This year has been a massive challenge for businesses worldwide, with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic reaching far and wide. The result has been that people across the world have a lot less money to spend and are a lot more careful about how they’re going to spend it.
Creating PR for a blockchain marketing campaign can be a much bigger challenge than launching digital PR and traditional PR in the first place, for a number of reasons. Between legal problems and the prevalence of scams in the cryptocurrency space, investors are becoming a lot more wary of how they spend their money compared to when the space was the “new thing”.
This is why it is important to appropriately plan for your campaign and make sure that you execute the plan adequately to ensure that you are getting as much reach as you can to attract your needed fundraising. That’s why we have devised the Top Blockchain Public Relations Campaign Checklist for 2021.
So, moving forward, if you manage to tick off everything on this checklist, your campaign will be well on its way to success.
Start Early With Your SEO
This is a critical aspect of any blockchain PR campaign that unfortunately gets frequently overlooked in comparison to the other methods generating hype and traffic to your project. The main reason for SEO being overlooked is that it can be a slow burn to see results, but this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make use of SEO, it just means that you should start early with it.
If you’re not already aware of what SEO is, it stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of improving your volume of website traffic and the quality of this traffic by using a variety of different techniques to improve your business search ranking. For example, Google has 200 different factors that they use to rank websites and put them into certain positions on their search engine.
To make a start on your SEO, you should make sure that your website has at least over 350 words per page, so that your website isn’t considered “thin” by Google standards. Furthermore, you should aim to create long-form content related to your project so that you can get backlinks to your website as quickly as possible.
Getting more backlinks to your site will help you to increase your website traffic and get more people that would be interested in your offerings. Another way to help you to get more backlinks to your site, you can also try to post guest articles on a number of different publications talking about problems and how your blockchain project is going to solve these problems.
Some examples of popular places to put out guest posts for the blockchain space can be found below.
- CoinTelegraph
- Forbes
- CoinDesk
- CryptoNews
If you don’t feel like you have the time or expertise to do this yourself, you could always acquire the services of a professional blockchain marketing agency to take the burden away from you.
Make Sure Your PR is Honest
We’ve just covered the importance of using SEO and posting guest posts on publications for your PR. Whilst you’re going to want to generate as much buzz as possible around your project, you need to make sure that your PR is honest and that you are not overselling yourself, or your solution.
The first reason for this is that investors and even just enthusiasts in the crypto space have now gotten used to seeing projects that offer to change the world, when in fact, they are only standing to change very little. You should provide statistics to back up the importance of the problem that you are trying to solve, and you should be honest about how your project is going to change this.
If you’re too promotional or over the top in your PR content, you’re going to put off investors and users. Worse yet, your campaign is actually probably going to get very little engagement because your brand is going to come across as untrustworthy by over-selling the importance of your brand.
As a general rule, you should avoid using the phrase “change the world” or, “revolutionizing the X sector.
Use Crypto-Focused Social Media
With the unwelcome nature of cryptocurrency advertisements on a number of different platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and even Google; many social media sites have actually shown that they are more opposed to the potential of cryptocurrencies and blockchain compared to some other sites that are out there.
As a result of this, the cryptocurrency community has moved onto a number of different crypto-friendly social media sites. These are the sites that you should be using to spread the word about your project. Some examples of the more crypto-friendly social media sites that are out there can be found below.
- Telegram
- Medium
- Quora
Of course when you’re posting content on these platforms, you will have to be mindful of your “tone”. For example, on Reddit, which is informal and conversational, you may find that the tone you will need to use to engage your audience would be different to the tone you would need on LinkedIn, which is more professionally focused.
Using the correct tone for the type of platform that you’re using and the audience you’re targeting will allow you to maximize your engagement rate, which will drive your blockchain PR campaign forward even further. You will do this by creating a community of people that are going to want to shout and rave about your project.
Having this community to push your message forward will make your fundraising much easier, as they will suggest it to their friends and associates, especially if they themselves are taking part, which they likely will be. Your brand awareness would skyrocket, also making it much less likely that your idea is just a passing fad.
Make Sure Your Website Is Attractive
This one is incredibly important, you need to make sure that your website is attractive and eye-catching, so you can retain their attention for as long as possible. You’ve already put in all the hard work to get the person onto your website, why would you let them leave so easily? In fact, 38% of people will stop using your site if your layout and design is unattractive.
So you’ve got your design done on desktop, is the job done for you? Absolutely not. You’re going to also need to make sure that your website is correctly optimized for mobile, with responsive design so that it looks just as good on mobile as it does on desktop. Mobile traffic has massively increased to nearly 50% of total traffic over the years and 85% of people think that mobile sites should be just as good as desktop sites.
If you’ve not got web-design chops yourself, you can always outsource the work to an outside company to ensure that it looks great and works great for your visitors.
Filter Down Your Idea
When you’re talking about your idea and trying to catch the attention of potential users, you need to be able to filter down your idea into a basic concept that almost anyone could understand. This is because not everyone will have the technical knowledge needed to unravel a long, and frankly boring lecture about how your project works. You need to save that for the people that know about it.
When you’re communicating to anyone in your campaign, you need to assume that they don’t understand the technical side, so as many people can consume your content and learn about your project as possible.
Highlight Your Team
Investors and even savvy enthusiasts know that a business is only as good as the team behind it, and your project is no different. When you’re going through your blockchain PR campaign, you’re going to have to always highlight the strengths of your team and how their experiences will help you to make your project a success. How can you trust a company if you don’t know who is behind it?
