10 marketing tips to thrive in the bear market

It's the nature of the game in an emerging industry that there are rapid climbs and even faster drops in technology adoption. These are the bull and bear market trends of all markets - from financial markets to Web3. Marketing in the bull market can seem much easier because of the momentum your audience brings to the table - but the bear market trend is still a time for growth.

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From an investing point of view, you'll hear plenty of strategies as to how to optimize growth in bear markets. Personal finance experts have pushed tactics and strategies like dollar cost averaging, buying defensive stocks, and always ensuring you buy dividend-paying stocks to gear your investment portfolio for the subsequent bull market. How can we gear ourselves up for the long run and ensure the audience stays invested in our project? Bear market territory causes detractors, irrespective of the industry.

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But what about marketing? What kind of marketing tactics can a Web3 or Crypto project implement to maintain interest in all of the market volatility? Bear markets aren't fun for anyone unless you know what you are doing. The prolonged market downturn and plummeting fiat stock prices cause people to re-evaluate their investment strategy and adjust their risk tolerance. Prices fall and prices rise, and market conditions will always be things that we can't control, but we need to know how to operate in each of them. Bear markets are scary!

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If the current market downturn has led you to hate the bear market - we understand! With market volatility at an all-time high and many crypto investors reminiscing on the days of the bull market, let's take a look at 10 marketing tips that can help you thrive now that the bear market is the status quo.

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Play the Long Game

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When navigating a bear market, you may be dealing with reduced focus from your audience - it's essential to have a long-term strategy in mind. It can be tempting to jump on every new marketing trend, but be careful to avoid doing this (primarily if it's unrelated to your project). This season, you'll need to hone in on what has worked well for you and your project. Focus on building and strengthening your existing community rather than just driving more traffic to your website.

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Thriving in the bear cycle is all about that human connection. As in any market, you need to build trust and rapport with your audience so they'll feel comfortable choosing your project over any others. The overall market can be plummeting for a few years, but if your audience feels a sense of strong underlying principles and good technology upon which your project is being built, and on top of it they trust you, you've hit the trifecta!

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If you can manage to play a long game - the clients you bring in during the bear market are likely to be those who remain loyal for many years to come.

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Create a Content Marketing Strategy

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Since the dawn of Web2 - content marketing has been an excellent way to build your reach. Whether you need to generate leads, gain traffic, or build trust with your audience - a good strategy will ensure your efforts never get wasted.

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When revenues are flowing, and the market is stampeding ahead during a bull market, we're all tempted to spend more than usual on paid campaigns. Still, in the bear market - our budgets are rightfully smaller. A tailored content strategy helps deliver relevant articles, posts, and media to our audience.

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Knowing the goal for each piece of content and how it will contribute to your overall marketing strategy is vital before you start the creative process. Your tone matters in every piece: People are more cautious when approaching content in a bear market. Look to share your optimism, your existing user success stories, and engaging content that promotes the benefits of using your company's solutions.

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Know Your Audience

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It's vital to identify your target audience and the types and places where they are engaging with your brand and your competitors! You need to know whom you're writing for, their interest, and what actions you'd like them to take. Once you have all this information, creating content that resonates with your audience and increases awareness of your brand will be much easier.

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If you've successfully attracted new users, review the statistics from previous posts and campaigns and see where they came from and what messaging they responded to best. Ensure you're targeting content to your audience where the easy wins were in previous engagements so you can attract more users using tried and tested strategies.

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Use Social Media

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Social media channels are a great way to connect with your audience personally and interact with them in real time. Consistency is one of the keys to an effective Social Media strategy. It's also a powerful strategy to use the presence of other creators and influencers on social media by sharing relevant posts or photos from their feeds.

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Always ensure your social posts are topical and relevant - this is always the golden rule - and actively connect with, share, and tag industry leaders or positive sentiments from your users or leaders on the platforms. Social media platforms are free to use and ideal for community building. Remember: beat the bear - keep your social channels upbeat and engaging!

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Implement your Brand Strategy

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A key to content marketing is to build and stick to your brand strategy. This will help you determine what content you need and how often it should be created. It's also essential to create an editorial calendar and to ensure that all of your posts are consistent in tone, style, and format so that they flow together seamlessly.

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Ensure your logo, image styles, colour schemes, and content are on point while remaining appropriate across all platforms. Your website and blog should reinforce the quality content posted throughout the rest of the web - as should email signatures and every other piece of media published by your business.

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Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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SEO is increasing the number of visitors to your site by making it more visible in search engine results. While this is often overlooked - it is arguably the most crucial way to generate new interest during bear markets. A business on page one of Google results can be consistently rewarded with new traffic no matter what the rest of the market is doing. SEO is accomplished by optimizing your website's text content, image tags, and website structure to make it easily digestible by search engines. Creating relevant backlinks from other sites and news articles that point to relevant pages on your website is also essential.

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Do your Market Research

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Market research is used to gather information about your competitors, the market in general, and your target audience. (Yes, we know we've already mentioned the audience! It's that important!). This information will help you determine how to position yourself relative to other players in your field and what kind of content would be most beneficial for your users.

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Once you have an idea of what is working for them, your own strategies can be developed - and once you see things that have yet to work for them - you can save significant time (and reputation) by not repeating their mistakes.

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Over a longer period of time every business cycle, market trend, and overall sentiment changes. The point of market research is to stay invested in delivering quality to the right group of people! Long-term growth is the critical factor here.

