Cryptocurrency Airdrops are out of fashion, so let’s try something else. Below are 7 tips on improving your marketing efforts and gaining more adoption for your cryptocurrency
As we saw in the recent Stellar/Keybase airdrop, getting new users to your platform or crypto project is hard. They had to shut down one of the biggest airdrops because of spammers and people gaming the system. Even President Maduro of Venezuela is trying to improve adoption by airdropping half a PetroDollar to each person living in Venezuela, which they will probably sell ASAP. After a lot of unsuccessful airdrops in the last couple of months, it’s safe to say that big airdrops are out. This includes sending your coins to random ER20 addresses, because that only confuses people and they do not want to register on some obscure exchange to offload the $1 worth of your token.
So, here are a few tips on improving adoption of your coins by upgrading your marketing efforts, in no particular order and with no particular projects in mind:
- Dedicated content contests (Informational videos, infographics, reviews, memes etc). These are a great community booster and with the right rules you could reach a lot of new people. If you do it on a most liked/viewed/upvoted base, you will have to have some good checks in place, since it’s easy to buy likes/votes and ask for them in upvote-4-upvote communities.
- (Mainstream) Partnerships. Partner with other crypto projects & companies and find mutual ground for your coins. Give users interest for storing your coins in a certain wallet and give them discount (or a cashback) on anything they purchase with that wallet. Partner with your local coffee chain, supermarket, bars etc. Be creative! Non crypto people will not HODL. They want to SPEND, so make sure they can use your coin accordingly and won’t be too influenced by volatility, if possible.
- Build your Brand. Reach out to the right influencers. A 1000 small influencers are sometimes better than one big influencer. Let them promote your coin and make sure their followers truly benefit from interacting with your coin. Go viral, work on your branding and make sure the mainstream audience cannot ignore your project.
- Your own content should be king. Make sure you are clear about your mission and how your unique coin is solving real world problems, by actually showing the solutions and how people can use them. Your content should look awesome and one of a kind to stand our from the blur of crypto projects.
- Expand your Social Channels. Don’t stop at Twitter and Medium. Use TikTok, Twitch, Instagram TV and don’t be afraid to go to the niche platforms and make yourself visible.
- Go out in the real world and show people how to use your product. Make it fun. Hide Easter Eggs, do GeoCaching, advertise in random places, flyer etc. Anything to reach people that aren’t active on the regular social channels, but are interested in taking more control over their money/data/ etc.
- Think about merging with another crypto project. This is something people in crypto appear to be afraid of, but there are quite some similar projects out there. Trust me, I’ve seen 3000+ whitepapers and not every project is unique. Combining forces might be a great way to survive the Altcoin bearmarket. Reach out to your competitors and find a way to work together instead of working against each other.
In general, these are bad ideas:
- Letting your followers shill ref links or give out bonuses for sign-ups. This depends on your service/product, but his might come over like spam on peoples feeds. For example, have you heard anything about Initiative Q lately?
- Purchasing an audience for your social media channels. You can have 23.000 followers, but if you only get 2 likes for your posts or have no interaction in your Telegram channel, it doesn’t look good on you.
- Ignoring your audience. Regularly update them with what you are working on, how long it will take and prepare them for delays. You’re developing a new product, this will take you 3-4 times longer than you imagine, which is common in IT, so be upfront about it.
- Trading competitions. They just do not work. Only bots and whales will trade your coin and profit from the competition. General traders will feel left out.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, especially since it’s impossible to compare all the crypto projects out there. Hopefully you get inspired and think of a new angle to market your coin!
Article by John van Rijck
CEO of All Crypto Whitepapers
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