Today, most marketers go about web3 marketing in one of two ways.
Those transitioning from web2 to web3 use the same tactics, tools, and data they used to market web2 products.
Others, who grew into marketing roles while building web3 products mostly replicate strategies of other bigger web3 projects.
Both of these approaches rely on data that are not specific to their project or target audience, leading to suboptimal marketing results.
We’ll explore them to understand why we need a better way to market web3 products and services and how exactly you can do that.
But first, let’s go through a quick primer on what web 3.0 means.
What does Web 3.0 mean?
The internet started with web 1.0, which was primarily a platform for sharing static information. Then came web 2.0, which enabled more dynamic and interactive experiences, such as social media and e-commerce.
But most web 2.0 platforms today are centralized, prone to censorship, lack user data security, and fail to share earned value with users.
Web 3.0, or simply web3, is the latest iteration of the world wide web that focuses on decentralization, transparency, data ownership, and user-centricity. It empowers users and businesses with greater control over their online presence and data.
By leveraging blockchain technology, Web3 enables decentralized applications (dApps) that operate on a network of computers instead of a single, centralized server. And user interactions on web3 occur through pseudonymous crypto wallets and get immutably recorded on a blockchain.
In short, web3 changes three crucial elements of the internet:
1 - Foundational infrastructure: from centralized entities to decentralized blockchains.
2 - Power dynamics: from corporations to user communities.
3 - Data: from being linked to emails and social profiles to pseudonymous crypto wallets.
Collectively, these upgrades to the web can lead to the creation of innovative marketing strategies and platforms that prioritize user experiences.
For example, imagine a decentralized social media platform where users can choose to share their data with specific brands in exchange for personalized offers and rewards. This kind of mutually beneficial relationship is what Web3 is all about – empowering users and businesses to connect on a more meaningful level. Apart from all of this, there are technologies and updates like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, and the semantic web that will be a crucial part of web 3.0.
But for the purpose of getting started with the right digital marketing strategies in web3, we'll focus on the narrowed-down version that we discussed above.
Having established how web3 differs from web2, we are better equipped to understand why the two common approaches to web3 marketing mentioned earlier might not work.
Let’s take a dive.
The challenge with web 3.0 marketing strategies
There are two general categories of marketers in web3.
First, marketers that transition from web2 to web3 and try to use web2 tactics for web3 products.
This approach tends to underestimate web3’s fundamental differences as compared to web2.
Web2 was all about easily accessible social media handles, emails, and cookie data, making identity resolution extremely straightforward. But web3 is about privacy, pseudonymous identities in the form of web3 wallets, and on-chain interactions.
Besides, as web3 data is stored on a blockchain instead of a centralized server, it can be much more difficult to parse, sort, and identify.
For instance, one of the most effective marketing strategies and a prime example of value-sharing in web3 are airdrops — a way to distribute crypto tokens to a set of crypto wallets or users based on different blockchain-based or off-chain activities and behaviors.
Web3 projects often use airdrops to reward their most loyal users with crypto tokens that possess real value.
This is very unlike web2 platforms and one cannot only rely on web2 tactics or data to pull off a successful airdrop.
The second approach is where a marketer tries to simulate strategies of other web3 projects.
This approach flips the marketing equation and tries to fit a product into a marketing strategy instead of doing it the other way round.
Even if a marketer finds a similar product and uses the same strategy as them, how do they clearly portray their edge over competitors? Or, how do they establish and offer what their users exactly want?
As you can see, both these approaches act on inaccurate data. And they’re as good as shooting arrows in the dark. You might get lucky at times but that's all.
So, you need an approach to web3 digital marketing that accounts for web3’s differences from web2 and tailors the strategies based on accurate behavioral data.
But how can marketers exactly do that?
It’s simpler than you might think. We’ll break it down into three different parts:
What is web3 marketing?
How to set up a web3 marketing strategy?
5 web3 marketing strategies that work
What is web3 marketing? Same fundamentals, different approach
Web3 marketing is an approach to marketing web3 products that takes into account blockchain-based data and the unique expectations of web3 users. It goes beyond SEO and paid ads and utilizes user-centric strategies such as airdrops, quests, loyalty programs, staking rewards, and so on.
As different as the marketing approach of web3 sounds compared to web2, marketing’s basic fundamentals still apply here.
Like for any other type of data-backed marketing, you can follow the same broad steps for web3 marketing, and they are:
1 - Collecting and analyzing data.
2 - Acting on insights and creating campaigns.
3 - Assessing and optimizing results.
Similar to web2, web1, or the pre-internet era, consumer data remains the front and center of web3 marketing. That’s followed by understanding your potential users’ needs and expectations.
So, how exactly is web2 marketing different from web3 marketing?
