How to Growth Hack Your User Base

Published on: 18 February, 2022

One of the issues DeFi projects face after development is increasing and retaining their user base. When it comes to marketing, DeFi Projects face several restrictions like:

Google Adwords Policy restrictions
Facebook Ads restrictions

An excellent way to increase your user base is through growth hacking. Growth hacking is perfect for your project if you wish to get exponential and sustainable growth at minimum cost.

This blog post will cover growth hacking and how to hack the user base of your DeFi project.

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking aims to increase the number of users, downloads, or clients as fast as possible using a sustainable model.

So, think of growth hacking as an analytical, creative, innovative, and inexpensive strategy to grow your user base exponentially.

Growth hacking doesn’t adopt the old rules of marketing. Instead, the best growth hacks take advantage of unique opportunities available in the digital world. That is perfect for DeFi projects because the idea of DeFi itself doesn’t adapt to the old ideas of centralization.

How to Use Growth Hacking to Build Your User Base

The first step to starting your growth hacking process is to understand the needs of your users. To do that, you must first get to know your target audience. Make sure you answer:

Who are your target audiences?
How can your DeFi project help your users?

Pro Tip: Build a customer persona! Your customer persona is your ideal user; what they do and what they like. You could try Hubspot tools to save time and make sure all of your bases are covered.

After you identify the USP (Unique Selling Point) of your DeFi project, you need to build your growth funnel.

Once you have identified your ideal users’ pain points, needs, and motivations, it will be easier to understand how your product addresses those points. Maybe you offer a higher yield vs. other farming projects, or maybe your UX is the easiest for new users. It could be they like being part of your community because of the principles you stand by.

Understanding your user is key to identifying which features could help you build a story that could attract new users for you, a story that is different from your competitors.

Think of your smartphone, what is it that makes it different from other brands. Is it the technology, the way it looks, or the brand values you identify it with?

How To Build Your Growth Funnel

A growth funnel helps you measure your project’s success and monitor your users’ progress.

Ideally, you want users to pass through all stages; the higher the number of users that move through all stages, the more successful your marketing is.

The Growth funnel is divided into five stages:

Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Monetization
Referral

Acquisition is the first contact point between users and your project. At this stage, you’re focused on attracting more users. The priority is traffic and project awareness.

However, keep in mind that you don’t want traffic from everyone. Traffic from users that are not part of your audience demographics will probably be of little to no use.

How can you find your key audience?

It’s true that you can run into issues finding users because of the banned ad words on major platforms like Google and Facebook. Not only that, advertising in these spaces gets expensive fast. If you’re ready to make the investment, do your research on how you can make your ad campaign work despite the restrictions.

Google and Facebook might be the first places you go if you’re working outside the crypto world, but in crypto, it might be better to put your resources into other areas.

Go directly to your target audience by advertising on crypto user hubs such as DappRadar or CoinGecko.

You could also look at their ways of raising awareness, such as through inbound marketing or community events. Try publishing content on different platforms with a message that adds value for your user persona.

Forget about selling and start thinking about how you can help your user. Hubspot is king of inbound marketing and they have a whole online academy for marketers to learn how to drive a successful inbound marketing strategy. The best part is it’s free.

Activate and retain

The audience should understand how to use the product at the activation stage and become registered users. This will look different for every project, but think about the key information your user needs to get started.

For instance, to interact with smart contracts on RSK, you need to have the native token RBTC. So, a video series was created with tutorials showing users how they can get RBTC.

At the retention stage, you want to keep your users’ attention. The best way to do this is to ensure your project solves a problem. Failure to keep your users at this stage implies something is wrong with your offering.

Thankfully, there are ways you can address issues that come up. It’s important to have mechanisms set up to receive feedback from your users so that you could identify any friction points. Engage with your community of users to hear what they are saying about your product.

You could also ask directly for feedback through a survey. Typerform is a platform that helps you build surveys in a more human way than Google forms.

Monetize and get those referrals!

You also want to focus on the monetization and referral stage. Your end goal should be to get your users to the monetization and referral stage.

Make sure you review different ways of monetizing your project so you choose the method that works best for you. There are different ways you can tokenize your project to make sure it’s sustainable in the long run. Does it make sense to have a utility token that lets users consume your services? Do you have a security token that guarantee annuity rights?

Tips For Growth Hacking Your User Base

Offer Referral Rewards, Airdrops, and Giveaways

One of the fastest ways to grow your user base is to offer a reward policy or giveaway. Set a reward system for your users to refer to other people.

For example, Dropbox implemented a referral program for their users, and it got a record 3900% growth in 15 months. They got all that growth without spending anything on marketing. They simply offered additional cloud storage for those offering and accepting the referral. That way, both parties got rewarded in the program.

Try something similar, create a reward system. AirDrops are an excellent way to increase your project awareness and user base. Create a system for people to refer or do something in exchange for tokens. Check out Binance’s successful referral program to get some ideas.

Create Engaging Content

Your content is crucial to the success of your marketing. Create simple and engaging content that explains your project to your audience. Release project updates on all project accounts like Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Telegram.

Furthermore, your website content should be up-to-date and offer information on any question a prospective user may have.

Leverage Social Media

Social media marketing is a great way to raise awareness about your project and direct traffic to your website. Create a project account on the major social media platform your users hang out. That way, it is easier to attract your target audience’s attention.

Post regularly on your social channels but not always about your project. You want to keep a balance between your promotional content and engaging content. Check out RSK’s social media channels for tips on driving community engagement. You’ll find a healthy balance of promotional, engaging, and educational content too.

Try Influencer Marketing

This strategy is great for awareness and getting people to trust your DeFi project. Find top voices in the crypto and DeFi space and get them to talk about your project. You’ll get excellent results by getting top influencers to talk about the benefit of your project to their users. Check out CoinTelegraph’s top people in crypto and blockchain in 2021 to learn about the leading industry voices

Keep in mind that an influencer marketing plan is going to come with a big price tag. By participating in a co-op marketing plan with RSK, you could reduce these costs by up to 50%.

PR Marketing on Big Crypto Media

Collaborate with media organizations to publish articles without being marked as sponsored. To do that, you must be ready to create quality content that adds value to readers.

Getting your users’ attention through quality articles is an excellent way to prove your credibility and earn their trust.

You don’t have to handle the content creation yourself. You can work with agencies and freelancers to help with the content writing process. By joining the RSK ecosystem you could leverage on existing media relationships for announcements and PR.

Do More With Growth Hacking

To grow-hack your DeFi project’s user base, you must be prepared to ditch the conventional methods and get creative.

Test new strategies and measure your results to decide on the best methods for your project marketing. However, ensure your DeFi project is secure enough to solve your users’ problems for the best results.

With RSK integration, you can open up to the original, largest addressable crypto market- Bitcoin.

If you want to know more about how to integrate with RSK, and join our network of marketing allies and growth hackers, don’t hesitate to reach out!