Crypto exploded in 2016 and 2017, leading to wild, and often reckless, investing, selling, and several notable scams. Governments and platforms alike took note. This led to a strong crackdown on the type of content that could be shared on these platforms. More specifically, almost all paid advertising was curtailed across all of the major platforms, from Google to the Facebook (now Meta) empire.
But, as crypto has grown, expanding into a larger project — Web3 — many of these platforms are taking note and jumping on board. Just look at Meta. This means, they've had to revise their stance.
This brought paid marketing back to the forefront of many projects who had avoided it for years. (Although many others managed to slip through the cracks.) And, it came back with a bang, with crypto projects dominating this year's Super Bowl…and many subsequent discussions.
But, for marketers with more modest sights set on a more day-to-day style of paid advertising, what does this landscape look like?
Paid Ads for Crypto
First and foremost, let's be clear, paid marketing only means that more people will see your posts or information. This often is not enough for an actual sale. This is true in Web2, and even more so for Web3, because there is even lower understanding and trust in the various products.
What paid marketing can do, though, is be part of your plan to build your brand, remind people of it, and, eventually, result in a sale. What can you do?
All of this comes together to build brand awareness, but needs to work in conjunction with several other things to convince some over time that they should actually move all the way down the funnel. For instance, memes are great to drive sentiment, and 'Join Discord' or 'Subscribe' might be good for soft-funnels, but how this all comes together to eventually lead to actual sales.
This is unfortunately a very hard thing to track…and can be a hard sell for companies watching hard dollars go out…and soft metrics come in.
Tips
Well, this might not be a tip, so much as a rule of thumb. Content can be offset…but not fixed…by throwing money at it. It's best to start with good content, which will generally drive down the price for video campaigns, and just improve how effective they are overall.
Otherwise, when choosing a platform, also think about the type of information they collect about their users. This will help you make better decisions about how to target on that platform.
- Twitter — collects written content, so use keywords.
- Reddit — also collects written content, so use keywords, but also target people based on subreddits they follow.
- LinkedIn — although extremely expensive, this is the only platform that consistently and effectively collects professional information.
- Facebook/Meta — collects a profound amount of information.
- Google — also collects a profound amount of information.
And, finally, while the paid ads landscape is opening up for Web3, many of these platforms still have automated triggers that will flag and pull your content. To try to sidestep this from the get-go, try to leave the following out of ad copy:
I know, this is limiting, but trust me, having your ads pulled or the entire account suspended is more. For the time being, erring on the side of caution generally helps.
A Changing Landscape
The announcement that many platforms were banning paid ads for crypto projects back in the late 2010’s was a blow. And, I’m not sure we’ve all recovered from the whiplash of many of these platforms revising their stance in recent months, even if the revisions (in practice) have been slow.
All the same, the loosening of the rules limiting any type of paid advertising for crypto and Web3 companies is a major step. Once again, projects are able to build brand awareness with the help of various social platforms. Although, using these platforms for actual conversion, especially around more hardline crypto projects is still a very tricky situation.
But, keep your eyes and ears open, because the next few years, or even months will likely bring even more updates on the topic.
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