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Don't Rely on Paid Advertising Alone

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Paid advertising is a great way to get the word out about your brand and increase your presence on social media. However, it's important not to rely on this alone. It would help if you also incorporated organic marketing strategies into your overall plan to keep costs down while still building brand awareness.

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Suppose you can - build a list of subscribers or invite users to follow and engage with you on your chosen social media platforms. Build campaigns and funnels that drive the audience to take action. Use pixels and analytics to build more brilliant campaigns - and reduce your costs through remarketing when you run paid promotions. Gather user emails and opt-ins for marketing wherever you can without negatively impacting the user experience. If you are looking for advice on the best ad networks for crypto projects, then look no further - Top 5 Crypto Ad Networks For 2023

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Run Giveaways and Competitions

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Well-structured and relevant giveaways are a great way to attract new followers, generate interest in your brand, and build loyalty among existing customers. These types of promotions are often relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing. You can hold them as often as you want. However, it would help if you were sure to provide value for participants and only offer relevant prizes to your business. We recommend using a respected platform to handle your competition to ensure you can communicate well with any audience members who engage with your promotion. Consider making it a requirement that they opt into your email list or create an account to win the prize.

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Experiment with New Channels and Techniques

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If you've been using the same marketing strategies for a while now and they aren't working as well as they used to, it's time to try something new. As mentioned before - check out the competition or leaders in your field and experiment with different types of content or social media posts. Reviewing some new tools for your marketing toolbox or trying a few new platforms could be the door into a more extensive community that you haven't been able to engage with yet. If you have a team to manage the room - consider launching chat rooms on platforms such as Telegram or even explore WhatsApp's new "Communities" feature.

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Embrace Your Network

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It takes far more effort to get a new customer than to maintain an existing client - so when you are marketing in a bear market, make sure that you are looking after your existing clients well. Put in some effort to turn clients or followers into advocates. Once you have happy clients - leverage them by asking them for testimonials and referrals. The cheapest form of marketing - and the most powerful - is word-of-mouth (or self-driven-tweet) recommendations built on top of positive customer experiences. In addition, take the time to reach out to your network and see if there are opportunities where they could share your solution with their extended network.

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These tips are all founded on delivering a solution that adds value to your audience despite the bear market environment. If you implement all - or some - of these, we're sure you'll be ready to capitalize when the market turns again. For now, let's look at why we're in this market stage at the moment, so we can learn from those that went before us as well.

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What has caused the bear market?

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Understanding some of the reasons behind this latest fall in the crypto market. Cryptocurrencies are still in the nascent stage, and there is a lot of rapid growth followed by dramatic pullbacks in price. It's volatile. One of the primary reasons for this bear market is FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) over this volatility. While it's easy to see the volatility over a short period, it is helpful to zoom out and see that some metrics and coins have been more stable than legacy financial markets. Those traditional markets are also experiencing significant challenges at the moment.

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An essential driver of this bear market is the rise and fall of many altcoins projects and scams which were not delivering real value to the users. ICOs from as far back as 2017 have struggled, and many have failed this season. A lot of projects were built on hype and the promise of quick money instead of a great idea or product. Often the scammers used great marketing strategies - as responsible players - let's use those strategies for good!

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Regulators dragging their feet

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Regulation and slowed adoption from big industry has also contributed to the state of the market. Many countries have begun trying to regulate cryptocurrencies. Still, there has yet to be a clear consensus on what this actually looks like. This has made it difficult for some crypto projects to find banking partners or for regulated investors to enter an unregulated industry. The result is a wall of money sitting on the sidelines, unable to enter the cryptocurrency space. The slow pace of regulators getting involved has not helped the market in any way - but regulations will undoubtedly be part of the next market turn.

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Bad Actors

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The vast pressure experienced by the market so far in this Crypto winter can certainly be partially attributed to bad actors. The recent Luna debacle created massive losses for many individuals and firms in crypto. The rapid demise of FTX and many of its 130 subsidiaries has also created a significant drain of both trust and financial backing in the entire crypto industry. These centralized projects have caused much pain. While some say it will be beneficial in the long term, we are yet to see the full effect of the fallout in the market today.

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Weak Solutions

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Regardless of the dramatic moves in prices in the crypto space - many projects in the crypto space have failed due to weak business models and a lack of adoption. The main reason is that most projects need to be solving a problem.

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With so much hype in the crypto, NFT, GameFi, and Defi space, many investors ignored vital statistics in the hope of making absurd profits. The crypto space is a space filled with whose aim is long-term wealth building, but the expectation is it's going to happen overnight. In the famous words of Warren Buffett, "Nobody wants to get rich slowly".

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We can learn from many of these - simply creating new tokens and trying to get people interested in them is not a long-term plan for success. This approach has not been sustainable so far and has often left the industry worse when the project fails.

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Takeaways

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If you're in the early stages of launching a new solution or web3 service, taking the time to understand some of the bear market's triggers will help you better navigate this cycle successfully as a crypto project or investor.

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As the crypto sector continues in a bear market cycle, we hope you'll consider some helpful tips to keep your project growing steadily during this period. Keep pushing on, don't give up on it, and keep contributing meaningfully to the future of web3.

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Navigating the crypto winter is certainly not the most straightforward task - but we trust that once you make it through to the next bull run - you'll be agile and ready to take on the world.