Every successful project requires a dedicated community built around it. This concept has become an integral part of any marketing strategy, especially within the crypto industry.
While the main idea with any crypto project is to deliver a technically impressive product and immaculate code, the main value to it is the community. It’s the community that gives it the edge over competitors, approves or disapproves of the product, develops it, and gives it some soul.
Community means a group of people who come together and share the same interests with a common goal, and, more importantly, who care about one another and the collective good.
In this article, we analyze the steps that go into creating a successful community for crypto/blockchain projects.
- Goal setting
Goal setting is a good starting point for achieving small and then bigger victories. Ask yourself two crucial questions:
What is the main goal of our community?
What is the measurement of our value?
Tell your community about your values because these are the individuals to help you reach them. Also, keep them informed about your ups and downs and needs whenever possible so that they know they can make a difference. They will appreciate this frankness.
- Choose proper platforms
The majority of crypto projects prefer Telegram, Discord, Twitter and Reddit.
Both Telegram and Discord are highly rated for their security and encryption features.
Telegram supports communication through groups and channels that attract users, while Discord works with servers. Here you can create public or private servers, which may contain groups and channels, and there’s no limit to how many servers you can run. That means that access to different channels can be controlled according to a person’s role.
To find and deal with rogue admins, you may use your Audit Log in the server settings. This helps to track all admin actions, such as banning users, and allows you to track down admins that are abusing their role. But it doesn’t allow you to rank the quality of a post or comment, so trolls and scammers can sometimes overwhelm the conversation with noise and distractions.
Discord is open sourced which means you can have customized features while Telegram is not, but it does provide a number of bots that can help. Customizability of Discord is on another level as you can add bots to enhance the functionality of your servers or games to entertain the audience.
Projects tend to use Telegram mainly for answering questions, communicating to their ICO participants and for technical discussions between their team and open-source developers. It is extremely user friendly and has lots of features. Discord also has these features, but they are situated in one server rather than in a message feed.
Apart from that, messaging on Telegram and Discord is cloud-based, which means that content can be edited and deleted on both the sender and the receiver’s side, and messages remain available on synced devices.
- Collaborations
Collaborations with other projects tell your community a lot about your project. Thanks to integrations and collaborations with different platforms, projects can invite a wider audience and create a useful product. Establishing trust with the audience creates a database of potential clients who will help to share information about services and the project itself.
- Cross-posting
Cross-posting is a marketing technique that has been used successfully on many occasions.
- Understanding the client’s experience
The point of entry is of paramount importance with every client. It is here that clients form an opinion about you, no matter which platform they enter. It is here when some of them may become your most loyal followers and fans.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, as they say.
- Client’s perception and high quality content
Good content will always remain the number one key to success. There are a few questions to answer to understand your audience:
– Who’s a member of your community?
– Why do they want to join you?
– What do they expect?
To answer these questions you have to use certain communication tactics with your audience:
– Try gathering as much information about them as possible;
– Encourage people to generate content about you themselves and spread information around;
– Create precise tasks for your audience.
Each member can contribute to the development of your product and create additional value.
- Influencer marketing
Your project will struggle to thrive without influencer marketing. It is vital to find a proper blogger who will be interested in your product and will adroitly translate the spirit of your community to their audience.
- Ask for expertise
If need be, seek professional help from people who know how to build a community by experience or by profession.
Last, but not least, remember to enjoy the community creation process and appreciate that it takes time to do this thoroughly and effectively. But in the end it will all be worth it.