Last week, BNB Chain introduced a $10 million fund to help blockchain projects with user acquisition and growth. This fund highlights how imperative it is for any project within the blockchain space to form a tribe around their platform. However, even with blockchain’s proven potential to achieve significant transformation, startups and new projects face difficulties gathering sufficient user bases or active users.
In today’s emerging digital marketplace, blockchain projects desirous of building a loyal community of users must implement strategies that transcend the influence of Twitter, whose lifespan is mostly a matter of minutes. To unlock the transformative power of blockchain, projects must identify more innovative ways to build a more lasting, positive impression.
This article explores strategies organizations can use to grow their user base significantly, achieve mass adoption, and hit growth goals using blockchain’s capacity for efficiency and value addition.
When creating a user base to achieve mass adoption, projects that target everyone fundamentally end up targeting no one. The first step, therefore, is defining your audience so your message will be tailored to the exact needs of a particular group. Blockchain and decentralized applications are still in their early growth period. As a result, both the message and the messenger must adapt to the community’s needs, and defining such an audience will revolve around blockchain knowledgeability.
Developers must see beyond the surface-level analysis of the problems that their project seeks to solve for users to have a chance of getting hooked to their vision. An excellent example of a blockchain concept is the Dapper Lab’s NBA Top Shot project, built around collecting NBA highlight moments. Though simple, the idea offers NBA fans an innovative blockchain collectible that makes efforts to rally them into an engaged community of users worthwhile. The idea has created a generation of fans of NBA diehards who will pay anything to “own” the best NBA highlights.
An exciting story highlighting the objectives and benefits of your project can be a first-rate technique to spark the interest of new and old community members, besides indoctrinating team members about the project’s aims, values, beliefs, and concepts. Ensure the story provides potential members with reasons for them to desire to join and engage with your community.
Implementing this strategy involves creating an official group where developers and users engage with one another on the project’s development. Use cross-channel marketing ideas that appeal to various platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram and Discord to offer rewards as incentives for members inviting friends to the group to increase traffic and grow your user base. You may want to develop secondary or purpose-based groups for different languages and use media resources like links, images, videos, or ads.
It is essential to design a retention strategy to keep the community of believers in your blockchain project from day one. The project team must have fast, ready, clear, and accessible answers to common and challenging questions. It’s also necessary to arrange seasonal activities like Ask Me Anything (AMA) interviews, polls, and contests or competitions to give community members a sense of ownership or belonging. Keeping the community engaged gives them a reason to remain with you long-term and become loyal supporters.
Since blockchain is a developing space, you want to anticipate different kinds of users with convergent contexts, personalities, and motivations. By conducting demographic research and creating a persona analysis of your user base, you’ll be able to categorize members as developers, users, investors, newbies, or enthusiasts and address their needs accordingly. Provide 24/7 support where community members can readily access admins who can answer questions about the project anytime.
The blockchain space is gradually getting crowded, which shouldn’t necessarily be bad. Developers can carefully choose to collaborate with other projects if the added value of cross-pollination presents opportunities to create something whose value to users will be greater than the sum of its parts. With a long history of collaborating with Binance, Kava Labs offers the best example of growing a user base through partnerships.
The application, built on the principle of blockchain interoperability, announced a new partnership with BNB48, a club consisting of investors of Binance’s BNB token. The collaboration aims to create awareness of the opportunities available in decentralized finance (DeFi) for users holding the BNB token.
By tapping into a broader market, the blockchain project has launched Hard, an automated money market that allows users to lend, borrow and earn with others like Bitcoin (BTC), Ripple (XRP), and BNB. While the blockchain space is inherently tribal, projects can use this feature to their advantage by creating a broader following that could, in turn, spread the word about their projects to a broader audience.
You want to integrate performance-tracking tools like Google Analytics into your system to help you understand if you’re meeting your objectives. The internet is chock-full of multiple tools projects can employ to determine if they’re taking the proper steps in meeting their key metrics. However, since building a community of users is a challenging task that may require advanced experience, get professional help from developers with the tools and expertise to help create and grow your user base.
An engaged community of users who understand and believe in a project are the best advocates to offer vital organic support on social media and beyond. You can trust a satisfied community to explain your blockchain products and answer related questions on different social media channels, helping to increase understanding and adoption.
Enthusiastic blockchain community members can become aficionados eager to learn about your project and an active frontline army of ambassadors keen on engaging with new and potential members. Creating a thoughtful and mutually beneficial relationship founded on honest and open communication can be valuable to continuous onboarding initiatives that incentivize growth for your blockchain project.
