Effective marketing is crucial for the adoption and success of blockchain projects. And in the web3 world, there are two ways of looking at it: focusing solely on promoting the project’s native crypto token or marketing the project itself. 

Most hype-driven projects focus on the former, but if you want sustained long-term growth, you need to market your crypto project and not just the token.

However, the biggest challenge of marketing your web3 project is that web3 users are pseudonymous wallets. 

This makes it difficult to understand user behavior and preferences as you can’t employ the traditional methods of user segmentation and profiling. 

In this blog, we’ll dive into what crypto marketing is, how it works, and the most effective strategies you can use to create demand and growth for your web3 product. 

What is Crypto Marketing?

Crypto marketing refers to the marketing strategies that web3 projects can use to attract and engage potential investors and users.

It helps your product stand out and creates the initial brand awareness and excitement needed to reach the right target audience and raise funds from public offerings and VCs.

This allows you to acquire users and retain them in the long term, so your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is low and your customer lifetime value (CLV) is high. 

How Does Crypto Marketing Work?

Crypto marketing encompasses a wide range of web2 and web3 strategies and tactics that help you achieve the following goals:

• Establishing strong brand awareness for your project and product, creating a buzz, and generating interest among potential users.

• Building trust and credibility with customers, instilling confidence in your offering, and enticing them to try it out.

• Converting initial users into long-term, loyal community members who actively engage with your project, provide feedback, and contribute to its growth.

To help you understand how crypto marketing enables you to achieve both of these, we’ve broken down how web3 marketing functions before and after the product launch. 

Before Launch

Marketing isn’t something you do after you’ve built and launched your web3 product. 

Ideally, you should start marketing your product even before it launches to make potential users aware of it. That being said, here’s how crypto marketing helps you do this:

• Explains the problem and solution:  A well-executed marketing strategy ensures that your content effectively highlights the problems potential users face and how your product can solve them.
  For example, Polygon highlights how Polygon 2.0 solves the scalability problem in this blog post just days before its launch. 

• Establishes competitive advantages: Since multiple products are similar to yours in the market, you need to stand out from your competitors to acquire users.
  
  Using solid marketing techniques ensures that your project’s messaging is unique and helps you distinguish yourself from the competition.
  
  For example, a layer-2 DEX like QuickSwap differentiates itself from a Layer-1 DEX like Uniswap by highlighting the fact that users don’t have to pay any gas fee to make trades on the platform. 

• Establishes trust: The crypto space is full of rugpulls and scams, making it difficult for potential users and investors to place their faith in your product.
  
  A good marketing strategy focuses on building trust by showcasing the team’s expertise and highlighting any partnerships or endorsements from reputable entities.
  
  For example, Frax Finance’s founder regularly posts updates about their platform and answers users’ questions to establish trust and credibility. 

After Launch

Once you’ve launched your web3 project, your marketing strategy helps “spin the flywheel” faster. It creates a positive feedback loop that drives exponential growth by helping you acquire, attract and retain customers, and get them to promote your product through word of mouth. 

Here’s how it does this:

• Creates a behavioral loop: The goal of launching your product is to get users to try it out and keep coming back to it in the long term.
  To do this, you need to take a leaf out of social media platforms’ strategies and create a behavioral loop, which consists of four parts: trigger, action, investment, and reward that help form a habit. You need to incorporate all these elements in all of your marketing strategies to keep users coming back to your product.
  
  For example, if you’re conducting a loyalty program to retain users, you should:
  • Identify behavior that will encourage taking action (trigger).
  • Make it easy to solve the problem you presented at the trigger moment so they come back to your dapp (action) and complete tasks (investment).
  • Reward them constantly to close the loop and keep them coming back for more (reward).

• Helps build loyalty: Every marketer knows the importance of loyalty; it reduces customer acquisition costs and helps attract new customers through positive word-of-mouth. 
  
  Crypto marketing strategies emphasize and reiterate the unique benefits of your project or token and how it can provide exceptional user experiences to boost customer loyalty. 

• Keeps product relevant: Your web3 product needs to stay relevant to meet the evolving needs and preferences of your users.
  
  Effective crypto marketing helps with this. It goes beyond mere transactions and focuses on building and nurturing strong connections with consumers, which helps with the following:
  • Retention: Crypto marketing helps you consistently engage with your customers and retain their interest. For example, if you’re a web3 development platform, you can put out guides and tutorials to help users build dapps easily. 
  • Trust-building: With crypto marketing, you can foster trust, build confidence in your brand, and drive engagement even after customers have signed up for your product. For example, you can organize AMAs with industry experts and conduct webinars to encourage engagement from users. 

• Gather valuable insights: With crypto marketing, you can gather valuable analytics and insights about user behavior, preferences, and market trends which help identify areas for improvement, and guide product updates or feature enhancements. 

Now, let’s look at some crypto marketing strategies you can employ to gain traction, acquire users, and convert them into long-term customers. 

Effective Crypto Marketing Strategies

The goal of crypto marketing is to put your product in front of the right people and build a  community around it so it continuously acquires new users.  

