ColdChain Agency

Web3 Growth & Digital Marketing Agency

Marketing for Large Blockchains & Ecosystems

Simone Pomposi, Web3 & Blockchain Marketer (Ex Fantom Foundation).

Unlike conventional markets, where customer profiles and needs are well-understood and static, the blockchain ecosystem is dynamic, with a rapidly evolving audience whose motivations can be as volatile as the market itself.

This complexity demands innovative approaches to create and sustain engagement, setting the stage for a deep dive into the strategies that can navigate these turbulent waters.

Marketing in crypto is hard. Before diving into the details, let’s define marketing.

Marketing involves a set of strategies and activities aimed at promoting products, services, or brands, and establishing a connection between companies and their target audiences. It encompasses understanding customer needs, creating value, and engaging in communication to facilitate exchanges that benefit both the company and its customers.

To summarize, to “do marketing” we need to:

  • Define an audience (who is our customer?)
  • Understand their needs (why should they buy/use our product/service?)

Once the who and why are clear, we can make a plan to reach the audience with a specific messaging. Easy. Well, not really.

In it for the techhhhh

The first challenge in crypto marketing is to define the audience. Who are the “customers”?

Outside of crypto, it’s relatively easy to identify a specific type of audience.

Let’s take Slack for example. Slack makes people’s lives easier by simplifying communication within a company. Therefore, the target audience of Slack is people who work in a business. Whether these people are developers, project managers, customer support operators, or some other sort of digital worker, it doesn’t matter much to Slack.

In crypto, things are quite different.

Let’s take the example of Fantom, for which I worked for almost four years. Fantom is a prominent layer 1, a blockchain-based digital infrastructure that allows developers to build decentralized applications or dApps.

From the short description, it seems like developers are Fantom’s target audience. That’s true, but they’re not the only ones.

In actuality, the vast majority of people somewhat involved or interested in crypto aren’t developers.

Why, you ask? Why would someone who is not a developer be interested in something so technical?

Tokens!

If there were no tokens, nobody except developers would care about what most crypto projects do. Similarly, most of us don’t care for AWS, Google Cloud, and the myriad of other highly specialized digital products and services aimed at developers.

Therefore, if tokens didn’t exist, marketing in crypto would be so much easier. The audience would be developers, marketers would market to them, and everyone would be happy.

But well, there are tokens. And that changes all. Our target audience is not just developers anymore; it expands to a bunch of people from all walks of life, more technical, less technical, younger, older, you get the point.

These people use the token for one reason or another. In the case of a layer 1 like Fantom, some might use the token for staking or to pay for gas fees on the network to interact with dApps. Others might just buy the token for speculation, hoping to get a financial return over a period of time.

The fragmentation of the audience creates significant issues. Marketers have to take care of the needs of two very different groups of people, with different levels of understanding and use of the product.

While the developers might be fine with well-documented and well-communicated technology and its progress, the other group – let’s call them end users – doesn’t necessarily care about that.

They’re not really in it for the tech.

Sure yeah better tech is cool and continuous development gives trust and credibility, but if the token doesn’t appreciate, most people won’t be happy. They’d for sure trade stale tech progress for better price action. Many such examples out there.

Additionally, these two groups respond to different messaging. Marketers need to find a balance in how to communicate so that both groups understand the message. If it’s too technical, they will lose the end users. If it’s not technical enough, developers will go where they’re served best.

The Fantom story

Fantom was an underdog. Born amid the 2018 bear market, its beginnings were challenging. Crypto itself was much less developed than now, and Fantom was just another ticker of Coinmarketcap.

In early 2020, we realized that our audience wanted one thing more than anything else. They wanted to be kept in the know. They wanted regular communication. They wanted to feel heard and to be part of something bigger, a community.

Blockchain development takes years, and often there isn’t much news or updates to share regularly. But it doesn’t matter. Coca-Cola still spends billions a year on marketing. No updates or news there, the product hasn’t changed in a long time. Nonetheless, they must keep doing that to keep that connection with their audience and customers.

So we started communicating more and more, focusing our efforts on Twitter and blog posts.

Fast forward to 2021, in early January we tried something different. We coordinated with a group of hardcore Fantom supporters to amplify each others’ Twitter posts.

The results were astounding.

The engagement went up exponentially and, coincidentally, developers started deploying the first dApps on Fantom, sparking a positive flywheel effect. Over the following months, the network was blooming with new projects and new users.

As simple as it was, word of mouth turned out to be very effective.

We continued expanding our marketing efforts highlighting the dApps on the network and connecting the larger user base with the up-and-coming dApps.

A network and the dApps built on it work in symbiosis. New dApps bring new opportunities which bring new users to the network. New dApps also tap into the existing user base and they’re sure to have people trying out their product from the get-go.

Wen marketing

Another challenge in marketing a large blockchain such as Fantom, is identifying a unique selling point, aka what makes it different from its competitors.

Marketers in the blockchain space need to continuously scan the horizon for shifts in technology, user expectations, and competitive landscapes. This requires a nimble approach to messaging, where the USP is not a static proposition but a dynamic narrative that reflects the project’s evolving advantages.

For Fantom, initially, it was relatively easy to define a USP. Fantom was one of the only blockchains that was fast and inexpensive to use.

People were used to Ethereum, which was slow, prone to congestion, and its fees could spike to hundreds of dollars. When Fantom, Avalanche, Solana, and Polygon started to emerge, they showed the world that there were alternatives. Many more people could afford to use decentralized networks, which led to the explosion of popularity in DeFi in 2021.

Back then, the fast and cheap was a novel narrative. However, once fast and cheap went from a feature to a minimum requirement for blockchains, it wasn’t a narrative anymore.

Nowadays dozens of legitimate blockchains can claim similar performance in terms of speed and cost of transactions, therefore being fast and cheap is no longer a unique selling point for anyone.

Over time, we gradually moved away from the “fast and cheap” USP.

At Fantom, we strived to create the best developer experience in crypto. We wanted to create the smoothest playground for smart people to create novel applications on the network. Boom. Technological goals and business goals were aligned at last.

How to grow large ecosystems

On paper, it’s quite easy to grow a large ecosystem. 

Here’s the recipe:

  • Product: Have a product that can last over time
  • Community: Bootstrap a community
  • Communication: Foster a loyal user base by creating a line of communication and establishing trust. Be authentic, don’t overpromise and underdeliver
  • Marketing: Understand your audience, speak their language, and explain why they should use your product

In practice though, it’s extremely hard and many fail. Leaving the product aside, there are quick ways to create a community, but quick in is often quick out.

The hard thing is to create a community that sticks around and that cares about what you’re building.

How do you make people care about what you’re building? If you figure that out, you’re on a good path.

Ultimately for Fantom, what worked was a combination of good tech and a strong and united community. Without those, any marketing effort would be short-lived.

Conclusion

Marketing in crypto is hard, but it’s also fun. It allows you – it forces you sometimes – to be very creative.

This industry is still at an early stage, which means there are opportunities for unconventional approaches and communication styles that would be somehow inappropriate outside of it. Memes are part of the culture. But in the end, it’s all about the people.

In the rapidly evolving world of blockchain, marketing is not just about selling a product or a token; it’s about building a movement. Understanding the human element—recognizing that behind every transaction, every token purchase, and every dApp use is a person with their hopes, fears, and dreams—is crucial.

By focusing on what truly matters to the community, marketers can unlock unprecedented levels of engagement and loyalty, paving the way for success in the unpredictable yet thrilling arena of blockchain.

Get in touch!

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