There’s a few ways you can do this. For example, when you hire a new member of your management team, you could put a post out, or a short press release. In this press release/post, you can highlight how great they are, include a picture of them smiling and maybe even have a short interview. This will help people feel connected to your project personally.
Furthermore, if you know of any conferences that could be beneficial for you, you could even send a couple of your team members to a conference. This way, they can build up personal connections for the project, whilst also improving the reputation of your team, particularly if you go to a well-known conference and post about it.
Create a Sustainable Budget Model
One of the worst things that you can do with a blockchain PR campaign is throw all of your money against the wall straight away, then expecting to get a definite return on your investment. What is more likely is that if you do this, you will lose your budget and have barely anything to show for it. I’ve seen some projects fall into ruin over poor marketing budget management.
For example of how expensive things can be in a blockchain PR campaign, guest posts on CoinTelegraph can cost up to $3000 and to have backlinks placed in by a freelancer on Forbes can cost up to $1700. This is a lot of money to spend when you haven’t even got a guarantee of a return. To boost your articles, you should share them on crypto socials.
A blockchain PR campaign can cost upwards of $60,000 per month depending on the needs of the company. Despite this, if you only have $60,000 to begin with on your marketing budget, then you should spread this money out and aim to have that money last for around a year. This will allow you to scale up more effectively, than flashing in the pan.
One of the first things that you have to remember is that sustained and steady builds in brand awareness and content are much better than sudden hype and notoriety. This is because a lot of hype just turns into a fad, with the project slumping to incredibly low levels after, failing to continue to grow.
On the other hand, if you were to steadily distribute content, get involved in conversations and build up your brand awareness before your fundraiser, you will find that a larger number of people will remain interested in your project after the hype. This is because you will have become entrenched in the community by contributing for longer before your fundraiser.
Create and Measure Key Performance Indicators
If you’re not doing this already, I have one question for you. How do you know what’s working and what isn’t? It’s very rare for a company to have no Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), normally factors like sales, leads and others are commonly tracked, but with blockchain PR, things are a little different.
The things that you are going to have to measure for your KPIs are a little bit different, for example, you are going to have to look at things like web-traffic, brand recognition, and how your SEO has been performing. These are all indicators of how much your project will have touched the crypto space.
Web-Traffic
On the surface, web-traffic is the easiest KPI to understand for your blockchain PR campaign. This is because it is simply a measurement of how many people have visited your website during a certain timeframe. You can also, depending on the tools that you use, see where most of your traffic is coming from, so you can track where your campaign is having the best effect
Despite this, web-traffic is not the be all and end of all of whether or not your project succeeds. Just because you have a lot of people coming to your website, does not mean that they will stay or invest/use your project. This is why it is important to have an attractive website and make sure that you engage in communities to get higher-value visitors.
You can measure the web traffic coming to your project website by using Google Analytics or Ubersuggest.
Brand Recognition
Ensuring that you invest in brand recognition is one of the best ways to make sure that your campaign doesn’t fall victim to being another hyped up project that receives little interest once your fundraising is finished. Brand recognition itself is the process of trying to get your target audience to be able to identify your brand just by your logo or tagline.
Getting brand recognition is notoriously difficult, which is why I’ve suggested that you start early with your SEO and generating notoriety for your project long before you plan to fundraise. Not only does it make sure that people invest in your project, it also helps to make sure that people stay interested and recognize who you are after the fundraising has finished.
To measure your brand recognition, I recommend Google Alerts. Because brand recognition is incredibly hard to measure accurately, your best bet is to see how much your project is getting mentioned online and Google Alerts helps you to do this. By measuring how often you are mentioned, you can see what is working for your campaign and what isn’t working.
SEO
There’s so many factors that go into a website’s SEO ranking that it can be incredibly difficult to take stock of how your brand is doing across all of those factors. Thankfully, one of the most important and easy to measure factors is the amount of backlinks that your website has. These are essentially other websites that link back to your primary website.
Some of the easiest ways to get backlinks are to get involved in guest posting, as has been previously mentioned in this article. It is also recommended that you use your company block to create relevant long-form content that can be linked on other websites to boost your rankings on Google and other search engines.
There are a number of free tools available that you can use to measure the number of backlinks that your website has. For example, you can use Ahrefs, The Hoth and Ubersuggest to measure how many links you have and which content is getting you those links.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have discussed a great number of things that you will need to take note of during your blockchain PR campaign to ensure that you reach your funding goal and have the necessary money to drive your project to success.
Firstly, we covered the fact that if you want to get the most you can out of your campaign, you’re going to need to start your SEO operations earlier than most projects do. You will also need to make sure you’re honest about your project and the problems that it will solve.
It is also critical that you get involved in crypto social media so that you can engage in a community that will spread the good word about your project. It is also important to measure that you have a great website so that the people you bring to your website will want to stay on it and learn more about who you are.
To make sure that your users and potential investors have confidence in your project, you need to make sure to highlight the skills and experiences of your team. This helps people to feel at ease, knowing the project is in good hands. It’s also important to have a sustainable and realistic budget so that you don’t simply become a flash in the pan.
Finally, it is important to create and continue to measure your KPIs so that you know whether your campaign is working to its full potential or not. If your KPIs go down, then needs to change. Alternatively, if your KPIs are up, you know that you’re doing well.