1. What is Crypto Content Marketing?
2. Why should crypto projects utilise content marketing?
3. How should crypto projects approach content marketing?
4. Core areas of focus for effective content marketing
   1. Search intent.
   2. Content types & formats
   3. Content length
   4. Tone of voice & readability
5. Getting to know your audience.
   1. Social Listening & Research
   2. Engaging with end-users
   3. Keyword Research
6. How can crypto projects utilise content marketing?
   1. Whitepapers/Litepapers
   2. Events
   3. Blogs
   4. Podcasts & Twitter Spaces
   5. Videos & Webinars
   6. User-Generated Content (UGC)
   7. and finally, memes…
7. Summary

What is Crypto Content Marketing?

Crypto marketing remains somewhat nascent as an established set of rules, frameworks, or truly tried-and-tested approaches. Many crypto projects are yet to fully-embrace Web3 marketing. While there are of course many well-known projects, a new standard of content marketing has yet to emerge. This post will look to establish a foundation for crypto/token/web3 projects to follow to inform their crypto content marketing.

In this post we are going to look at.

What is crypto content marketing?
The Benefits of content marketing for crypto
Content Marketing tactics for crypto
Web3 Marketing strategy for crypto

Content Marketing at its core is to create & distribute valuable information and of course, content, to your target audience and end users. In this case, those potential token 💎HODLers💎. Given the red tape and regulatory nuances surrounding crypto tokens, we must look to ultimately get more eyes to a token, whilst not directly promoting said token. This can be tricky, though our goal with content marketing can be to inform, impress and ignite action from our target demographic.

Providing research and navigation assistance to its audience is one of the key roles of content marketing in a crypto project. In addition to educating potential investors and customers, content marketing creates value for your cryptocurrency.

Why should crypto projects utilise content marketing?

Awareness and transparency are crucial in the Web3 space, having a means to distribute content, messaging, your brand and informative content will be key for your audience and would-be holders. 

Content drives & builds communities. Content marketing can be a two-way street, distributing content helps to inform and develop your crypto community. 

Content marketing helps to inform content, effectiveness and establishes a structure to follow. Embracing data, analytics, SEO and strong copy helps to build a solid content marketing strategy for your cryptocurrency. 

As crypto falls into YMYL (your money or your life), Google and other search engines are looking for authoritative, informative and essentially expert content. A strong content marketing strategy can help develop your project’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authority & Trust).

How should crypto projects approach content marketing?

Web3 marketing can be very reactive, if we’re building new technologies and disruptive content, this can be expected to some extent. However, to be effective at content marketing – we must have a high-level plan, goals, and clear KPIS. A basic content marketing effectiveness plan & framework could look like this:

Target audience & personas: Builders & Developers

Primary Goals: Hackathon sign-ups

Metrics to track: Sign ups, unique visits, time spent on page, etc.

Content Structure: Resources, funnel, themes, promotions, USPs.

Before undertaking any content marketing plans, a framework must be in place to ensure the most optimal results.

Core areas of focus for effective content marketing

Search intent.

If our content is to be effective, it also must have a keen audience. This is where search intent becomes vital, ideally, we preemptively know search intent which allows the content being produced to speak directly to those search intents, or we are able to reverse-engineer to ensure our content appeals to said search intent. Search intent takes several forms:

The Q’s – who, what, where, why how…

Educational content plays a huge role in crypto – this is a new space that few understand and need to understand in order to see the value in your project. Educating your audience will likely be core to any content being produced, what does your crypto/token do? How does it work? How do I stake? When are tokens burned? so on and so on. Knowing the questions asked about your token, or similar tokens can greatly inform your content production and arm your copy team with contextual and quantitate data.

Content types & formats

Understanding how to distribute content, creating a compounded effect and ensuring a macro view of this content aides in its success. As mentioned through the article, many formats are available, video, blog, long-form, social channels and so on. Having a macro view and tactical understanding of each will provide better results. Looking for engagement, utilise video, sign ups, a landing page and so on. Ensuring you plan your content format to align to their strengths is key to a prime content marketing plan.

Content length

While there is back-and-forth around ideal content length, ultimately the content must be relevant and do a comprehensive job of satisfying the end user. The date of event of course won’t need to be 2,500 words, however, if we want to be seen as authoritative in subject-matter, or thematically, we should put our best foot forward displaying strong knowledge, expertise and so on. Again, with crypto as a YMYL subject, it is more important than other topics to be seen as such.

Tone of voice & readability

ToV is important with content, the language used, formats and context is highly-informed by the ToV. This should also reflect your brand and acknowledge the stage of the user’s journey. i.e. simpler language and easily-consumable content for n00bs, more complex and technical content for developers.

Getting to know your audience.

Social Listening & Research

More specifically for Web3, communities thrive everywhere and will give insights into your target audience, their behaviours and challenges. While it somewhat ‘anon’, we can still gather audience insights from communities such as Reddit, Discord, Twitter, Telegram, Facebook, Youtube and the list goes on. This can also be ‘reverse-engineered’ with site operators to help shine a light on more specific themes and topics, by example.