For a marketer, the two major things that change in web3 are:
- What data you can collect and filter.
- How you execute on that data.
Let’s address the first change.
Collecting data for digital marketing in web3
The bad news about web3 data collection is, data of all user interactions are hidden behind cryptic wallet addresses and transactions on a blockchain.
The good news is that a blockchain stores all interactions in a public ledger.
So, while you may or may not be able to identify the users’ identities, you can always study their on-chain activities to understand user needs. And there’s a ton of blockchain data that you can assess to create a killer marketing strategy.
Despite how technical it sounds, tools like Raleon offer a user-friendly interface where you can find all kinds of useful marketing and user data on the blockchain in a few clicks. And you don’t need any coding knowledge to do this.
Besides, you can use Raleon to connect users’ web3 and web2 interactions. This can help you target existing and new users not only on web3 platforms but also across web2.
For example, in a few clicks, you can get a list of all addresses that use a competitor platform. Or, you can find wallets that own at least two or more NFTs worth over $500 each. Or, filter for users that own a web3 domain name or use a web3 social media protocol such as Lens. The possibilities are endless.
To better understand what’s possible with such data, let’s suppose you’re building a decentralized exchange (DEXs). In this case, you can parse the blockchain data for existing DEXs to look for the most active traders.
If you want, you can further narrow down the list of users (a.k.a. wallets) to only those whose yearly trading volume exceeds $10,000.
You can then create a personalized offer for these traders, say zero-cost trading for six months, and show it as a one-click Action Prompt when they visit your website.
Moreover, using an attribution engine, you can study web2 data to understand where your users come from and where they hang out on social media. By combining this with your users' on-chain behavior, you can establish who your potential users are. You can then target them with suitable campaigns across platforms they already spend time on.
You can even use on-chain data to track activities on your platform and figure out what is working and what is not. We cover this in more detail in this blog: 10 Web3 Project Metrics To Help Drive Growth.
Gathering data related to your potential users helps you:
1 - Identify your target audience,
2 - Understand their needs.
3 - Design strategies to deliver solutions to those needs.
The idea is to not look at web3 data as siloed from web2. With Raleon, you can bring together web2 and web3 data. You can then use this to tailor a marketing strategy that can appeal to the right users, onboard them, and build trust.
Now that you know what kind of data web3 and blockchain hosts, let’s see how you can execute on this data.
How to set up a web3 marketing strategy?
The data hosted on a blockchain can tell you a lot about your potential or existing users. And once you know how to extract that data and sort it, you can design marketing campaigns that tap into the very specific needs of users and thus deliver results.
Let’s see how you can use the data-driven marketing tools on Raleon to act on the three fundamental steps to marketing stated above.
Step 1. Collecting and analyzing data
As we’ve mentioned over and over again, blockchain data is the most crucial when designing a marketing campaign in web3. And Raleon is a marketing tool that can help you do that in a few simple clicks.
Once you log in to Raleon, you can find and filter users from the blockchain universe based on a wide range of parameters.
Let’s suppose, you’re launching an NFT marketplace and want to airdrop tokens to NFT holders to attract them to your platform.
To do this, you must first define the parameters based on which you will airdrop the tokens. Let’s say, you want to airdrop tokens to all users who have traded any NFTs in the last 60 days.
To do this, you can simply go to the Audience Builder on Raleon and add the parameters you see in the image below:
And your audience is ready.
If you want to filter users based on more parameters, you can simply add more filters by clicking And wallets who.
Or, you can find and build different kinds of audiences to study their activities over an extended period and base your strategies on your findings. You can also assess users’ web2 activity on the Raleon dashboard and link it to their web3 activities.
For more details on setting up an airdrop, read our step-by-step guide to execute a campaign like the NFT marketplace Blur’s $400 million airdrop.
Step 2. Acting on insights and creating campaigns
Once you have your audience and their data ready, it’s time to design the campaign. And whether it’s a web3 or web2 campaign, you can do it through Raleon’s Campaigns section.
You can use this to customize and launch a wide range of campaigns such as an airdrop, pushing Action Prompts on web2 landing pages, NFT launches, loyalty programs, and so on.
To take this a step further, you can also target your audience with personalized content, such that they see prompts that are specifically designed for them. As a result, you increase conversions, get better engagement, and drive more growth.
Step 3. Assessing and optimizing results
Once you set a campaign in motion and start seeing results, you must assess those results and optimize your campaign.
And Raleon lets you do exactly that. On your dashboard, you can view stats related to your web3 marketing campaigns and see what’s bringing in the best results and what’s not.
Based on this insight, you can optimize your campaign for the best results.
Now, let’s check out some data-driven web3 marketing examples that you can work on.
