This guest post was written by Rudi Davis, Senior SEO & Content Manager at PR agency Publicize, specialists in PR for blockchain and other tech verticals. If you are an entrepreneur building a pre-seed stage blockchain startup, at the time of this publishing, you can still apply to join the Toronto Founder Institute's second Blockchain Founder Syndicate program.
While blockchain technology may have made its public debut 10 years ago, developing an effective content strategy can still be a tricky task. You need to get in front of multiple audiences and explain complex subjects to the average reader. That’s not to mention any work you may need to do, in dispelling any misgivings the general public has with a technology that’s slightly tarnished by crypto scams.
But if you want to build awareness, educate the public, and onboard new users, then nailing your blockchain content strategy is vital. And the key to succeeding with this: plan for the long-term. So here’s how to build the foundations for this and start off on the right foot.
1. Define your target audience
Every good content strategy starts with identifying its target audience. Begin by defining each of your user groups, then define the wants and needs of each group. This will look something like the following:
- Potential investors: If you’re using an ICO or other token event to raise funding, then your content will need to answer why someone should invest in you versus another company. Consider how you can articulate your use case and unique value proposition.
- Existing investors: You need to provide confidence to investors to ensure stability. This could be achieved with regular development and commercial updates.
- Prospective service users: You need to explain how your product provides the best solution to your prospective users’ needs. Consider how you present your unique value proposition to users.
Take this one step further by creating buyer personas for each of these user groups. This will help you to define things like your tone of voice and communication style. For example, if you’re a fintech blockchain company that’s raising funding via an ICO, your investor buyer persona could be millennials in the crypto community. But your prospective service user buyer persona could be decision-makers in financial institutions.
2. Scope out the competition
Based on your market knowledge, make a list of your main competitors. This should include those in the blockchain space and also non-blockchain companies competing with your product or service. Aim for about six to ten competitors to analyze.
Now broaden this list by discovering which companies are the most successful with search. Enter a body keyword phrase into Google that best describes your product. For example, if you’re a blockchain energy trading company, a keyword phrase such as “energy trading” would be too broad. So a phrase such as “blockchain energy trading” would be more appropriate. Add all the companies appearing on page one to your list.
It’s now time to uncover the content strategies of your competitors. Sign up for a 30 day free trial of SEMrush or Moz. Using the site explorer function, enter each of your competitors’ websites. You can now view all the keyword phrases they are ranking for and what pages are capturing these keywords. To make analysis a bit easier, download all of these reports into spreadsheets.
3. Uncover your competitor’s content strategies
Search can be split into three broad categories:
- Navigational: Users searching for the name of a company, instead of typing in the URL
- Transactional: Users searching for a product or service they’re in the market for
- Informational: Users searching for information on something or an answer to a question
Why is this important? Well, as much as I love talking about the theory of search to anyone that’ll listen, understanding this is vital when planning a content strategy. Apply these categories to the keyword terms your competitors are ranking for.
Look at the transactional terms and the type of content capturing these. What type of terms are being captured by competitor homepages? What type of terms are being captured by product or services landing pages? What type of content are on these pages?
Do the same analysis with informational terms. What type of search terms are these and what type of content is capturing this? Blog posts will probably be capturing the majority of these terms, but what other type of content is performing well? Are there common informational queries that are being captured by the majority of your competitors?
4. Map out your content strategy
Now you know how your competitors are doing it, you can start mapping out your own content strategy. You need to think about the user groups you identified in step one, combined with the types of searches discussed above. Consider the following:
- What problems does your product solve? For example, if you’re developing a blockchain for supply chains product, you could create informational blog content on existing problems in supply chain management. This content will need to be targeted at both potential investors and prospective service users. The good news is that a lot of it can be taken from your white paper.
- What industries are you targeting? If your product is targeting multiple industries, think about how you could capture industry-specific transactional searches. This could be via landing pages for each industry. Or if your product is industry specific, could you split this into subsections? For example, if you have a medtech blockchain product, you could target insurers, private medical networks and public health bodies with different content.
- What’s the best way to broadcast progress? This content won’t necessarily capture search. Its purpose is to keep your existing investors up to date and to show to everyone else the progress you’re making. Consider the most impactful way of doing this, such as a regular blog post from the CEO. This can be amplified via your social channels and press releases.
5. Concentrate on owned media content first
Once you’ve researched the market and mapped out a plan, it’s time to implement it. Focus on owned media first. By this, I mean your website and any other channels that you control.
When it comes to content creation, I’ll let you into a little secret: a good content creator is a resourceful content creator. To clarify, I’m definitely not talking about content spinning, where you rewrite the same article half a dozen times. These days, this is a sure fire way to get in trouble with Google. But you should wring every last drop of value out of each piece of content you create.
In the case of a blockchain company, your white paper is the basis of this resourcefulness. This can be used as the basis for creating content that will sit across your site. In terms of what content to create first, focus on longer form explanatory content.
For example, this could be a mini-thesis of the problem you’re fixing in the industry that you’re in. You can then select topics that are touched upon here, and write these up into smaller standalone pieces of content. My mantra is that good content begets good content.
6. Start reaching out for earned media wins
As your owned media content begins to expand and mature, you’re then well placed to reach out and win earned media. That’s a fancy PR way of saying media coverage. Three of the most effective do-it-yourself methods of winning media coverage are press releases, guest contributor writing and content syndication.
A blockchain or crypto press release is a good medium for announcing important milestones and achievements. Therefore, it’s a great mechanism for keeping investors and potential investors updated with progress. But outside of this, its use becomes more limited. That’s why you need to also factor in the below.
Guest contributor writing is where you pen an article that’s then published in a third party publication. You want to approach both blockchain media outlets and media outlets specific to your industry. This way, you can build awareness within the blockchain space, which helps with future investments, partnerships and attracting new hires. Meanwhile, you’re also building awareness with potential service users via industry-specific publications.
Approach publications and pitch them articles about your industry which you have demonstrable expertise on. Always try to align this with your broader content strategy by having related owned media content you can link to within these articles (although stick to some basic dos and don’ts with this).
As for content syndication, this is similar to guest contributor writing. However, instead of writing an article from scratch, you provide a piece of content you’ve already written. This is then published on a third party website. This type of arrangement is often favored by organizations that want to publish regular content but may lack the resources to do this. So think about blockchain conferences and events websites, or blockchain accelerators and incubator websites.
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Conclusion
As you can see, you need to take a logical and phased approach when setting up a content strategy for your blockchain company. You need to consider each of your target user groups and decide how you can create content that will appeal to the wants and needs of each.
Once you’ve settled on a plan, created owned media content, and began winning media coverage with PR, you’ll be on your way to onboarding plenty of new users. And what’s more, this becomes a sustainable long term model, where you’ll see continual returns on all the time and effort you’ve invested.
If you are the Founder of a pre-seed stage blockchain startup, apply to join the Toronto Founder Institute's second Blockchain Founder Syndicate program.
Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over $1.85BN in funding, and building products people love across over 200 cities worldwide.
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