New clients for your blockchain startup - Improve your sales funnel and watch out for these best practices.

Struggling to get new clients in the crypto space is not rare, but the reasons behind it are diverse. When talking about blockchain, your clients may leave the product in the basket or need more convincing about how your service will apply to their problems. The solution in both cases is improving your funnel. Since blockchain is digital, we focused on online/remote products in this article. We will review the levels of a good sales funnel and give concrete examples of enhancing your company's performance.

Authors: Mayra Candelaria and Carmen Rodríguez

Figure 1: Marketing funnel

AWARENESS - Who is your company?

Awareness is the highest level of the marketing funnel; this occurs when a client easily associates a product with its brand name; this association should preferably include positive comments about the company that differentiates it from its competitors. 

Marketing campaigns are crucial in this funnel stage because they aim to attract potential customers; that’s why brand awareness can help your company to introduce new products or improve the existing ones. One way to achieve this is using social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Telegram.

Figure 2: Average time spent on social media (2012-2022)

According to Statista, the average time spent on social media worldwide in 2022 is 02:27 hours per day, as shown in Fig. 2; therefore, there is no surprise that today’s businesses invest resources to boost their profiles. For instance, Reddit (an app with different crypto communities) has accumulated 430 million active users per month, and Twitter has 206 million daily active users.

Best practice: Be an active user on social media platforms aligned with your strategy. 

INTEREST - What are you offering?

So, after making your future clients aware of your brand, the interest phase is the next stage, where clients begin investigating your company’s services and offers.

This phase connects the brand with the potential customers while presenting your company’s position to them. These potential customers can be developed through various channels besides the above-mentioned social media; it can also include email, specific content to industries, educational opportunities, newsletters, and more. The desired outcome is for the user to take an active interest in your company and be open to more information.

The interest stage of the funnel is one of the most difficult challenges any company encounters on their marketing journey; hence, having a well-based marketing strategy is the key to success; your company needs to communicate in a simple way with initiatives and educational content.
 
Most people are unfamiliar with blockchain, which makes them afraid to interact with or invest in it; therefore, educating your target audience about this topic is essential. By achieving this, your prospective client will understand clearly the technology and the problem you are solving. Figure 3 shows an example of how to engage your audience with a post explaining the definition of a “crypto term” in a friendly way.

Figure 3. Post from Luna Vision's account on Instagram.

Best practice: Include in your publications educational but entertaining content for your viewers.

CONSIDERATION - What client’s problems are you solving?

At this point, your prospective clients are already paying attention to your product; hence, you can continue educating them using automated email campaigns with customized content and case studies. Likewise, you can include free trials and additional information about your products and offers.

Luna Vision carries out a clear example of this and offers a free call to their new clients to get to know their needs and expectations, as shown in Figure 4; this is a good way to hook your clients by giving them a taste of your products and services.

Figure 4. Luna Vision’s booking free call

Best practice: Include a free product trial and let your client experience it first-hand.

DESIRE - Why is your company the best one?

In this step of the funnel, the consumer recognises your brand and the problem you can solve for them and wants to acquire a product or service to solve it. Since blockchain is a relatively young industry, there are not that many competitors. Nevertheless, you must analyze the ecosystem and differentiate. 

SEO (search engine optimization) is a process that will improve the quality and quantity of your website traffic, allowing you to rank for words like “TOP” or “BEST”. If a potential client runs a google search about your service, you want to be one of the first options he encounters. As you can see in Fig. 5, when you search “blockchain podcast”, you already get a selection of three. To be among them, you must select the blockchain topics you want to rank for and then transfer them to your title tags and meta descriptions. But remember, SEO is not only about keywords; you should also use proper domains and URLs. 

Best practice: Select some keywords and start using them on your title tags and descriptions.

Figure 5: search engine of blockchain podcasts

ACTION - Why should the customer purchase ASAP?
After going through the different levels, your client has been educated in blockchain technology, understands the problem, has received targeted content, knows your services, and is convinced that you are the best in the market. All this would be in vain if you don't manage to move your customer through the last stage. Inducement to purchase can be achieved through time-limited offers and “calls to action” on websites and emails. As you can see in Fig. 6, you can include a call to action on your home page like basenode did on their website.

Figure 6: Call to action Basenode

In this step, you should work closely with the sales team to increase conversion rates. The concept of “scarcity” is the desire to have a product when there are not many. This has been proven with the boom of NFTs. In the eyes of the consumer, purchasing something scarce will speed the buying process.

Best practice: Include a call to action on your website

Last tips to have a healthy funnel

As you can see, acquiring new clients can be a long, complicated process, but it is possible with the right strategies. Moreover, sometimes the marketing funnel is not linear, and prospects could enter it at different levels; this sometimes occurs when customers have already been told about a brand's product and know they want to buy it; hence they enter directly into the Interest phase. You should also keep in mind that bringing your recent client back up to the funnel is often cheaper than acquiring new ones. So be sure to follow up with your customers and generate brand loyalty.