Back in January, Facebook led the way in banning cryptocurrency ads. The social media giant decided to break up with all the companies advertising binary options, cryptocurrencies, and ICOs on their platform. This was a bold move and it was soon reflected on the Google’s decisions, too. In March, they announced their Financial services policy update for June 2018.
Even this may seem like a step too far, they actually had a very good reason for that.
The cryptocurrency market is growing at an astonishing pace and that’s fine. The idea behind this system is built on blockchain technologies, offering full and undeniable transparency and privacy to its users. Unfortunately, the crypto market itself is not always that trusted. Namely, with the rise of this market, the number of ICO scammers and crypto fraudsters has also grown. Simply put, Facebook’s and Google’s decision to ban anything crypto-related is all about protecting their users from getting manipulated.
The only problem with this idea is that neither Facebook nor Google was ready to separate genuine businesses from scammy ones. This is why they banned them all. In other words, this decision also affects perfectly legitimate businesses. So, let’s see what the consequences of these radical changes are.
The Rise of New Marketing Opportunities
So, what does this mean for legitimate crypto-related businesses? Now that you can no longer advertise on Google and Facebook, does this mean that you’re doomed? Of course not. You should focus on SEO and organic ways of advertising your business.
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Do a detailed keyword and market research. You need to know who your major competitors are and what keywords they target. You should also know who your target audience is and what phrases they search for most commonly. Based on what you find out, you should come up with a list of keywords that will work for you.
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Invest in content marketing. Once you have your keywords, you can build awesome content around them. And, as you know, content is the backbone of earning quality backlinks and building authority.
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Do onsite SEO. In short, it’s optimizing your site to meet Google’s high expectations. It includes stuff improving page loading speed, interlinking procedures, redirects, the optimization of meta elements, etc.
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Promote your site. Leverage different link building practices, do competitor backlink analysis and get your site featured on numerous directories and business review sites.
Protecting Users’ Rights or yet another Way to Control a Growing Crypto Market?
Recently, we’ve been reading a lot about Facebook’s intents to launch their own, first mass-market cryptocurrency.
In May, the former head of Facebook Messenger, David Marcus, announced that Facebook started working on developing their own blockchain technologies.
After nearly four unbelievably rewarding years leading Messenger, I have decided it was time for me to take on a new challenge. I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch, Marcus pointed out in a Facebook post.
Even though very few details were given, we can conclude that it would be a huge leap for Facebook, especially after this Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Giving billions of their users the opportunity to make electronic payments both on the platform and outside of it, it would make Facebook the leader in the crypto market.
Still, this makes us wonder- isn’t all this the opposite of what they’re doing right now?
Many interest players believe that the ban could be temporary and that it’s a way of controlling the growing crypto market.
I suspect the ban has been implemented to fit in with potential plans to introduce their own cryptocurrency to the market in the near future and therefore removing other crypto adverts allows them to do it on their own terms, claims Philip Nunn, the CEO of the Blackmore Group.
So, What’s the Future of These Bans?
The impact of the ban on crypto-related ads will heavily affect ICO startups, preventing them from growing the capital through ICOs. However, the overall impact on the market is not that critical. There are still numerous well-established crypto companies that see these bans as the opportunity to throw out their scammy competitors and polish up their industry’s name.
This is also an inspiration for government agencies to build an actionable regulatory framework for these industries and, in this way, protect the security and the rights of online users.
And, if Google and Facebook are really doing this because of their users’ safety, then they will simply remove the ban once these regulations come into force. Time will tell.
Until then, make sure you invest more in SEO and driving organic traffic to your site. Remember, no matter how powerful paid ads are, it is a technically optimized site and high-quality, relevant content that helps you rise above your legitimate competition.