Crypto marketing is fundamentally different from how today's marketing agencies communicate with B2B and B2C clients for the simple reason that blockchain startups are often community-supported and open-source internet protocols.
Let's explore the best MarCom tools for blockchain companies, and how blockchain marketing service providers can leverage them to help their clients scale.
Today's SaaS companies communicate to their users, B2B clients, and stakeholders through a pretty typical marketing mix including email, social media, paid advertising, and possibly even print collateral.
There is nothing wrong with this set of marketing communication tools.
Because crypto startups are community-driven, blockchain marketing requires a new set of marketing tools to communicate with their global audience.
Discord, like Slack, is a team communication tool where admins can create channels dedicated to specific topics and members can talk freely through text, voice, or video.
If Twitter is a high school where news travels fast, Discord is the cafeteria full of self-organizing cliques where people hang out, talk, and share memes.
And much like Twitter, if your project doesn’t have a Discord, is it even legit?
Discord is the perfect platform for core team members, community developers, and users to build something amazing, get support, and of course, share spicy memes.
When speculative investors evaluate a new crypto project, they look at a few areas:
Founding Team and Company Vision
Whitepaper and Tokenomics
Technology and Use Cases
While these fundamentals are a major consideration, one that also carries weight with investors is how active and engaged the project’s community is.
Consider this:
If there are multiple teams of equal caliber building similar projects, how do investors pick a winning horse?
Community.
All else equal, if your project has a fanatic base of users, devs, and brand ambassadors investors will strongly consider this “network effect.”
Vibrant communities demonstrate product-market fit. Solana is a prime example.
With 50+ channels spanning development, engineering, integrations, and support, their Discord is home to over 41,000 users (4,100 online while we’re writing this) and is the central place for their 10,000+ hackathon registrants to collaborate.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, privacy is important to crypto users.
Privacy is baked into the cryptography that secures public blockchains, and there are myriad privacy tokens like Dash, zCash, and Monero that prioritize anonymity for users exchanging value with private currencies.
So what are companies to do when they want to collaborate with someone who has 100K followers on Instagram and a CryptoPunk for their avatar?
Telegram enables people to speak and text with one another from their mobile devices without having to give out their personal information.
Besides privacy, it’s also free and universally available on iOS and Android. Unless you’re trying to connect with people in mainland China, Telegram is an ideal tool for phone and text conversations.
Ready to dive in? Check out these top Telegram channels.
While Telegram is the most popular messaging platform for crypto companies, many alternatives provide unique strengths.
WhatsApp - With over 2 billion active users, WhatsApp is the biggest messaging app
Signal - Likely the most secure messaging app, and it has all the features you'd expect
Dust - A privacy-focused messaging tool that allows users to delete messages for good
Status - A secure messaging app, crypto wallet, and Web3 browser all in one
To a traditional marketer looking to get into crypto, forums might sound as outdated as email marketing, and while forums are irrelevant for many industries, the space a public forum affords people looking to share ideas and interact with like-minded individuals from anywhere in the world, forums are a powerful MarCom tool.
If anyone were to push back on the idea of forums being old school, you can remind them that Bitcoin was originally announced, launched, built, and supported through forum posts between the pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, and early Bitcoin core developers on the P2P Foundation and Bitcoin Forums.
Similarly, much of the early development, planning, and Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) were presented and discussed on the Ethereum Foundation forum.
More active examples of forums being used by 3rd generation layer 1 blockchains include the Solana Forum which is home to over 1,250 users and 150 threads.
Discourse is an open-source discussion platform used by many crypto startups. With a suite of features to support discussion forums, mailing lists, and chat rooms, it's no surprise Discourse is the preferred forum platform for today's blockchain companies.
Snapshot is an "off-chain gasless multi-governance client with easy to verify and hard to contest results."
That's a mouthful.
More simply, Snapshot is a voting platform where token holders can vote on governance proposals for a variety of DeFi projects including Yearn Finance, Sushi, Bancor, Balancer, Uniswap, Aragon, Cream Finance, and more.
For more information on how Snapshot works, read their help documentation.
Snapshot allows token holders to connect their digital wallets and vote on protocol improvement proposals, but the bulk of the discussion for the proposal is discussed on forums and shared Google Docs.
When a community of a few 1,000 investors, technologists, and developers are responsible for the direction of protocols like Yearn that have billions of dollars locked in their yield aggregation vaults, it takes many threads and shared documents to discuss the ramifications of implementing protocol-wide changes.
Because blockchain startups are primarily community-driven, the MarCom tools they use to communicate and collaborate need to support their unique circumstances.
While other tools like podcasts and live streaming platforms like Twitch can help educate a massive number of people, open communication tools like Discord, Telegram, Forums, and Snapshot enable large communities to stay organized and communicate in real-time at scale.
Whether you're a marketing agency helping blockchain companies scale their community, or a traditional agency looking for leads, these MarCom tools are a must.
Looking to market your blockchain company?
Reach out to our sales team, or send us a DM on Twitter (@webstacks_) if you prefer to talk privately so we can schedule a call with Telegram.