Yes, web3 will forever change content marketing, but it is quite shocking to see that most web3 brands have some ridiculous marketing strategy.
If you disagree, take a moment off and search 'web3 marketing strategy for brands?'
You probably going to see:
- Community is king,
- Content marketing is ideal
- Email marketing is a priority
- All startups should leverage influencer marketing, etc.
Perhaps these are clickbait to get most founders confused and invite them into a project.
Nonetheless, I genuinely think that most web3 brands having a shabby marketing strategy lack a unique product and consequently a long-term growth strategy. Ironically, having a strong marketing team will easily identify the strength of the company and provide feedback to the developing teams to address.
Again, I agree that web3 will change some elements of content marketing. However, let us learn the concept of an effective market strategy for web3 brands.
What is Web3 Marketing Strategy
Generally, marketing strategies are organized steps to effectively present a brand's products/ services to a targeted audience.
Hence, we can say web3 marketing strategies are organized steps to effectively present web3 products/services to a targeted audience.
We can see that web3 marketing should be organized to effectively communicate products to audiences. Note these audiences are likely to be confused about the web3 technology. It is the job of marketing teams to provide a good onboarding experience for users, which will increase the sales and ROI of the brand.
Marketing is important for every business model, and web3 is not exempted. The image below is from George Coudounaris a B2B marketer
Unfortunately, there is a dominant marketing strategy that is ruling the web3 space which is affecting the onboarding experience. This dominant web3 marketing strategy includes the;
- Paid promotion and involving bot to enhance the algorithm
- Paid influencer promotion
- RT and tag friends to get giveaway coins
- Build a community on discord, for meme sharing and “GM to everyone building something for the future”
- Creating copy that is extremely centered on the company's project, etc.
One thing the above marketing strategy fails is that it is not backed by the fundamental marketing concept and psychology. Moreover, web3 is getting advanced, people are becoming more aware of the spammy marketing involved in the industry. Hence, your marketing strategy needs to change or be modified positively.
In the next session below, we are going to look on good marketing strategies web3 brands can improve sales.
10 Basic Marketing Strategy For Web3 Brands
I understand that web3 brands can be shared into different categories like; NFTs, Financial Institutions, Software as a service (Saas), etc. However, below are the fundamentals to get all marketing strategies right for web3 brands.
1. Understand The Product’s Unique Value Proposition of A Brand
It seems obvious to spend some days understanding what the brand is, and how it is different from other products in the space. However, most people in the marketing space don’t do this well.
Once you have a gig, don’t be satisfied with the document the company will give you. Do your research, and find out what people are saying about them on social platforms like YouTube, Twitter, etc.
From your findings you should have some questions. Then you need to request calls with the founding teams, customer relation officers, etc. Ask them questions, and find out what people ask them frequently about the company.
A good way I love to make sure I understand a company’s value proposition is to draw a SWOT analysis. I know it is an old-school method, but you will be surprised at the data it will give you and how you can address them and include them when creating content.
2. Research on Your Audience
Now you know the company you are working for, it is time to know the target audience they are hoping to reach. Pay attention to this section, because if you target everyone, you will end up targeting nobody.
Not everyone shares the same value, experiences, desires, etc. So go find your audience where they hang out. Again I love YouTube comments, Quora questions, and even the customer support center and customers themselves.
From your research, you will discover their pain points, what they are struggling with and how your brand can help them solve the problem. You will even find the language and channels they frequently hang out.
Remember, assumptions will sabotage marketing resources and effort. Put in the time and effort to discover your target audience, before rolling out any marketing strategy.
3. Create a User Persona for Your Target Audience
Draft comprehensive data that explains your target audience, for reference purposes when you run out of ideas. Let’s be honest, marketing is interesting but at the same time hard when we lack information. Coming up with ideas becomes a nightmare for us.
A good way to keep ensure your marketing campaigns speaks to your audience is by documenting your findings.
Furthermore, you can easily pass this information to the rest of the marketing team, so as to have the same brand voice and identity.
4. Encourage the Founding Teams To Build Personal Brands
This is one of the hardest aspects if you ask me. Most founding teams are anonymous to their target audience, but even if they are known they are not helpful to the community.
About 58% of companies get more visibility through the founding teams. As a marketer, it is advisable to leverage the popularity of founding teams when marketing products.
Sometimes, these teams are well-known on socials, but most times they are not. However, the goal is to make this team popular with the right audience.
