Blockchain technology has emerged as a revolutionary force in the financial sector and beyond, prompting large enterprises and scrappy startups to vie for leadership in this rapidly evolving sector.

In this article, we’ll explore how four prominent players in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry used Stack Overflow Advertising solutions to expand brand awareness and increase developer engagement. These companies’ operations span the US, the UK, and Europe; their main focus is on leveraging blockchain technology to improve financial systems and application development.

Core challenges

The blockchain companies had two big challenges they wanted to solve with Stack Overflow Advertising. First, they needed to increase awareness of their offerings in a competition-saturated market. Second, they sought to attract and engage developers with the right skills.

The first core challenge was to increase brand and product awareness in a competitive market. This involved:

• Driving greater adoption and usage of their platform, tools, or network.
• Inspiring developers to innovate and create new applications using their products.
• Highlighting their technical expertise to establish themselves as leading experts in the blockchain space.

The second core challenge was to attract and engage developers with relevant skill sets. To achieve this, the companies needed to:

• Specifically target blockchain developers skilled in areas like smart contracts, Web3, Solidity, and NFTs.
• Overcome the challenge of reaching and engaging this niche audience in a crowded environment where other blockchain companies are competing for their attention.

Strategic solutions

All four customers used display advertising to increase awareness alongside sponsored content to boost engagement among their target audiences. Here’s how the strategies played out.

Display advertising

For the four blockchain companies, display advertising was their foundational approach for driving traffic to targeted landing pages and technical content. To maximize reach, customers targeted users of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange with specific topic tags. This allowed them to reach a niche audience with contextually relevant ads, leading to higher engagement rates. A combination of tags was used, most commonly blockchain, ethereum, solidity, web3, and smartcontracts.

Results

A typical three-month campaign served anywhere from 1.1 to 2.9 million impressions, exceeding the Stack Overflow CTR benchmark of 0.05%.

Additionally, three customers used Stack Exchange sites to reach blockchain-oriented communities, with Bitcoin and Ethereum most commonly targeted. Due to the specialized nature of these communities, the CTR benchmark for Stack Exchange is higher than for Stack Overflow, standing at 0.07%. All customers surpassed this benchmark; some even doubled it.

Average engagement time-on-page also significantly improved, increasing by more than a minute, according to one customer’s tracking data.

Sponsored content

In the form of sponsored podcast episodes and blog posts, customers leveraged Stack Overflow’s editorial channels to extend their reach and recognition, showcase their technical expertise, and build trust with the highly engaged developers and technologists on Stack Overflow—a community that can be very skeptical of advertising content.

The sponsored content featured the company’s subject matter experts (SMEs) discussing topics of interest to developers and relevant to the companies’ offerings. As an added value, the sponsored podcast included banner ads promoting the episode.

Results

On average, 1.5 million impressions were served worldwide across Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, with a CTR of 0.05%. Podcast episodes either matched or exceeded the average download figures, which typically range between 7,000 and 10,000 per episode.

Impact and outcomes

The strategies deployed by these four blockchain companies increased awareness and engagement metrics beyond industry benchmarks. Importantly, the time users spent on content pages significantly increased, demonstrating their heightened interest and interaction with the targeted material. Equally important, the enhanced engagement via sponsored content cemented each company’s place as a trusted leader in the industry.

Final thoughts

We’ve seen how strategic display advertising and thoughtful deployment of sponsored content from Stack Overflow Advertising helped four blockchain players connect with and engage their specialized developer audiences.

A burgeoning community of developers is poised to explore the impressive potential of blockchain technology. Companies that want to reach these developers need to meet them where they’re at: Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network. We’re one of the largest developer communities in the world and an essential part of every developer’s workflow.