimes they do better, sometimes a little bit worse. If anything, a traditional brand can always rely on paid ads to bring on more eyeballs to their project.

A crypto brand operates in a completely different universe. To begin with, if you want to grow a brand in this space, you can not use ads - paid social media ads are forbidden and if you find a way around it, there’s little use to it since it is not how crypto community discovers products. It’s a different culture.

What’s left for a crypto founder to do?

Use word of mouth marketing and MAKE people excited about the project you’re building. However getting tens of thousands people religiously talking about your brand, sharing it with their friends, investing in it, is obviously no easy task. Not impossible though. It’s just a completely different marketing strategy from day 1.

Building a loyal community of fans around your brand is the safest their to building a successful brand. What if we have gotten too comfortable with the idea that building something great takes time? What if became impatient? What if our timeline for generating a big community of fans was few weeks, not few years? How would that impact our marketing decisions?

There is always the 1%, the purple cow, which just pops seemingly out of nowhere and wins everyone over.

Why not you?

Here’s what a project called PACMOON did:

PACMOON team are the creators of $PAC crypto coin, but for a coin to have value, it has to have a decent amount of people trading it. To create buzz around the coin, the founders allocated a budget of $PAC to be airdropped to their most active fans (once you get this coin, you can then cash it out into real $$$).

To be eligible for the airdrop, people had to post on their social media about PACMOON. The more views their posts get, the more coins they would get. Even better - the best of community posts are constantly being reshared by the brand’s page with over 200k followers, resulting to even more views to the creators of those posts.

The community is well incentivized to not only talk about PACMOON but also create interesting posts about the project they are so invested in - the more they share, the more $PAC they get; the more people trade $PAC, the higher value it has.

Incentivizing the community is not enough, you should also make it easy for them - the last thing everyone wants is to waste time creating social media content that delivers unclear value and poses the risk of you looking like an idiot in front of your online friends. PACMOON also provided plenty of marketing materials, guidelines to make content creation easy. And then it’s a snowball effect - the more people get into the game, the more people get into the game.

This community first approach to growing your business is a completely new way of thinking. It requires courage, creativity and a commitment to taking bold action and never looking back. The rewards though…

Think about it. How can you turn your followers and customers into a communityaround your brand?

Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help: