How to attract users to your crypto exchange — a handy checklist from marketers
As practice shows, owners and top managers of crypto projects and cryptocurrency exchanges, although they have a wealth of knowledge in their domain, still often waste a lot of time and effort planning strategies to promote cryptocurrency exchanges. This publication seeks to systematize our knowledge in this area and draw up a sequence of actions that, in our experience, are essential at various stages of a marketing campaign.
Of course, this should not be taken as a guide, as the cryptocurrency market is now in such a state that every business's journey is unique. But we hope that our digest will help you at the initial planning stage and save you some precious time .
A crypto exchange marketing campaign may involve several major activities, including direct advertising and brand promotion, encouraging user activity, and improving the exchange's functionality. Let's examine each of them in a little more detail.
Promotion and branding
This direction includes a set of activities aimed at attracting new users and increasing their total number. Some of these tasks must be carried out by management, but some of this work can be outsourced to specialist digital advertising and promotion campaigns. Let’s break them down.
Initial preparation and objective setting
This point may seem obvious and self-evident. Before launching any campaign, you need to define its objectives, but they are not always clearly identifiable. This task rests almost entirely on the shoulders of business owners and top management. According to their position, they must understand the specifics of the market, the demands of customers, and the vision of the product's final appearance. For obvious reasons, this task is unrealistic to outsource.
Without a clear understanding of who your customers are and why you are offering your product to them, you cannot move forward.
Awareness campaign
The campaign refers to the development and promotion of any relevant content about the crypto-exchange. Three types of activity can be distinguished in this segment.
Development of a marketing strategy. This can be achieved by analyzing the performance of competing businesses as well as surveys of target user groups, including traders and cryptocurrency holders, including potential ones. Note that methods of gathering information vary, and no one but the business holders themselves can know better what is right for their product — a preliminary survey or practical testing.
Information content creation. Generally, creating content about any business starts with a semantic core, that is, an ordered set of search words, their morphological forms, and phrases that most accurately describe your business. This is not as easy a task as it might seem at first glance, because when creating a core, you need to make sure that it includes enough keywords, but that the content on your pages doesn't look oversaturated.
The next step is to write the content and publish it.
- Writing. This work can be outsourced, but it is advisable that you have someone on staff who oversees this process. A content manager from inside your company understands your product better than any freelancer from Upwork, can work effectively with contractors, and make changes in time if they are needed.
- Publishing. The type of content you publish also determines the choice of site. You will likely need to work with several platforms, including your blog, to increase the likelihood of reaching the desired category of users.
SEO implementation. This point stems from the previous one and involves creating an indexable landing page and optimizing conversions from the latter. This work is based on the results of keyword analysis and user behavior.
A pro-tip. Even if your business is geared towards experienced traders, you can always expect a big surge of interest from newcomers, and seasoned clients as well need to be informed about the platform operating principles and the current market conditions. To attract and retain traders, you can always rely on educational content in all its forms — from publications about the platform's functionality to news articles.
To get your exchange to your target audience, you need to choose the optimal content format and create quality publications that put your products in a good light.
Advertising and publicity
In this case, advertising refers to a set of paid activities to promote information about your exchange through whatever channels you deem appropriate.
Working with media partners. This direction may include writing and publishing articles and press releases about the exchange on popular crypto news and analytical resources, including Telegram channels.
Cooperation with influencers. Influencers are prominent traders, crypto-bloggers (including YouTube video-bloggers) to promote the exchange.
Native banner advertising. This category may include a/b testing, geo-targeted redirects for targeted users, and contextual advertising.
Affiliate programs. These may include Cost Per Action (CPA) networks, intermediary advertising systems with behavioral targeting.
A pro-tip. When searching and selecting influencer bloggers and advertising channels, you may stumble across many unscrupulous projects. The work of the latter is not intended to bring leads to the client, but only to implement budgets. For example, a typical scam scheme may look like this: a Telegram channel charges a sum of money for placing a press release or advertisement, and then instead of actual leads the customer only receives views or visits from bots. This does not mean that finding an honest partner is impossible. You just have to be careful when looking and double-check everything.
Advertising budgets are essential for a successful promotional campaign, but it is also very important to monitor how they are spent.
Event-driven PR
This category may include any action linked to an event for which your exchange has provided a news hook.
Participation in offline events. You can allocate a team of exchange representatives to a conference, forum, discussion platform, or hackathon, or sponsor such an event yourself.
Posting new instrument listings on the exchange (Coinmarketcap and other platforms). Each listing added to an event platform can increase the awareness of the exchange, but such information should be posted as soon as possible.
Technology partnerships development. Integration of payment services and systems, cryptocurrencies, AML/KYC identity providers, etc. — all these are reasons for discussion. Every newly established partner enhances the reputation of your exchange.
Don't forget that any action you take to develop the exchange can be used as a PR opportunity.
Warming up the user base
The users of your exchange can also help in the PR campaign of your business. There are several ways to achieve this.
Channeling the activity of users
Contrary to popular belief, users can be organized to carry out various activities if the process is made mutually beneficial. A competitive basis is best suited to this:
- referral programs;
- forecast competitions and contests for traders;
- contests of publications in social networks;
- voting for the choice of coins to be listed.
Implementing partnership projects
A great example of efforts in this field is bounty programs. The bounty program provides an opportunity to obtain blockchain startup tokens without investing your own money. A company that goes for an ICO offers to perform certain actions to promote the startup and attract new users and rewards such actions with tokens.
Email newsletters
It's a tried and tested way of keeping your user base humming, but there is one catch — email newsletters should not be abused, as there is a fine line between informing and annoying. Set clear boundaries for your newsletters, define all the do's and don'ts, and the mailing frequency for different categories of users.
Remember that the user base is your main resource. If you want to use this resource for PR purposes, set ethical boundaries and make it a win-win, and the results will be delivered in no time.
Expanding the functionality of your exchange
The focus of the PR campaign is on your exchange and its capabilities. Timely improvement of existing features and addition of new ones in line with user requests and the market situation is the basis of the promotion work. If this basis is missing, all other efforts will be in vain.
It is the software provider for your exchanges and their ability to respond to your requests promptly that comes to the fore.
Enhancing the trading experience
This category includes anything that can expand your users' trading toolkit and provide them with more options for creating strategies — introducing new coins, new order types, and trading tools (e.g. trading advisors). This can also cover the expansion of investment opportunities — new formats, new indices, and futures.
Expanding deposit and withdrawal options
Expanding the pool of payment systems and crypto processing services shows you care about your users. They will appreciate this kind of innovation.
Developing the ICO capabilities
This category is perfectly illustrated by the example of utility tokens, which give the user access to a company's services or products after a certain period.
A pro-tip. A large number of businesses enter the market with a fairly basic idea — a cryptocurrency exchange. That said, there are cases where as early as the marketing campaign’s planning stage, it is decided that additional functionality is needed. And it’s completely OK to probe the potential of a certain category of customers and decide whether the new component is worthy of a separate investment round.
Remember that your promotional campaign aims to attract users to the exchange. The more developed your platform’s functionality, the more likely it is that traders will stick around.
The bottom line
Investing in the promotion and advertising of your exchanges can have a direct impact on the future return on investment and profitability of your project. However, any crypto exchange marketing campaign should be tailored to the needs of your target audience and backed up by the widest possible range of services and tools.
WL Global team can provide you with the most flexible solution and timely service — ask our specialist for details.