If your project wants to focus on a green, sustainably-focused token, we can utilise site operators such as;

site:reddit.com ‘green crypto’

This will search for any posts on Reddit that talk about green cryptocurrencies and return discussions such as;

‘Green Crypto: What Are The Cryptocurrencies That Are Kinder to Nature?’

reddit user.

This also applies to other spaces where we can look about the discussions taking places, users views on topics and how and what they think given thematic content.

Engaging with end-users

Crypto has an abundance of engaged users across social, events and many means to garner information and knowledge around your end users and potential holders. For more well-established projects, engaging with sales, customer services teams and events teams can help shine a light on your current user based and help to inform content moving-forward.

Keyword Research

Keyword research for crypto is vital for a successful content marketing strategy, it provides context, data, difficulty, competitive insight and much more. This also helps to identify demand, trends and provide a commercial incentive to content. With information on your consumers, we can now look at how best to utilise content marketing.

How can crypto projects utilise content marketing?

Whitepapers/Litepapers

Whitepapers are the MO of any given crypto/blockchain or Web3 project. This of course needs to be seen, digested, shared and needs to disrupt the space in order to gain traction. The bigger the audience, the more likely your project will drive eyes to your initial offering, generate buzz, sign-ups and so on.

The now famous BTC paper to this day draws eyes and acts as a powerful starting point for any Web3 project. While the main goal of course isn’t traditional content marketing – it shows the power of content in-and-of-itself to drive adoption of a project.

Events

While events aren’t strictly content marketing in their physical form, much can be utilised and driven online. Awareness, demand, data capture, links, buzz – you name it. To most-effectively combine content marketing with events, we can take several tactical approaches. Evergreen events (i.e. annually recurring), or more ‘dynamic’ events. We both, we can utilise content marketing to grow the event’s visibility before the event, and then build content and awareness post-event.

Speakers are valuable content marketers.

Speakers can spread the message prior to your event via their blog, website, LinkedIn, socials and so on – ensuring they have an effective ‘media kit’ such as the official logo, the correct links and ensuring it’s consistent across all speakers, acts as a strong content marketing generator. Post-event, having speakers post their talks on their blogs, YouTube, Slideshare, LinkedIn etc. also creates and disseminates more and more content from a singular event.

Blogs

Blogs are a core piece of the content marketing strategy, especially for SEO and driving organic traffic and visibility. As with other elements of a content marketing strategy, your main or macro content can be split up into blog posts that can cover the content from different angles. Also within Web3, many prevalent voices have blogs, Vitalik, Gavin Wood etc. if there’s a position to utilise well-known and authoritative authors alongside your core marketing blog, further traffic, link sharing and authority can be shared across a aligned blog strategy. Not to mention guest posts from other authors, and utilising schema mark up to build upon E-A-T.

Podcasts & Twitter Spaces

As with video marketing, podcasts are a well-established medium to share information and generate buzz and interest around your token/crypto/NFT. Web3 & Crypto podcast are very popular and can likely be attended by your project’s founders and or senior teams, Twitter spaces also provide a similar space for projects to engage their potential investors and end-users.

Videos & Webinars

During Covid, webinars became the norm, however, there’s still value for community-driven webinars and of course much value in creating video content around crypto. YouTube is a hot bed for crypto content, though as we all know it can be heavy of misinformation, shills, paid reviews and not the most transparent medium. If your project does undertake YouTube as a venture, it’s crucial to be transparent, informative and listen to your audience. Webinars give a great opportunity to answer live questions and inform your engaged audience in a live setting.

User-Generated Content (UGC)

Given the ethos of crypto and Web3, IMHO UGC makes huge sense for crypto projects and is largely underutilised outside of ETH and a handful of others. With a thriving community, comes the opportunity for a thriving UGC strategy. Several DAOs have utilised their community to produce incredible content that ultimately is made by their community – for their community. Creating briefs and/or assigning tasks via Discord seems a popular route here. If worked in tandem with your marketing site, SEO and regulatory teams, content can be created, templates shared and so on, all with a view of improving your content marketing traction, and engaging your audience who are hungry for more and more content.

For developers, the likes of Stackoverflow & GitHub are practically built on UGC, those projects able to effectively leverage UGC can expect to see strong performance from their content.

and finally, memes…

Memes are the lifeblood of Web3. While not all projects should or would utilise them, your community more often than not will, Solana down again? meme. That photo of Vitalik, meme. the list goes on. While they must come organically, memes are a fantastic way to engage and relate to your audience, if you’re in the position to hire a sh*tposter – do it.

Summary

In summary, crypto & Web3 provide unique opportunities and unique challenges when it comes to developing a successful content marketing strategy. As it stands, there is much value in the digital marketing prowess and frameworks in place from Web2, crypto projects should look to build upon that for the most success with their content marketing.

– AJB

Post written in collaboration with Web3 Marketing Agency, Coldchain.