As usual, they often give excuses that they don’t know how to build a community via their social media. This is a good time to call for a copywriting service for founding teams or increase your price if you are an agency or want to do it yourself. Personally, I advise you to connect a personal copywriter to the founding teams, because that is not your job. However, you need the success to boost your marketing campaign.
5. Create User-generated Copies that Tie The Value Proposition of Your Brand
Back to our job, of marking the brand! It is time to address the virtual home address of the company, which is the company’s website. This is my area of expertise, but I promise not to be biased when explaining how important optimizing your website is for every brand that has a long-term strategic growth plan.
Before you consider spending money on paid ads, make sure you have all the ‘ultimate how-to guides’ on how people can use your products. You also want your website to attract people searching for problems and informing them: your product can solves their problems. Except your product is not unique as claimed, then you can go ahead for paid ads and direct them to discords, telegram, etc.
However, if you have a unique product different from competitors, you should have on your website blogs, video tutorials, customer success stories, etc. This will give your brand a more credible rating from visitors.
This content can be turned into short and entertaining videos and podcasts, that will then be shared in a bit on socials.
6. Have the Right Team and Channel to Distribute The Copy For an Increase in Engagements
Optimizing the heck out of your website is still not enough for most web3 brands, because most of the use cases are still new and people don't know there are options available. Hence, a good way to reach your audience is on social platforms.
By now you know the channel your audience is, ensure your social media teams are crushing and dominating the space for high engagement and visibility.
This is hard but possible, you need a good social media engagement plan to achieve this. Remember when I mentioned getting the founding teams on socials? It is time to get them involved with distributing content to reach their individual audience.
7. Promote The Brand
It is time to run paid ads and influencer campaigns strategically. I can imagine your eye rolling, I am not against paid ads campaigns or influencer marketing like I portrayed earlier on.
I am only trying to let you know that running paid ads and influencer marketing campaigns won’t work if you fail to build brand awareness and reputation. You need to get your name on socials without the help of ads and influencers. This will enable people to recognize your name fast and perform the CTA (call to action).
Even when the first attempt at promoting the brand fails, you can still retarget your audience. People love repetition, the more they get familiar with your name, the better they see your brend as an authority.
In addition, don’t involve bots in the promotion of your brand on socials, they devalue your reach.
8. Build A Community
Community is one nice way to increase brand awareness and revenue. However, most web3 communities are constantly abusing and wasting people's time. Worse, they abandon their audience once they perform the last CTA.
This is a wrong approach when building brands, the early adopters of your products should become the brand's advocates. According to Moses Aboh a community manager for web3 brands:
Most web3 projects today can easily be copied. So focus on building a strong community alongside your project.
The community managers and social media managers are experts here. Listen to them, and ask them questions to get more data on the audience.
9. Track Your Result
Every marketing strategy should have KPI (Key Performance Indicators) and web3 is no different. Although, following this basic principle in marketing web3 products is bound to yield results for your team. However, you need to track which post got the most traction, which channel, and which event your team had the most signups. All these are data of your customers you don’t want to take for granted because if you refine and reuse the tactics, you will still see success.
Another reason I advocate for marketers to track results is because of the lack of trust most startups have when onboarding marketing teams.
Have the ability and proof to say “we were able to increase our social followers to x, then we pushed them to our website/youtube/podcast so they are convinced we are a legit brand. 60% of the visitors convert to our loyal customers within 2 months. We then qualify them to be advocates of the brand)
10. Promote The Brand Again
Your marketing strategy at this level is more advanced. The team should involve in partnership programs that have your target audience.
Find events that your target audience is and partner with them. The event can be online or offline, either way, secure a spot.
If your founding members are not good public speakers, you can accompany them or find another person who understands the product and can effectively explain it to a 5 years old child.
These are the 10 basic marketing strategies the web3 brand needs to start building on.
Concluding Thought
This marketing model demonstrates how you can tie a web3 product to real-life use cases. People are getting fed up with the underpromise and hype from web3 brands.
State your brand's value proposition and qualify your audience. This will attract the right audience and make your brand easily adopted.
Stop using the generic marketing strategy like;
-'we are hiring now'
-'we just closed a seed round of $xxxxxxxxx'
-'web3 is the future of a decentralized world'
It will definitely cost the founding team money to hire good talents like;
- Product Manager
- Video/graphic designer
- Copywriter
- SEO Content writer
- Social media manager
- Community Manager
- Etc.
Nonetheless having a marketing team with this skills, will position your brand and increase revenue in the competitive industry.
