Earning the Crypto Community’s Trust is the Fastest Way to Scale Your Brand

Welcome back. This week we’re going to talk about the power of earning consumer trust and how trust indicators can be leveraged to help win over life-long customers. It’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now, so here we are.

Next week I’ll be publishing the second quarterly crypto SEO update, so keep an eye out for that.

If you have any thoughts or feedback, feel free to tweet at @MarketMix_. You can also DM me at @bradmichelson.🔺

This week’s issue is sponsored by Blockworks

Blockworks launched two new podcasts this week: Empire and On the Margin. 

I asked their team if I could share sponsorship availability/pricing for you all… 

Turns out Empire is already sold out, but On the Margin has one spot open. 

On the Margin’s first episode already has 23,000 views on YouTube.

If you want to sponsor the podcast, reach out to Blockworks via email. Tell them I sent you and they’ll take care of you. 

The first thing I tell new crypto brands to do when they launch is to focus on earning the trust of the community. It sounds obvious but it’s actually one of the hardest things for a marketer to do in our industry, where the audience defaults to being so much more skeptical than consumers in other industries. And for good reason.

Without the trust of the wider community, you’re not going to get very far with Crypto Twitter. I really believe it’s the first thing that new brands have to focus on.

Let me put some fear into you:

1. Lack of trust costs U.S. brands $756 billion per year

2. 59% of consumers say that a single data breach would negatively impact their likelihood of buying brands from a consumer products company

3. 45% of consumers would never trust a brand again after it displays unethical behavior or is involved in a scandal

4. And 40% of consumers say they’d stop buying from that brand altogether

But just like we recently discussed with retention marketing, if you do this right, there is significant upside:

1. 82% of consumers say they will continue to buy a brand they trust, even if another brand suddenly becomes hot and trendy.

2. And 78% say they always recommend the brand if someone asks.

3. To top it off, 75% say they will continue to buy a product from a trusted brand even if a competitor is getting better reviews.

Trust was the biggest hurdle for us when we were launching the BlockFi brand. This was a year off the back of the 2017/2018 market boom and bust.

No one knew about us and the community was less than inviting for new brands entering the space, particularly for one in the lending space. I made the decision pretty early to focus on promoting our trust indicators to help solve this issue.

It was pretty frustrating at first.

But we found ways around it. We leaned on our early investors, leveraging their prestigious reputations as trust indicators for why people should trust our brand. And it worked.

By the time we launched the interest account, major players in the space took notice, posting to Twitter about how the product offering was making them reconsider their previous concerns.

The company has since scaled to being one of the fastest growing companies in the wider fintech industry. Amazing.

At the end of the day, your goal as a brand marketer is to provide your audience with reasons to trust you. That’s the core of your job. They’re not going to do it for you.

Here’s the four things you can do to help your brand build trust within the crypto community:

1. Be Human

No one likes engaging with a robot (ok, some people do I guess). One of the simplest things you can do as an emerging brand in a niche industry like ours is to talk to your audience the way they are used to being spoken to -- like a person.

Sometimes this means using informal language. But more often this means being fluent in the language of memes. Lolli does a great job of this and the community loves them for it.

2. Share Your Community’s Values

Social causes are a huge topic for brands these days. Seventy percent of consumers say it’s important for brands to take a stand on social and political issues, up from 66% in 2017.

Applying this idea to the crypto community can mean a lot of things, but the main through-line here is going to be the emphasis on promoting financial sovereignty.

Not every crypto brand can dive too far into this narrative (centralized products in particular). It’s an area where DeFi and Bitcoin Lightning products have a clear advantage. And some of those brands do this very, very effectively.

I love how Umbrel does this on Twitter. They get double bonus points for being able to carry those values to the forefront while also communicating with your community like a human, rather than a brand. 👏

3. Be Transparent

Sometimes things just don’t go according to plan. Maybe you screwed up. Maybe it wasn’t the company’s fault at all. The customer is going to blame you regardless.

One of the most important things you can do as a brand is to be as up-front as possible when something big does go wrong.

1. Don’t evade questions

2. Be as detailed as possible

3. Communicate clearly

This goes a long way in building trust with crypto consumers. We’re talking about peoples’ money here, so remember that.

4. Be Trustworthy

This sounds dumb, but make sure that you’re worthy being trusted. It takes time, but it’s probably the most important investment you can make for your brand. 

A 2014 study found that there are two key kinds of transparency:

1. A company's reputation for transparency 

2. A company’s efforts to communicate transparently

Unsurprisingly, the study found that companies that had a reputation for transparency were deemed more trustworthy than companies who didn’t. Invest early and make it a priority. 🔺

Who’s Hiring Marketers in Crypto?

• Email Marketing Lead @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Business Intelligence Analyst @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Director, Product Marketing @ Mythical Games [APPLY]

• Marketing and Communications Lead @ SFOX [APPLY]

• Junior Marketing Analyst @ Bitrefill [APPLY]

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to share Market Mix with your friends. 🔺