How to Market Your Cryptocurrency Project! - Part #1
In this article, I want to provide a brief summary of how to market your cryptocurrency project. Yes, a lot of projects out there are dishonest. But what I have seen which is even worse than dishonesty, is great projects relying on dishonest marketing tactics, leaving me and many others scratching our heads at what their marketing teams are thinking (or not thinking.)
If your project is great, you should focus on why it's great, not deceiving people (who often know you're deceiving them.) Deception in your marketing, lowers the amount of trust that big money will assign to your project, thus decreasing its market capitalization. Deception works great if you want to rob grandma of $5. Deception is often terrible if you want your project to make it to, or stay in the top 100.
Don't Use Telegram Chatroom Logic
A lot of projects operate using the logic derived from their Telegram chat rooms. Trust me, if you want to market successfully, 90% of the people who show up in your chatroom do not know the first thing about marketing. I do not pretend I am excellent at marketing, I am no expert, but I know enough to see what will work and what may be terrible. For example, I predicted a substantial rise in EOS prices when it was below $1. I also predicted substantial increases in other coins due to their effective strategies such as Nav Coin before it rallied. I also avoided certain coins which did not see significant increases in value compared to other projects. Sometimes I missed it or made mistakes, but many times, I was right and I was right because I understand how projects are analyzed. With the analysis I have done comes an appreciation of how successful projects market themselves.
But you judge, whether what I am saying provides any benefit for your project.
Figure Out Your Project's Actual Strengths - Even if it's not popular
In the image below, we see an example of a an older marketing attempt by our platform here, Steemit. Perhaps it was done by a well-meaning community member. It attempts to use Transactions Per Second as a talking point to market the project as superior to alternatives.
The problem with this image is that it is deceptive. It discusses Steem in a biased comparison. A comparison that any informed person knows is bogus. People who know cryptocurrency, know the only reason Steem has 10k TPS is because Bitshares (built before Steem) also had 10k TPS. Steem just utilizes the benefits of another projects success, and incorporates the high TPS into Steem.
This type of comparison is bad marketing because it achieves negative outcomes with different audiences. With my type of audience, the informed investor audience, it communicates that we can not trust your marketing because you are hiding key facts and points. So then, when you go on to communicate additional information to us, we wont believe you because we knew you were full of it in the prior marketing points raised.
Or even worse, you do convince a person using such poor talking points and logic. It's even worse if this type of marketing is effective by deceiving, because after 2 weeks, the person learns that many other projects have 10,000 TPS, and that Steem was never the first. Such a person risks being utterly disenfranchised by the poor marketing of the project.
With content like this you have achieved ONE of the following instead of effective marketing
Created fake expectations beliefs in the audience
or made the informed audience totally discount your information/material.
What to do instead
Rather than broadcast that you are secretly threatened by Bitshares existence, which also has 10,000 TPS and existed before your project, you should actually be open about these facts. When a project is willing to be open about the reality of what they offer, they can see their true strengths for what they are.
The truth is, while Bitshares and Steem both had 10,000 TPS, Steem had and still has, thousands of more active real users than Bitshares ever had. In other words, it had Bitshares amazing technology, plus better user adoption, better usability, and better market / brand awareness.
When Steem is discussed in this light and contrasted against Bitshares, it does not make informed investors like myself so skeptical of your misguided marketing tactics. Marketing is not about hiding the truth from people, it is about highlighting your project's strengths and why you offer an advantage vs. other projects. Many projects have unique advantages and benefits that other projects do not have, in fact, I think most legitimate projects do.
Communities often miss what makes them great. It is because many people do not know what a project's actual strengths are or why people use it. They see a project in terms of what they like, or what they wish were true about a project. A lot of people actually believe that good marketing is lying. It just disappoints people in the end.
Instead, be honest!
By the way, if you liked this article and want more of my viewpoints or ideas, take a look at our company at TLCC Consultants. We can launch your STEEM project and also work with other EOSIO blockchains. We can prepare an EOSIO smart contract for you if that's your thing. And yes, we can assist with marketing consulting!