How to Market a Blockchain Company | Ep. #555

Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about how to market a blockchain company. So everybody is talking about cryptocurrencies or talking about blockchain or talking about Ethereum, they're talking about NIO, like all this stuff, right? It's going crazy right now. And, you know, both NIO and I have gotten into the space. We've mentioned in the past that we're both interested in it. And I can just kind of kick things off. I can tell you the, one of the blockchain companies that we're working with right now is it's very traditional, right? They're doing media buys on a site that's getting a ton of traffic, you know, let's say CoinMarketCap, right? And the traffic's coming back. They have a landing page and they drive It's very simple. You drive them to a landing page and you're trying to get them onto your email list. And then you're trying to get them onto Telegram, which is a chat program to communicate with these people. That's kind of the high-level funnel. And then from there, you're just constantly emailing people about the new token launch that you have coming. What a token launch is, you could be launching your initial coin offering, right? And that's where you're just basically offering the utility of whatever your product or your service is. And you're offering it to a bunch of people, right? It's not like you're getting equity or anything, but you're just raising a lot of money. And I can let Neil kind of elaborate on that in a little bit, but the marketing is very traditional right now in this sense. People are doing a lot of retargeting. People are running Google Display ads, but it kind of reminds me of the wild, wild west where people are getting paid in cryptocurrencies. And then it's, yeah, it's very standard. We're talking like media buys to landing page, get them into your email funnel and then market to them.

Yeah. The typical approach, as Eric mentioned, is it is a funnel. Everyone's doing ads on CoinMarketCap. From there, they're collecting emails. From there, they're pushing them into a Telegram group. Once they build up the group, then they have a really active community and they're hoping that when they go public or live, then everyone's just talking and engaging and they start printing cash. What I found with blockchain or crypto marketing or ICO marketing or whatever you want to end up calling it, is most people aren't using traditional channels. Why aren't people networking with all the influencers and getting them to review, you know, your ICO? Why aren't people connecting with the groups and trying to say, hey, here's what we're doing, feel free to review it? Why aren't people connecting with all the YouTube crypto influencers and trying to get them to review your ICO? On the flip side, we're seeing people just do basic things like banner ads, getting press from the CNNs or Bloombergs of the world, which don't do much. It's nice to have. I'm not saying you shouldn't have the press, but they really don't do much. And we're also seeing people going out there and trying to recruit celebrities like Floyd Mayweather and have them promote their ICO.

Or Paris Hilton.

There you go. Doesn't really work to have celebrities because they don't do much. 2, you can't just focus on the marketing. Yes, I broke down a lot of marketing stuff that you should be doing instead, but you also need to be focusing on the technology. If there is no real reason for you to be on the blockchain, then you shouldn't be on there. If you could just go and raise money for your startup and you can be a normal venture-funded startup, go do that instead. I understand it may be easier to raise money on the blockchain, but it doesn't mean you should be doing it. You should be doing what's right for the people and the technology and the space. So think long run, not just with your marketing, but also with your product. And the last thing I would want to add with this is I've seen that a lot of people raise money, But they don't do regular updates. If you took money from venture capital, you would have to do board meetings, board decks. How hard is it to write a blog post each and every single week just updating people? It's not that difficult. If you're getting millions of dollars, put in the time and effort to update people. That's a minimum thing that you should be doing.

Yeah, the company we're working with, or one of them right now, is— it's exactly what Neil's saying, right? Like, it is your obligation if you have raised a lot of money To update them. And then this company, I mean, they're doing a conference, they're speaking at different things. They have a complete content calendar. A lot of the things that we talk about on this podcast, we're talking about, Neil just mentioned, you know, perhaps building better relationships, influencer marketing, you know, there's ads, things like that. Yes, there's a marketing aspect, but absolutely, it's not— a lot of people right now, because it's so easy to raise money and there will be a reckoning, they're just writing a white paper and it has just all this fluff in it. And then people end up putting a bunch of money.

Yeah.

And they end up losing their shirts and then people just run off with the cash because there is zero accountability. So that's the problem right now. I mean, if you have to really look and ask yourself if you are going to market this company, is this going to provide a lot of utility to people? Is this technology actually relevant right now? Because a lot of the stuff people are talking about is not actually able to be implemented at the time. It's just a lot of, you know, a lot of smoke and mirrors. Right. So, I mean, you know, beyond this kind of being a, hey, you got to make sure you're doing things the right way. All the things that we talk about on this podcast are going to work. You know, the people, and if you're even looking to start like a, let's say a marketing agency in the space right now, now's a good time because everybody's doing things that are, you know, being done or have been done in the past, let's say 5, 10 years, maybe even beyond that. Yeah.

And this space, it is the wild, wild west and you're going to start seeing a lot of issues end up coming up with people doing scammy things. Your brand is priceless. Warren Buffett once released a letter to CEOs. He has tons of them. I don't know what the number is, but let's say 60-something. And in his yearly letter, he doesn't write pages and pages. He just writes a one-pager because he's like, my CEOs are so busy, I'd rather just give them the message short and to the point. One of the messages he ended up telling people was when you have— you're faced with the decision to choose money or protecting the brand, he said, always choose protecting the brand. Don't just do what's going to make you money. Most of the people marketing in this space are just thinking about the money. Think about your brand. So if your strategy isn't long-term, you need to reconsider everything.

Great, so with that being said, if you want to check out our goodies for you, our marketing goodies, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more. And one final thing, if you're interested in us having Neil and I curate all this podcast content, organizing all of it, making it easier, just tweet at me @EricoSiu, that's E-R-I-C-O-S-U-I.

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Thanks for watching.