Your Blockchain Events Strategy Needs These Three Things to Thrive
This is Part Six in an 13-part Alpha Growth series breaking down the problems every blockchain project has and needs to solve to grow and scale. New to the series? Start here.
So you’re building community around your blockchain project. Sooner than later — and maybe right from the start — here’s what you’ll face:
Problem six: you need to produce events
If you’re building in crypto, and you want to do it well, you will become an events producer. No way around it. Marketing in crypto is all about events. In fact, everything you do should be an event:
- Product launch? It should be an event.
- Just hired somebody great? It should be an event.
- Decommissioned a product? Even that should be an event.
In Part Five of this weekly series, I laid out the role of community in crypto. The TLDR: to get from ponzinomics to tokenomics and beyond, you must have community and hodlers. Without that, everything will be ape want banana, degen pump and dump and you’ll be rekt.
But there are other great reasons to focus your blockchain business development and marketing strategy on events:
- Events are great for recruiting. Need talent? Host events.
- Events are the only things you can legally advertise. Want to advertise? Host events.
- Events work. Only self-motivated people go to crypto events. These people make things happen. Want to find these people? Host events.
On that last point, take hackathons. They attract highly self-motivated people. They are magnets for lifelong learners and problem solvers. Those are things you can’t teach. And you can teach a lot of things. But you cannot teach motivation, and you cannot teach or train someone to innately want to learn or solve problems.
Events are what take the idea of a community and the need to build a community and solidify it into relationships, biz dev partnerships and other cross-chain coordination and marketing activities. Events are really about engaging your community and wider network and deepening the relationships there.
So your blockchain biz dev strategy must include events. They work. But these things are also true:
- Events are expensive.
- Events are time-consuming and potentially even distracting for you and your team.
- Events can make or break reputations depending on how well they’re run.
You have to do events. They also have to be good to work. They have to be well thought out and engaging. They have to offer education, training and a place to share experiences with people attending. The cost, time and brand risk that come with event production raise the stakes. You have to do events. But you also have to make sure they benefit your project, create growth and help support the health of your project.
In our experience producing, participating in and attending crypto events globally over the last four years, our team at Alpha Growth has found three things that matter most in a winning blockchain events strategy:
- You allow people to gather
Events are the crypto campfire. You know the power of the campfire: the most natural kind of formation of humans in all of existence. People have gathered together around campfires for thousands and thousands of years.
There’s also this: crypto is lonely. Events are a social outlet in a space where the natives have been particularly isolated. The more crypto native you are, the more you know it can be very lonely, right? Really good events — like ETH Denver this year — let the uber nerds who sit in their chairs all year long nerd out with their nerdy friends and talk crypto. They’re not weirdos at a crypto event. People get them. They are super ecstatic to be able to get together and nerd out.
Events also play into our natural instincts to compare and rank ourselves in groups. At events, the hierarchies and affinity groups and networks become clear. There are the event organizers, speakers, experts, panelists, hustlers, hackers, marketers. There are people who are into DeFi, vaults, lending, gaming, Bitcoin — whatever it is, people filter into their ranks and groups during these events. They understand where they sit in the wider ecosystem.
Your blockchain event needs to be the campfire. It needs to be the place where people are able to be together in a space, talk, eat, celebrate, share stories, share information, trade wisdom, all of it.
In-person or virtual or hybrid, your events need to offer that. Ever wonder why you don’t see as many webinars and one-to-many events happening in crypto? It’s the campfire factor. When your event allows people to connect and take in information campfire-style, it’s fire. When it’s one-to-many or there’s a barrier between people attending, you lose the campfire effect.
2. You produce events frequently and consistently
My mantra with events is this:
More and more often
To win blockchain business development, you need to be hosting an event every week or two. This obviously doesn’t need to be a full scale, in-person event. But it does need to be an organized, promoted opportunity for your audience and your community to engage with you and get involved in what you’re building.
Some classic examples:
- AMAs
- Twitter Spaces
- Open office hours
- Community roundtable talks
- Panels
- Hackathons
- Conferences
For more examples of crypto events, check out the drop we shared on Consensus 2022 side events.
Your audience needs to be able to see you, ask questions, give feedback and tell you more about what they want. You need to ask them questions and give them ways to get involved. Ultimately, you want them to understand the problem you’re trying to solve and have a narrative on how you’re solving it that is so good they want to tell their friends.
3. You create Queen’s We Will Rock You effect
The best blockchain events we at Alpha Growth have worked on and attended have pulled off Queen’s We Will Rock You effect.
You know the song. Queen’s complete crowd pleaser. But it doesn’t just please the crowd by letting people participate.
The crowd actually becomes the song.
The crowd is the performance itself. No crowd, no song.
The people participating in your blockchain event should make your event what it is. You want real impact that will grow your ecosystem and contribute to the overall health of your project. For that to happen, you need the consumers of the event to be involved in producing the results.
Your crowd needs to become the musicians.
We did this during last fall’s Gen C conference by offering bounties to attendees from the featured speaker’s projects. You could turn your crowd into the musicians through simpler mechanisms like well-executed AMA sessions, hackathons or crowd-generated content creation. For every event, big or small, think about how you can turn your attendees into a crucial part of the bigger experience.
Once you’ve set your community flywheel in motion and started leveraging events to amplify your growth and scale, you’re going to need to address a new problem: your chain. In Part Seven of this series, we’ll talk more about the crucial role picking your chain plays in your project’s overall growth and sustainability. See you next week.
If you’re interested in learning about more growth strategies for your project, we encourage you to connect on Twitter @bryancolligan. Join our Telegram for members-only alpha on projects we’re watching and DYOR resources for creating growth, credibility and engagement for your project.
