Every business in the world needs to generate awareness of its products and services. Some companies do this over years of marketing campaigns, slowing winning customers and building their brand from the ground up. Others invest in forms of marketing that result in short-term spikes in interaction. The best solution for each business may vary, with the best marketing services depending on numerous factors.
The complexity of marketing has given rise to an extensive industry worth around $1.65 trillion dollars. Within this field are hundreds of sub-sections of marketing, often built to directly address the problems, requirements, and best strategies for a specific industry.
Blockchain marketing is one of these subsections, providing specialized services to the blockchain field, currently predicted to be worth $94 billion by 2027. In this article, we'll dive into the complexities of blockchain marketing, touching on why this industry has such specific requirements and how agencies are rising to the challenge.
What Makes Blockchain Marketing Different from Traditional Marketing?
While blockchain has actually been around for well over a decade, many people are still fairly unfamiliar with what it is and what it offers to consumers.
As the industry has developed, core differences that separate it from other, more traditional industries have come to light:
- The differing foundations of a new company.
- The need for community trust.
- A comprehensive regulatory landscape.
Blockchain marketing services have to be aware of each of these core distinctions and understand how they shape the campaign styles, marketing mediums, and target audience that they focus on.
Let's break these distinctions down further.
The Established Foundations of a New Company
Despite numerous project offerings, innovative companies, and interesting ideas in action, the blockchain industry is still primarily known for one thing: cryptocurrency. While the majority of the population is unfamiliar with cryptocurrency, the ones that do have some knowledge of crypto typically have a negative opinion of it.
Considering the decorated history of crypto scams, rug pulls, and major projects vanishing overnight that we've experienced over the past few years, this is hardly surprising. While cryptocurrency scams are far less common today, this history has stained the reputation of blockchain.
When someone launches a new company in a different industry, customers have no reason to distrust the business instantly. In the cryptocurrency industry, this couldn't be further from the truth. Each company that creates a new offering in the world of blockchain doesn't just start from zero; they start from a negative position, requiring them to fight into the good books of customers.
The established foundations of a new company in the blockchain world are instantly negative, creating an uphill battle from day one for marketing teams.
The Need for Community Trust
Based on the unstable foundations that every new blockchain company experiences, marketing teams working in the blockchain industry have to change their focus right off the bat. While other companies may focus on getting their business products and services in front of as many eyes as possible, blockchain marketing teams have to lay a solid foundation first.
Blockchain marketing teams have to focus almost entirely on trust building, community forging, and transparency during the opening months (or even longer) of a company's launch. Funding and visibility are the first stages toward any successful company in almost any other field. But, in cryptocurrency, marketing teams have to create a trusting audience.
As many marketing teams will already know, building up trust and a favorable opinion of a company isn't something that can happen overnight. Blockchain marketing services need to build and launch extensive trust-first campaigns to get their projects off the ground.
Regulatory Compliance and Requirements
The blockchain regulatory landscape is always evolving. In other industries, it's rare that a new regulation or legal requirement comes into force that dramatically disrupts how a business is run. If that is the case, the disruptions typically fall onto the operations side, not impacting marketing. Recently, the launch of the EU Deforestation Regulation is an example of such a case occurring, resulting in disruptions and changes to the supply chain of thousands of companies but not impacting marketing teams in the slightest.
In the world of blockchain, a slight change in regulation can create new opportunities or completely eradicate whole marketing channels seemingly overnight.
For example, back in Janaury 2018, Meta (at that time called Facebook) issued a company-wide ban on cryptocurrency ads. Considering that Meta ads make up one of the largest pools of PPC ads in the world, this decision effectively disabled a prominent and useful marketing channel for the blockchain world.
Tech giant Meta is far from the only institution that's taken action to reduce the access of cryptocurrencies to central marketing markets. Entire countries like Singapore have issued complete bans on the running of any ads related to a crypto project. Other countries, like South Africa, require blockchain marketing teams to state that their projects lead to the loss of funds on any advertisement they create.
The complex web of regulatory compliance requirements that blockchain marketing teams must jump through mean that there is a significantly more limited scope for advertising in blockchain than in many other industries.
Marketing teams working in blockchain services must understand these regulations and be able to work around them to get their adverts in front of their target audience.
Final Thoughts
The blockchain industry has had a troubled past, severely damaging its reputation and creating issues for the marketing teams of today. Of course, instead of letting this unique set of circumstances completely paralyze the blockchain marketing industry, it has instead developed a concrete range of techniques, strategies, and workarounds that give projects the best possible chance of success.
For marketing agencies that are considering moving into this field, it's always a good idea to familiarize oneself on the current regulatory landscape, predicted future changes, and the best practices that blockchain marketing teams can follow to deliver winning campaigns to their customers.
