Content marketing cheat sheet for crypto and blockchain startups

“Content is going to rule the crypto and blockchain space”

And there are reasons for that…

Reason 1 — Great content = Awesome online reputation on Google

The typical cycle of research for any user, for a particular crypto starts with the person first hearing about it and then Googling it. And based what they see, they start forming first impressions. Google will show what you have written about yourself or what others are writing about you on the specifically searched keyword. This is the first interaction serious investors will have with your startup and the search results will propel them to dig deeper or leave in between.

Reason 2 — Good content can give great value to your community

As a crypto/blockchain startup it is important to regularly communicate with your community. If you are not able to give value to them every time that you interact with them, your communication will be treated like SPAM. The person creating content needs to well connected to the community to understand what kind of content will spark what kind of discussions and reactions.

Reason 3 — Content which gives value drives conversations and thought leadership

By creating valuable content you are creating fuel for conversations among your community members. And people love stuff which can make them talk. It makes them want to come back for more. Creating valuable content also convinces your users that you know your stuff really well and may actually end up changing the world.

Reason 4 — Good content can help you lower your marketing costs and go organic

Today everyone in crypto is going after sponsored PR and Influencer reviews which are costing a damn lot, but are in no way connecting you with relevant crypto audience or driving results. This is because —

1. Relevant and high quality crypto investors are on the constant hunt for amazing content, where they can learn something new.
2. An intelligent crypto investor will see through the shallow content strategy and not end up converting.

Effectively engaging relevant crypto audience with good content will drive more users to your community and thus more engagement at a far lesser cost than sponsored content.

Admittedly the above process will be slow and time taking, but the community you end building like this will stay with you and help your brand sustain through the bear and bull cycles of the crypto market.

Step 1 — Clearly define who your audience is and understand what they want to hear

In the crypto space, we have observed 4 major buckets of audience types a startup will interact with in its lifetime.

1. People who are going to invest in your ICO — will want to understand your business model, see if you are a thought leader in this domain and if your project can give them the returns they are looking for.
2. People who have invested in your ICO — will be interested in understand what is happening with their money, weekly business and Dev updates, when moon, when exchange and so on
3. People who are going to use this product in their daily life — How will this change their life? What are they doing now that they will be able to do better after this? What daily problems does the product solve and how?
4. People who will generate demand on the exchange after the ICO is over — What are your future plans, How are you driving adoption, Who are you partnering with, What are people using your product for, What can it be used for in the future?

All of them will need a different style of communication and different content to engage. So it is important to figure out the specifics by talking to these 4 kinds of broad audiences.

Step 2— Benchmark competition using Google

The objective of this step is to understand what has competition been upto.

1. List down the keywords for your competitors, your industry and the value you will provide. Example if you are benchmarking competition for Healthcare projects then, competition will be Patientory, Simply Vital Health, Medibloc and so on. The industry keywords will be Healthcare and Blockchain, Future of Healthcare, Healthcare insurance and Blockchain etc. The keywords for value you will provide will be very specific to your product features e.g. for Etheal it will be “medical tourism”.
2. Start searching on Google using these keywords. Pro tip do not stop at page 1. Continue till page 8 to 10 for all the above keywords and what you will see is,

“What are people/companies writing on that particular keyword, Who is writing it and Where are they publishing it”

This research along with the perspective you have taken from your audience types in step 1 will be the basis of your content marketing strategy.

For maximum results, ensure that you do this step only after doing step 1.

Step 3— Plan content themes and topics

Now that the research is done, it is time to plan your content themes. This would be in sync with Step 1 and Step 2 and can be broadly grouped into —

1. Thought leadership content — This would be high quality researched content on the problem you are trying to solve. This would be distributed via PR, in offline meetups and events, AMAs, Video Interview with founder and so on. This content will show the gravity of the problem you are trying to solve and future scope of your solution.
2. Status update content — This content would the weekly and monthly business updates. It would also include regular dev updates if the product is not ready.
3. Educational Content — This content would include how to use the product, how to drive maximum value from it, any doubts that need to be cleared or documentation that would be required by a user before using the product and so on.
4. Problem Solving Content — This content would include talking about what kind of problems your target user will face in daily life and how to solve them. These problems have to be contextual to your use case. This can help you drive good quality traffic to your community. For example for an exchange the relevant users are Retail crypto traders. An exchange can blog about what trading indicators to use, what trading strategies to use, what tools are being used by traders to get more profit etc.

Step 4— Start executing long form content first

Once the themes and topics are finalised, start with producing long form content. Long form content pieces are well researched opinions about the topic and theme that was decided. An example of a long form content piece is the one that we wrote for Post ICO marketing The benefit of first writing a long form content about any topic is that now you can repurpose this long form content into different short form content types (Repurposing).

Step 5— Plan for repurposing

A great content piece is not to made just once, it can be redone into many different types without losing the essence of the same. This will not only help you to extract the maximum juice out of the content you write but also ensure it’s distribution on other platforms in a relevant format. This helps in reaching newer audiences and gaining extra authority.

Some common formats of repurposing content are —

1. Make the key phrases into images and distribute on Social Media.
2. Answer all the relevant questions you can about the topic on Quora.
3. Create a small slide deck and upload it on slide share.
4. Make a short video and upload on youtube.
5. Create an infographic and share on social media.
6. Combine the content to create a small ebook and jump start your lead funnel.
7. Write a guest post about it.
8. Do a podcast or a webinar on the same.
9. Start an email/newsletter series

Step 6— If you spent 3 hours, doing the above 5 steps, spend 9 hours in distributing this content !!

The real beauty of the content you create comes out when it is distributed relevantly to your TG. The step 2 that you did, for benchmarking competition, give you 3 important insights —

“What are people/companies writing on that particular keyword, Who is writing it and Where are they publishing it”

The What got included in the Content creation plan…

The Who gives you an idea as to who are the influencers and journalists talking about this topic in detail. Spend time reaching out and talking to them if they can share or talk about your startup or share your content.

The Where gives you an idea as to where is the content being published/dsitributed, which sub reddits, which Quora answers, which publications in medium and which PR outlets.

A well thought out and excellently executed content marketing strategy can lay the the base for an organic content powered growth funnel for your startup. We hope the above article gave you an idea as to how go about thinking and executing the same.

We are Neptune Blockchain, a growth consulting firm focussed on Blockchain startups. If you are looking to drive growth by building organic content acquisition funnels then do reach out to us on Telegram — https://t.me/neptuneblockchain