5 Tips for Your WEB3 Marketing – Or, the Anatomy of ‘Pump’

Growing a crypto product is super challenging, and marketing performance data is the biggest bottleneck. Having spent the past six years in the wild wild west of Web3, I can share some hard-earned insights and revelations with fellow marketers and founders, citing some big Q1 crypto campaigns as examples (looking at you, Arbitrum and BLUR!). I also put together a juicy link compilation at the end, so feel free to scroll down for that.

The Usual Suspects: Funnel, Channels, Metrics.

When starting marketing for your Web3 project, you might find yourself asking these questions:

• How do I get the word out about my project without doing an obscene airdrop budget?
• How do I know that my Twitter growth numbers are not bot-based?
• What distribution channels should I prioritize for my dApp?
• Which growth metrics should the investors care about?
• Who are my super users who will drive the network adoption?

Source: Future by a16z.

The good news is that a Web3 marketing funnel is not so different from its Web2 counterpart, plus there is a ton of Web3-native tooling popping up. A typical marketing funnel in crypto goes something like this:

• A user learns about a project on some high-traffic news aggregator/newsletter, or bumps into a shill/ad on Twitter.
• They Google the project and land on your page.
• Hopefully, the next step would be joining your Discord or Telegram.

There you have it! Now it’s your turn to keep the excitement going by giving them buzzy incentives and a sense of ownership. You hear the word ‘community’ a lot in crypto, and this is something you can start building right away by having an automated onboarding flow to greet and assign roles to new members on your Discord server and making sure admins are there to ignite convos and provide support. We’ll touch more on the incentive part in a bit.

Now, how about the classic Web2 brand awareness campaigns via content and SEO? Those work just fine, slightly tweaked for the crypto-specific channels, with a heavy focus on Twitter (trust me, if you got your Twitter posting right, you did half the job), Telegram and Discord for user support, Mirror for blogging, Crowdcast and Hopin for events.

The actual user acquisition strategies will vary based on the audience segment and the type of product you’re building: what works for L1, won’t necessarily work for a dApp. Let’s look at the typical audience segments in Web3:

1. Builders: developers, node operators, and everything in between.
For these, you might want to try out things like workshops and hackathons and make sure you have a great developer relations guy on the team.

2. Ecosystem partners:
Heavy focus on partnerships, which includes all sorts of cross-marketing: AMAs, Twitter spaces, and events.

3. End user:
B2B and B2C ‘degens’ (or crypto-natives) and ‘normies’: investors, traders, and actual platform users. They’re probably the most challenging segment, especially when it comes to non-crypto native users. Hard to keep these engaged with anything but monetary/token motivation, yet that is very short-lived and most raffles/bounties won’t get you a loyal user. The key tip here: target early adopters and give them a sense of exclusivity, and/or random selection for rewards.

When it comes to analytics, here are some core metrics you need to track based on your the type of project you’re launching:

1. L1/infra projects: new wallet addresses, network activity (transactions per second), active devs and GitHub stats, number of partner integrations and network forks.
2. DeFi projects: TVL (total value locked), number of unique token holders, protocol revenue.
3. NFTs: estimated market cap, trading volume, floor price, number of unique holders, rarity score.

Content is king, even in crypto. {#content-is-king-even-in-crypto}

Building a strong knowledge base is the first thing you want do when launching a crypto product. One issue here is that not so many people are ready to delve into the depths of complex concepts of DeFi and tokenomics. So, it is hugely important to distill those into digestible formats: infographics, video clips, etc. Explain it to me like a 6-year-old!

I wrote my first piece on DeFi circa September 2018, and content has truly been my go-to tool for building brand awareness ever since. Start small: a few thoughtful threads on Twitter with the right amount of tagging will get you the first eyeballs. From there, start building out your blog but make sure you heads-on address your platform’s competitive advantage. All sorts of visuals work great, and we saw some great results with simple infographics explaining the platform’s value props. One great technique used lately is learning hubs based on the user segment: Celestia does a brilliant job at this with their ‘Learn Modular’ series grouping content based on the user’s knowledge level.

For analytics, measuring organic ROI is the most challenging part: the concept of ‘lead’ is vague in Web3 and conversion is hard to measure. One tool that I’ve found useful lately actually lets you tackle this by correlating active addresses on the network with Twitter and Discord accounts by pinpointing a particular campaign to a burst in user activity. Pretty straightforward and gets you the right picture. Some conventional Web2 tools (Husbpot / SEM Rush) work in a limited capacity, mostly for drafting and organizing content and allocating the campaign resources.

How do you go viral in crypto? {#how-do-you-go-viral-in-crypto}

The token is not a panacea for success but it will get the eyeballs on your product. When we launched a token, the level of attention and expectations skyrocketed: suddenly we were under the microscope, and there came the price talk. Lesson learned: ask yourself if you’d rather have a high quantity or high quality of users. Then you won’t need to over-moderate your Telegram and kick people out for spreading FUD.

For every single launch we did, the lion’s share of work was going into nurturing Key Opinion Leader(KOL) relations which is a huge pillar in Web3 PR. Careful here though: there are way too many ‘crypto influencers’ with inflated metrics these days, so make sure you do a proper audit. I find the most useful are those who create smart Twitter threads and podcasts on trending narratives.