To this end, let’s check out some web2 and web3 marketing strategies that will grow your product’s revenue and user base.

Web2 crypto marketing strategies

Most of the internet is still web2 and a large part of the crypto community resides there. 

So, employing web2 marketing strategies means acquiring more users and revenue. 

Here are some web2 marketing strategies you can use to get your product noticed by potential users and drive them to check out your product. 

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves creating and sharing content on social media platforms to drive website traffic, generate leads, and foster customer engagement and loyalty. 

There are plenty of social media platforms out there but the most popular one for web3 projects is Twitter. 

Most newbies start learning about the decentralized web here, and it’s the most common discovery channel for dapps, NFT collections, and DeFi protocols. It’s also where investors and web3 influencers hang out. 

So, if you want to get your project in front of new and experienced web3 users and gain traction, Twitter is a great place to start your social media marketing. 

In case your audience skews younger and prefers consuming short videos over other content, you can start with YouTube and TikTok.

Most users on these platforms tend to watch multiple videos simultaneously, so creating a series of videos on a topic related to your web3 product engages them and keeps them coming back for more. 

However, if your web3 product is primarily geared toward other crypto businesses, sharing content on LinkedIn that positions you as a thought leader in the blockchain industry is the way to go. 

This is because LinkedIn has a more business-focused audience and plenty of crypto companies already post content on it.

Other platforms you should definitely consider are Discord and Telegram. You can use both to build your community, share project updates, conduct informative Q&As, and spark engaging discussions. 

In addition, you can use Discord and Telegram to interact with customers in real-time and increase brand visibility and loyalty. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of organically improving a website’s visibility and ranking on search engines. 

The idea of optimizing your website is to get potential users to discover your product easily by improving your website’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT).  

Let’s say a user looks up “decentralized crypto exchanges” online to conduct trades anonymously.

If the first result on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is Uniswap, the trader is most likely to click on their website link over any other. 

Since they trust that search engines will show them the best decentralized exchange, they also trust Uniswap. This boosts the brand’s visibility and awareness and improves its conversions. 

Most web3 marketers push content on platforms like Mirror.xyz and Medium to boost their domain authority and ranking when getting started with their marketing efforts. 

While this is a great approach, you also need to publish content on your own website and backlink to it from other channels. This is because posting content on third-party platforms only boosts their rankings and not yours.  

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a direct and personalized form of communication that enables crypto brands to connect with their audience, nurture relationships, and drive conversions.

Marketers tend to gloss over it as they think it’s redundant. However, data says otherwise. 

49% of customers said that they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands weekly and the average expected ROI for email marketing is $45 for every $1 spent. 

Plus, email is the only channel in the web2 ecosystem that remains unaffected by algorithm changes. 

If Google or Facebook make algorithm changes you may lose or gain a significant amount of traffic. 

But you have complete ownership over your email list, and this allows you to stay connected with your audience, regardless of these changes.

In addition, email marketing helps with retention as it keeps you stay on top of your user’s mind with relevant information like product announcements, lessons, and updates. 

Binance is an example of a brand that does this well. When a user abandons the identity verification process, they send them an email to incentivize them and complete it. 

In addition to this, they also send emails to educate their users on how they can use the platform to stay on top of their users’ minds. 

Influencer Marketing 

Crypto influencer marketing leverages the expertise and popularity of influencers to promote products and services. 

It’s a useful marketing tactic especially if you’re an early-stage startup starting from scratch and are looking for ways to build your follower base and community. 

And the best way to get started is to identify potential influential accounts you’re already connected to within your organization or outside of it that have a genuine interest in promoting your product. 

If you don’t have any existing connections with such accounts, craft a concise pitch outlining why influencers should consider promoting your product. 

Clearly communicate how your product adds value to their target audience, stress on shared values, and how the partnership will benefit them. 

For example, when the World of Women (WoW) NFT collection launched, they reached out to Reese Witherspoon to promote their collection as she had previously indicated an interest in the web3 space and support for people of color and women’s rights. 

Reese and many other celebrities publicly promoted the NFT collection and purchased an NFT from it, which organically skyrocketed the NFT collection’s popularity and value 

Web3 Marketing Strategies

Web3 marketing strategies cater to the unique needs of web3 projects and users and are mostly centered around bringing like-minded individuals together. Here are some of the most common web3 marketing strategies. 

Community Building 

Community building is a central part of web3 as projects heavily rely on community members to become brand evangelists and spread the word about their projects. 

But convincing people and incentivizing them to join your community isn’t easy. Even if you manage to get over this hurdle, you need to engage them to get them to stay for the long haul. 

So, you need to start learning about your target audience and go beyond demographics to understand what would make them join your online community and actively contribute to it. 

And once you’ve done that, come up with a compelling narrative and outline the incentives to encourage active participation. 

The Krause House DAO excels at this. It unites basketball fans worldwide over the common goal of owning an NBA team and watching them win. 

And they keep their community engaged by hosting contests and creating compelling pitches to create partnerships with major buyers.

