3 Viral Campaigns That Attract a Crypto Audience
One of the most important factors in determining success for many crypto and blockchain startups is the strength of its community. Now at AmaZix, community health can mean many things, and we generally characterize that through a number of factors, including how active it is, how engaged they are, and how passionate they feel about the products or services offered by the crypto project.
Especially important for B2C projects is the number of active users within its community. No matter the quality or health of their community, user numbers can have its own impact on the short- and medium-term health and growth of the project, with mass adoption the key goal for many. Simply put, the more people there are using the service or product, the more demand there is for the blockchain or crypto powering that service or product, and the better chance it has of becoming popular.
Viral Campaigns for Crypto
While there is no substitute for a solid marketing strategy that sets out clear objectives for your brand to succeed in the crypto space, there are some tactical strategies that can be considered to bootstrap user growth.
These generally involve focused activities conducted in a short period of time, attempting to build up as much hype and buzz as possible to spread awareness quickly. These are usually incentivized as well, to motivate people to further spread the word, hoping to achieve a sort of virality where information is shared and distributed quickly through the network effect -- hence the term “viral campaigns”.
AmaZix has experience in designing and implementing some of these for crypto projects, as we understand how crypto audiences are motivated, and what appeals to them in relation to the result desired from a viral campaign: is it to provide a quick boost to online communities and social media followings? Is it to generate awareness about a particular event and attract participants? Maybe it’s to get as many people using an app or service and product.
Here are 3 examples of viral campaigns that we’ve found to work really well for a crypto audience.
1. “Bounty” Campaigns
Anyone who’s been in crypto from 2016 onwards will be very familiar with so-called crypto bounty campaigns, when hundreds and thousands of crypto projects sought to grow their online numbers across Twitter, Facebook and Telegram by rewarding participants who create or share content across social media with free tokens from their project.
Because the tasks are typically quick and easy to perform, they are also the quickest to show results and can be quite cheap in terms of user acquisition. Expect to spend and see results within days, with quick user growth across various social media.
However, we tend to believe that these are generally the lowest quality type of audience and prone to fraud. Even if you find a way to only pay out to eligible users, “bounty hunters” are fickle and tend to move on as soon as they receive their rewards, with little inclination to remain in your channels, much less to use your product.
In other words, not something we recommend for sustainable results but always to be considered if you want a tactical campaign to boost visibility in support of other more strategic campaigns.
2. Gamified contests
Another popular type of viral campaign is a prize giveaway, where participants are awarded an attractive prize depending on how well they perform in a contest. The prize itself will have to be appealing to the audience you’re marketing to. For example, a gaming community should look forward to prizes that enhance their gaming, while a financial service project should offer a prize that fits their customer demands. A huge cash prize paid out in crypto generally also does the trick!
There are many different types of contests to consider, but you’ll want to ensure that participants are also forced to interact with your project several times to ensure you also build awareness. These can be gamified, rewarding points for doing certain actions, completing certain tasks like downloading and using and app, and sharing on social media.
We’ve seen many projects achieve success with quiz type contests, or even treasure hunts, where answers or clues can be found by looking through existing content as a way to really encourage users to familiarize themselves with projects.
These contests should also include a referral system, encouraging people to share and recruit more participants for a higher chance to win the prize. In fact, the entire viral campaign can even be built around a referral contest to boost user numbers.
Done well, you can generate a lot of excitement during the campaign, build familiarity with the project, and even learn more about your audience throughout.
3. Community Challenges
When your project already has a significant crypto community online, and you know that they are active, and have a decent level of engagement, you can always inject bouts of excitement and optimism as a way to maintain existing users interest and through this activity attract new users with short “community” challenges.
Depending on the platform, this can be quite easy to do. Discord and Telegram, for example, allow you to put bots that can help you play games, quizzes and track other types of activity, and even tipping them the prizes directly with in-built wallets. But even without those technological tools, there are other types of Community Challenges such as for example a Meme challenge.
Crypto communities identify strongly with memes. We only need to look at the surprising longevity of Dogecoin to understand just how much crypto users love a bit of fun, regardless of age group. Even the DeFi space is awash with memes and meme-related terminology.
One way to take advantage of this is to create a Meme campaign, inviting community members to come up with all kinds of creative ideas to share and talk about your campaign in a humorous way. The winning memes get prizes, and get turned into meme templates so people can use them on social media or on chats as stickers.
Used with the right branding, this can create a long-term organic familiarity even months after the campaign.
To summarize, there are many options to choose from when considering brief tactical campaigns playing on virality effect for short-term results as part of a broader marketing strategy for crypto projects. You just have to be clear about what you want to achieve, and whether or not your community is ready for these viral campaigns.
Wondering what sort of viral campaign would work for your crypto projects? Drop us a line on Telegram!