The Crypto Marketing Stack

Growth marketing in crypto is something you can engineer and streamline with the right arsenal of tools. But with so many great tools on the market, selecting the right mix for your product can be a daunting and expensive task. To help, I’ve put together a list of effective tools I have personally used with a variety of clients in the blockchain space. This is far from a complete list, and I will be adding to it as time goes on. If you have any recommendations or think I am missing something, feel free to shoot me a message or leave a comment below.

1. Email marketing

GetResponse, because of their great email deliverability rates, easy builder, and because Mailchimp banned crypto 🙅🏻‍

2. Content marketing management

Airtable, because it makes managing multiple writers and a complex content calendar ridiculously easy.

Crypto suffers from a lack of understanding and basic knowledge. The only way to overcome this is through heavy investment into educating the masses through great content. Current blockchain and crypto startups have the opportunity to shape perception and the course of conversation by presenting facts and rationale in a digestible manner, all while generating brand equity and awareness. Airtable makes this process a little easier.

3. Community management

Telegram, because having an active community with a lot of members indicates success, credibility, and social proof. Telegram’s vision of end-to-end encryption naturally appeals to privacy-focused, authority-skeptic crypto fans. Crypto day-traders gather to share analysis and keep on top of market movements (and blow off steam by endlessly trolling each other).

Discord is another chat app that has its roots in the gaming world, has seen significant adoption by the crypto world. The two internet subcultures share many things—and both benefit from easy real-time communication with razor-sharp interactivity and a slick user interface.

4. CRM

HubSpot, because their free product has all the core features you would expect a core CRM to have, without the complexity and implementation of Salesforce or Zoho. Live chat with sales prospects and integration with gmail goes a long way in empowering your sales team and tracking your leads, while the simple and intuitive interface make adoption easy.

5. Communication & collaboration

Slack, because no one has better search, file sharing, and grouping features. In my experience, their product provides stress relief, productivity, and a massive decrease in the use of email.

When working in remote teams (a common occurrence in the crypto/blockchain world), I’ve found that Slack’s core features make it a little easier to establish a sense of team culture and community.

6. Traffic analytics

Google Analytics, for tracking traffic, acquisition, and conversions across channels. While it has a bit of a learning curve, GA is great for monitoring paid media campaigns, understanding the age, gender, interest, device and location of your audience, and understanding the traffic sources and types of content that drive traffic and conversion.

7. Product analytics

Heap, because of its amazing funnel analysis tool and because it requires a lot less custom work and maintenance than Google Analytics. Heap captures all customer behavior data from web and mobile, and gives you easy-to-use tools that make data analytics painless.

8. Blogging

Medium and LinkedIn, because they are fast, clean, interfaces with built-in audiences. Posting the same content across both platforms (Medium posts + LinkedIn allows long-form articles) is a great way to gain momentum and grow an audience among the blockchain/crypto demographic.

*Bonus points (and distribution) if your content gets picked up by highly curated Medium publications such as Hacker Noon.

9. Social media management

Hootsuite, because I’ve yet to across a free product for managing multiple social media accounts and scheduling posts with substantially better value.

If you can afford the $79/month, CoSchedule is another great tool with a cleaner interface and more powerful social media integrations, automation, and analytics.

10. Project management

Trello, without a doubt my favorite project management tool. On first impression, it looks extremely basic and minimally designed. Yet its core features and functionality — including to-do-lists, file attachments, admin controls, custom board backgrounds, drag and drops — make it the perfect tool for small projects and complex projects alike.

I’ve also used Basecamp extensively when working with external agencies/freelancers. Although its functionality is not quite keeping up with the times, Basecamp is a great PM tool and is the tool of choice for many marketing and design vendors.

11. Customer support

Intercom, at once a help desk, live chat, marketing automation, and customer database. Intercom allows companies to send in-app messages to users based on certain triggered behaviors, send push notifications, log new tickets, and create landing pages. It is the ultimate tool for delivering stellar customer service to users at all stages of the funnel.

12. Discussion forums

Reddit, the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet,” is an online message board and community of a rather youthful and technologically-savvy user base, making it an ideal venue to promote crypto products. From hosting AMA (Ask Me Anything) about your project and creating your own sub-reddits to running ad campaigns and starting discussing on popular channels like r/Ethereum or r/Bitcoin, Reddit can be one of the best sources of traffic you have ever witnessed when used correctly.

Again, this is far from a complete list and I will be adding to it as time goes on. In the meantime, shoot me a message on LinkedIn if you want to talk growth marketing and crypto.

Cheers,

Alex

The Crypto Marketing Stack was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.