Most web3 projects prefer to use Discord and Telegram to build and engage their communities.

Loyalty Programs

Retention is more cost-effective than customer acquisition as long-term customers tend to make repeat purchases and are more likely to recommend your product to others. 

Web3 brands know this. That’s why they invest in loyalty programs. 

The concept of loyalty programs isn’t native to web3. They existed long before the emergence of blockchain technology. 

But traditional loyalty programs tend to benefit only the brand and not the customer. Web3 loyalty programs change this and ensure that the customer earns valuable rewards at every step of the journey without eating into the brand’s profits. 

Soapy Joe’s NFT marketing campaign is a great example of a web3 loyalty program. 

Soapy Joe is a San-DIego based car wash company. Every time a customer got their car washed at any of their outlets, they would receive an email link that would lead them to their free NFT.  

The more NFTs a customer collected, the higher would be their rewards, which ranged from physical keychains to amusement park tickets to free annual membership. 

More than 10,000 NFTs were minted between 2,000 wallets and the platform saw a 10% increase in their organic traffic after launching the campaign. 

Earlier it was difficult to set up loyalty programs on web3 as designing it involved collecting on-chain and off-chain data and stringing them together to give you the insights you need. 

But now, with Raleon,  you can easily set up a marketing campaign that tracks a user’s web2 and web3 data.

Airdrops

Airdrops refer to the distribution of free tokens or coins to a specific group of individuals as a marketing or promotional strategy. They’re greatly beneficial when it comes to acquiring users and seeing high growth rates in a short period of time. 

However, the only drawback is that the retention rates for most airdrops are close to 1% which goes to show that they don’t get users motivated enough to stay on the platform and use it in the long run.

To change this narrative, you need to build a behavioral loop like Blur’s NFT campaign did. 

For starters, it launched during the bear market when most brands were on a tight budget and no one expected to receive “free money”. This piqued people’s curiosity and acted as a trigger to make them check out the product. 

Moreover, the criteria to acquire free rewards were very easy so it triggered people into action and many users participated in the airdrop. 

Plus, Blur split its airdrops into different phases, which gradually got its leads to convert into long-time users. 

We’ve broken down the airdrop further in this piece and also included how you can set a similar airdrop. 

Public Relations (PR) Campaigns 

Public Relations (PR) campaigns are strategic initiatives undertaken by brands to manage and shape their public image, reputation, and relationships with various stakeholders. 

They aim to create positive exposure, generate media coverage, and influence public perception through targeted communication and storytelling.

PR campaigns are an age-old marketing strategy to get your product in front of a large audience and build trust with them.

However, crypto is still an esoteric term to many journalists and is rocked by scams, so many of them are still skeptical about covering crypto news. 

This makes it difficult to build great media relations with journalists from popular crypto publications. 

The best way to break through the distrust and conduct a successful crypto PR campaign is to include numbers and recognizable names in your media pitch to journalists.  

When Alchemy, a web3 developer tools and infrastructure company wanted to get press coverage, their marketing agency leveraged the fact that the famous rapper Jay-Z had invested in the company in their media pitch. As a result, their press release and product stood out from other tools.

Should Startups Hire a Blockchain Marketing Agency?

The answer to that totally depends from business to business. 

Crypto marketing agencies consist of professionals who have traditional digital marketing skills and understand the requirements of the decentralized web. 

They can craft marketing strategies that align with the ethos of web3 while driving demand and growth of the product. Some agencies like Struggle C&C will even offer grant programs to market your projects at discounted rates. 

However, some teams prefer to build a marketing team in-house.

Whether you hire a full-service agency or build an in-house team, you can’t miss out on using web3 marketing tools like Raleon. 

Raleon maps on-chain user data to off-chain wallets so you have a holistic view of how your customer moves toward the conversion stage.

It also allows you to track attribution and accurately assigns the credit of the purchase to the right channel or platform. 

Next, let’s look at some other essential tools marketers must have in their arsenal. 

Build an Effective Crypto Marketing Strategy With a Web3 Marketing Stack

Building a solid marketing stack enables you to streamline processes, track performance, and make data-driven decisions for successful cryptocurrency marketing campaigns. Here are some tools you can make a part of your marketing stack. 

• Content creation tools: While there are a lot of NFT generators and AI tools to create artwork, platforms like Adobe Photoshop, Figma, and Illustrator, still produce high-quality artwork. 
• Scheduling tools: Once you’ve created your content you need to get it in front of the right people. So, you need to use content distribution tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to distribute your content across social media platforms and blogs. 
• Community management and engagement tools: When you start getting traction from your content, you need tools like Discord and Telegram to interact with your users and build a community. 
• Analytics tools: These tools help you get valuable insights from your crypto marketing campaigns. Raleon is one such tool. It analyzes on-chain and off-chain data and helps you identify which consumers are at risk of churn.

For a more detailed explanation of the tools you can use to optimize your marketing strategy, check out our blog: Web3 Marketing Stack: A Comprehensive List.

And to learn how Raleon’s campaign analytics can help optimize your marketing strategies, contact us today.