VC funding for web3 projects is declining as the Fed's rate hikes remove liquidity from the market. As a result, builders need new sources of funding. The solution? Web3 marketing. If you plan on building during this bear market, you're going to need some web3 marketing strategies. This guide covers the top eight web3 marketing strategies and why they're so important for blockchain projects.
Article summary:
What is web3 marketing?
Why is web3 marketing important for blockchain projects?
8 web3 marketing strategies
Blockchain project brand
Thought leadership in blockchain marketing
Web3 Marketing Tools and Platforms
Token economics and web3 marketing
With web3 marketing strategies, crypto founders must constantly adapt
Frequently Asked Questions
What is web3 marketing?
Web3 marketing promotes and advertises decentralized applications (DApps) and blockchain-based products or services. The practice seeks to educate potential users on the benefits of using decentralized products and services and how they differ from traditional web applications.
It also seeks to increase overall user engagement and product usage in web3. All in all, web3 advertising is a relatively new space. As the blockchain ecosystem continues to grow, it will likely become an important aspect of funding decentralized technologies.
Why is web3 marketing important for blockchain projects?
VC funding is decreasing, and therefore, it is more difficult to support innovation. An improved web3 advertising strategy is critical to the lifeblood of this emerging industry.
Without a viable and sustained supply of funding, great projects can actually languish — because innovation is expensive. Gone are the days of grassroots projects being coordinated via chat rooms and self-funded.
Today, you have to consider legal fees, payroll, audits, etc. to build a useful project.
Furthermore, a good web3 marketing strategy is the difference between a great product with no users and a poor product with lots of users. A common problem with web3 projects is great ideas but poor marketing.
This creates a barrier to adoption. Stagnation of products with real use cases is a net negative for crypto as a whole. In this case, a rising tide lifts all boats.
Conversely, there are countless projects with little to no utility but great marketing. When it comes to success in crypto (and most sectors), it’s not always about the product. Sometimes, success is determined by how well the product sells.
8 web3 marketing strategies
Community Building
One popular web3 marketing strategy that cryptocurrencies have adopted from other sectors is community building.
Close communities are emerging in the real world in the form of conferences and meetups. If you want to build a community around your project, you need to take some actions.
First, you need to get involved in the community: do AMAs (Ask Me Anything), learn names, and spread your story out there. This will put the name before a face, thus fostering some kind of personal relationship with the community.
Basically, think of this as a trust-building exercise. When people trust a group, they are more likely to sponsor a cause. Think about your target audience, especially who they are and what they care about.
Social Media Marketing
Your target audience is a big clue to the next point – social media marketing. Your core audience is likely on social media. According to research by Data Reportal, millennials under the age of 35 are more likely to own cryptocurrency. After that, ownership rates have steadily declined.
The age group that uses social media most often is 18-34, depending on the platform. In simple terms, go where the crowd is. You can further break down the statistics for cryptocurrency ownership and social media by country. However, the most important thing is to know your audience.
Therefore, market research is your friend. Do some research on your target audience and develop a strategy before you dive in. While it’s great to have an online presence, your product may not appeal to everyone — or every social media platform.
All social media sites have unique demographics. They vary by nationality, age, gender, profession, etc. Research in this area will save you time, energy, and outdated accounts.
Influencer Marketing
This brings us to the third web3 marketing strategy, influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a great way to minimize customer acquisition costs and increase brand awareness.
For example, you can create a budget for advertising, spread it across multiple platforms, and hope it succeeds. However, if you are an early-stage startup with a limited budget, your success may be limited.
Spreading your resources across multiple sites may not be as effective as a more targeted approach. Influencer marketing allows you to leverage an already established social media presence, limiting your marketing overhead.
Additionally, dealing with individuals can provide unique opportunities. For example, if you are short on funds, you can offer an influential person equity in your company rather than cash on hand.
You can also offer them protocol native tokens. Although, given the recent lawsuit surrounding FTX celebrity promotion, audiences are generally skeptical about this nowadays.
Content Marketing
The next element, content marketing, ties into the second web3 marketing strategy. Content marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content online for a specific audience.
Examples of content marketing media include newsletters, podcasts, social media posts, and videos. Social media content is essential for user engagement. Generally speaking, good quality content beats great content.
Meme culture drives crypto behavior, which shows that social media. To do this, successful creators have leveraged network effects. These are popular TikTok dances, chat room memes and gifs, YouTube and Instagram shorts.
For better or worse, the average attention span is decreasing. Therefore, you must get your point across quickly and concisely. You can’t burden your users with complex ideas.
With this in mind, the ultimate goal is to increase conversions, user engagement, and product awareness. Therefore, content must be relevant, up-to-date, appeal to the senses, and stimulate the audience.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a form of marketing in which customers are informed of new products, discounts, and other services. It’s a more subtle way to educate your audience about your brand’s values, soft sell, build rapport, or keep them engaged over the long term.
It is important for you to personalize your emails to differentiate them from competitors and phishing or spam. Branding plays a major role in this situation.
If you want to build a good email marketing campaign, you will have to:
Design an appropriate email signature (name, title, logo, call to action, links, etc.)
Personalize emails with Mail Merge
Send emails from real people, not robots
Create a follow-up email
Track the results of your email campaigns
Create templates for repeated use
Send emails at the best time
This web3 marketing strategy may seem complicated at first. However, many companies offer these types of services, such as MailChimp. Due to the popularity of email marketing, you can use most of these features with one service.
Search Engine Optimization
Another popular web3 marketing strategy is SEO (short for search engine optimization). SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of search engine traffic to a website or web page.