The beauty of this space is that we’re still fairly early and there’s lots of room for the first-mover advantage. Here’s an idea: a visualization of the current L2 / rollup landscape charting the network fees. The topic is super trending and no one has really done anything like that so far. A good example of a viral campaign is Gnosis Safe’s recent ‘March for Account Abstraction’ hackathon with up to 50K in prizes that featured brilliant motion graphics in line with their big rebranding campaign.

Think you need a huge budget for that? Not necessarily: you’d be surprised to learn about the chunk of organic engagement you can get by simply being active on crypto Twitter. Don’t over-shill your project though, try to share the insight or some original research your team has been doing. This works for reporter outreach as well and helped us secure organic mentions in top-tier outlets simply by sharing a CEO’s take on the ongoing FTX saga.

Like airdrop, but make it last. {#like-airdrop-but-make-it-last}

The recent Optimism airdrop when a huge portion of newly acquired users just bounced after claiming their tokens, illustrates that acquisition via instant token incentives doesn’t work for long-term retention. 40% of the airdrop remained unclaimed, and a majority of users just dumped the token. Some users enticed by the airdrop did stick around, but these are hardly the numbers you’d wanna see after giving away a huge chunk of the network’s utility token.

Source: Delphi Digital.

One way to tackle this is to implement retroactive distribution, which implies rewarding users who demonstrated a certain degree of activity in the past. Plus, the airdrop needs to be claimable: get the user to actually create a wallet and interact with the platform, even if it’s a simple asset swap What you’re trying to create here is a sustainable incentive mechanism with user tiers based on contribution (GitHub commits, Discord activity) rewarded by tokens, loyalty points, or badges (all of that can be redeemed for a token later). Call it a loyalty program on Web3 steroids.

An interesting user retention idea was just introduced by a16z referring to the notion of ‘waves’, or distinct stages when launching an NFT. It gives the user an unbeatable sense of exclusivity and belonging, which in turn helps to start building a strong network effect from the get-go:
https://twitter.com/0xDith/status/1601968816199720961

Incentives, incentives! {#incentives-incentives}

The next phase in the Web3 funnel requires a lot of thinking around the user perks, or ‘incentives’. General awareness campaigns are great, but the community attention span is short in crypto, so we need to keep the user entertained with targeted campaigns. Quests, bug bounties, anything goes. And make sure you throw in some token-gated features: access to premium content, exclusive invites to IRL events, or a 1:1 Zoom call with the Founder.

Most importantly: keep the excitement alive! A great example here is BLUR’s recent multi-step airdrop with their Care Packages that was gamified in such a way that gave users a sense of the unknown knowns playing upon their psychology. Source: @Pranksy

More battle-tested tactics to keep your community warm:

• Devs:

Comprehensive technical and product guides, workshops and hackathons (both IRL and online), consistent and timely Discord support (especially when launching major network upgrades).

• Ecosystem partners:

Cross-marketing with newly onboarded members (AMAs and Twitter spaces), ecosystem grants and accelerators. A great example here is Mina’s cohorts and Celo’s virtual acceleration and mentorship program.

• End user:

One campaign that we ran specifically for node operators at Taraxa generated the largest number of new wallet addresses: a time-limited offer to pay staking fees that also included a referral program where users were getting discounts on those fees. Another thing we did to stimulate user stickiness and engagement was a weekly top-block producer contest for node operators.

Campaigns that earn users tokens (or points and badges for the pre-token stage) to interact with the protocol by completing simple actions, such as swapping or sending assets work great for top-funnel acquisition. These can be executed at quest-to-earn platforms or through your own proprietary community platform for posting and rewarding submissions – gamification and cool UX are very important here.

Ambassador Programs are hugely popular but pretty hard to maintain in terms of user participation. Some tips here: make sure you build them top-down with high user autonomy and diverse task tracks. Coherent documentation and regular communication are key.

An ultimate recipe for a Web3 marketing campaign success? For me, it boils down to three things:

1. Know your product and break down the value props to the user based on segment.
2. Have a clear picture of your ideal community member aka ‘power user’.
3. Nurture your audience and keep the excitement going.

Links: {#links}

• Web3 Growth Stack by Multicoin Capital
• Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics
• Crypto Market Fit: Redefining Product Market fit in web3
• Community engagement tools:

• User segmentation: https://www.addressable.io/

• Community CRM + Analytics: Blaze

• Incentives + community mgmt:
  Guild.xyz
  OtterSpace
  Mint Kudos

• Bounty farming / quest-to-earn:
  https://wav3s.app/wav3s
  crew3.xyz

• Token-gated features:
  Collab.Land allows developers to grant access to certain parts of their website based on qualifying token holdings.

About The Author
Olga Grinina is a Web3 Marketing and Communications Executive advising crypto startups on growth and GTM strategy. Led user acquisition, secured partnerships, and helped raise funding for several blockchain platforms (DeFi, Layer-One Infrastructures): Akropolis, Taraxa, Gnosis, Subspace Labs.