SEO strategies can take weeks or months to produce tangible results. It’s all about building a website or account’s reputation in the eyes of search engines. Different platforms have different SEO guidelines.
For example, even though they’re owned by the same company, Google SEO is different from YouTube SEO. Likewise, Instagram SEO is different from Twitter SEO. Each platform will establish its own recommended guidelines based on what they like.
Hence why some platforms don’t accept paid subscribers or content in general. Platforms need a way to sort information by relevant content for users.
So if your information is from a specialized field, you have to provide some expertise. Also, you need relevant keywords and hashtags. Some social media platforms like to let you interact with other content creators in the same field. It all depends on the platform you want to optimize for.
PPC Advertising
If you are getting started in marketing, you must be familiar with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. PPC (e.g., affiliate marketing) is a type of online digital marketing where advertisers pay when users click on their ads.
Advertisers bid based on the perceived value of a click. Typically, users create an ad campaign and set the amount they are willing to pay. The platform then recommends ads to users at a frequency proportional to the amount they paid.
Typically, you’ll have a dashboard associated with your account where you can track your clicks, conversions, user statistics, etc. Google, Amazon, and Facebook all have some form of PPC advertising.
However, Google’s PPC is pull marketing, while Facebook’s is push marketing. Push marketing is designed to close a sale as quickly as possible, while pull marketing is about gradually building an audience, often from scratch.
Video Marketing
Some people prefer visual interactions to reading. Therefore, you’ll also need some form of video marketing. As the name suggests, video marketing uses videos to promote a brand, product, or service.
These videos can range from social media to YouTube to TV commercials. Videos tend to rank higher in searches, especially as more social media content shifts to short-form videos.
How-to videos, testimonials, or educational (e.g., whiteboard) videos are a great way to get started. Videos tend to stand out. Therefore, they are a great way to embed your product in the memory of potential customers.
Therefore, you should invest in some good video editing software. While you can use some AI tools to generate video ads, a human touch might be better. Unless you are strapped for money and time. In any case, do what works for you.
Blockchain project brand
Now that you understand the different web3 marketing strategies, you have to understand what to market. Branding is just as important as selling your product and ties all your marketing strategies together.
A brand is any name, term, design, symbol, or other characteristic that distinguishes one seller’s goods or services from those of other sellers. This is anything from your website domain, company name, slogan, story, or logo to your font choice and even your color theme.
You have to stand out. Many companies create media kits for this purpose. A press kit is another name for a media kit. It is a collection of marketing materials designed to provide information to journalists and help write articles. They are written materials or pre-made collections of marketing materials used to promote a company. You may find logos, banners, and even legal opinions in a media kit.
Thought Leadership in Blockchain Marketing
Sometimes it's hard to build alone, let alone arrange a successful marketing campaign. You might be a builder who just wants to do what you do best - building. Therefore, you might need some help with marketing.
While this is a relatively new field, there are a few blockchain marketing companies you should keep an eye on. These include:
· promotion sale
Coin-operated
· Biqila
· Comprehensive organization
· Let's do it
· Blonde
Web3 Marketing Tools and Platforms
Telegram
Telegram is a free, cross-platform, encrypted, cloud-based, centralized instant messaging service available worldwide. It's a great place to market your products.
Many people visit Telegram to access information that is early or not widely available. It is also a great way to foster a group or community.
Discord
Discord is a social platform for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and instant messaging. Users can converse in private chats or as part of a community using voice calls, video calls, text messages, media, and files. Many people have made web3 careers from community management through Discord.
Instead of bombarding your community members with links, Discord allows you to build personal relationships with them. You can organize conference calls, host discussions, stream live events, and promote your projects.
Twitter is a social networking site where you post 140-character status updates, or "tweets." It's great for short-form content. Crypto Twitter (often shortened to CT) is often where crypto news spreads. The platform allows you to share your thoughts with a large audience and is a great place to foster community interaction.
Reddit is a website for social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion. Registered users post content such as links, text posts, images, and videos to the site, which is then rated positively or negatively by other users.
It is a community network where people can explore their interests, hobbies, and passions. It is also a great place to discover information about upcoming projects.
Medium
Medium is a free and open online publishing platform. It has a high domain authority, which indicates that Google and other search engines trust the site. Therefore, your articles are likely to rank high in Google rankings.
Many web3 projects use Medium to update and explain how their products work.
Token Economics and Web3 Marketing
Bootstrapping is when an entrepreneur starts a business with very little capital and relies on funding other than external investment. Traditional startups often have difficulty overcoming the bootstrapping problem. This is also true for crypto startups. However, cryptocurrencies have a unique advantage: the cryptocurrency itself.
The main force behind the growth of the web3 economy is cryptocurrency incentives. They create the necessary conditions for the successful launch of new initiatives. Moreover, they expand and provide users with countless opportunities to monetize their interests and skills in multiple ways.
Airdrops, ICOs, or pre-sales are all ways to hype and fund a project. You can promote your NFT by offering exclusive rewards to early adopters.
With web3 marketing strategies, crypto founders must keep adapting
In short, web3 has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with the internet and conduct business. With the rise of blockchain technology and the decentralized web, power is shifting back to the hands of users, and companies are realizing the need to adapt.
However, it’s important to stay connected to trends outside of cryptocurrency. Traditional technology and finance are constantly changing. As the world becomes more comfortable with cryptocurrency, new web3 marketing strategies will be needed. It’s critical for web3 businesses to stay up to date with the latest marketing trends and strategies. Doing so will ensure their business remains competitive and relevant in the ever-changing digital landscape.