5 web3 marketing examples that work (data-driven)
There are few industries that move as fast as web3 and there's always something new to explore when it comes to marketing. But there are a few evergreen strategies you can use.
Here’s a list of the five most effective web3 marketing strategies that have a proven track record in web3:
1. Airdrops
Airdrops are a way for brands in web3 to acquire new users and retain existing ones by offering real value to users in the form of cryptocurrency tokens. While existing projects use airdrops to reward their loyal users and increase user retention, new projects, such as LooksRare, airdrop tokens to users of their competitors to onboard them to a new experience.
From creating awareness to building trust, credibility, and hype, an airdrop is known to do it all. But a lot can go wrong with airdrops.
You can’t risk your users seeing your airdrop as just some “free money,” which is what happened with Uniswap — the first popular airdrop.
However, airdrops were still a new thing back in the day and there weren’t simple enough tools to sort and filter users based on complex parameters.
Today, however, using tools like Raleon, you can set various parameters to identify and reward users that have the highest chances of becoming more loyal to your project.
To better understand the possibilities, here’s the list of criteria that the recent Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop used to calculate the airdrop amount for users:
- Bridged to Arbitrum
- Transactions Over Time
- Transaction Frequency and Interaction
- Transaction Value
- Assets Bridged to Arbitrum One
- Activity on Arbitrum Nova
Each tier had multiple sub-tiers to further classify users based on their activity. The more criteria a user checked, the higher was their airdrop amount.
Assets Bridged to Arbitrum One
- You've deposited more than $10,000 of assets
- You've deposited more than $50,000 of assets
- You've deposited more than $250,000 of assets
While 3 years ago, this would’ve required significant technical knowledge, today, you can simply log in to Raleon and set these filters in a matter of minutes.
Such data-driven marketing allows you to use behavioral loops to identify who your ideal users are, and what actions you think may “hook” them into the product to avoid pump and dump.
2. Loyalty programs
Loyalty programs aren't a new concept but they do get a new makeover in web3. Brands and web3 projects can use blockchain-based digital assets such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to make loyalty programs less transactional and more immersive and engaging.
What do we exactly mean?
So, let's say you're a web2 brand, how do you reward your users or consumers for their loyalty? Very likely with loyalty points that they can redeem only within your ecosystem. It has no value as a standalone object.
Using NFTs instead of regular loyalty points changes that. When you reward users with NFTs, they truly own the asset. That means they can transfer it to other wallets, put it up for sale across marketplaces, use it on any platforms you partner with, or just hold it as an asset. Besides, they don't expire.
To do this, you must first be able to identify your loyal users based on different metrics. For example, you can create a checklist similar to Arbitrum but for loyalty programs. By filtering user data for various levels of engagement on your platform, you can assign them different kinds of NFTs, which represent the level of engagement and the corresponding benefits.
So, instead of having points that people usually forget, you'll have unique-looking NFTs that are in themselves engaging and have inherent benefits even beyond your platform's ecosystem.
3. Events
Organizing, sponsoring, or even attending real-world or virtual events such as hackathons, meetups, and conferences is a great way to build a strong community for both developer and user-facing web 3.0 projects.
Let's say you're building a blockchain platform or web3 infrastructure tooling. You can organize hackathons to attract more developers to use your solutions. To do this, you can use a web2+web3 strategy, where you check for developers who own POAPs (proof-of-attendance NFTs) from developer events and craft a strategy to reach them and similar profiles on social media platforms.
Beyond the events, you can also show owners of POAPs from developer events a personalized message when they visit your platform to increase their chances of engaging with your solutions.
With Raleon, you can even combine web2 and web3 data. This makes it simple to understand the actions and behaviors of your users and prospects on-chain, in web2, and also at real-life events. You can then use this data to bring better engagement and brand interactions.
4. Community building
Web3 platforms are decentralized, meaning communities have a critical role to play in these projects. It can be as voters during governance, as advocates during events and campaigns, or as a replacement for support executives in Discord servers.
For example, check this conversation from the discord server of the web3 domain platform ENS.
Here, a community member answers the query of another community member, somewhat replacing the need for an extensive support team. These are often the most active and loyal users of a web3 platform.
So, community building shouldn’t be an afterthought but a leading part of your web3 marketing strategy.
With a good product, you can build a huge community of users on let’s say Discord. But how do you take your community from dull and boring to strong and lively?
You bring in incentives and elite roles for community members who contribute to the project's operations and growth.
You can identify such community members and reward them with something of social significance. For example, in a Discord server, you can make them a moderator of a channel or gift them an NFT that gives them an elite status in the community.
You can even rely on community members for user generated content and reward such activities in the form of crypto tokens, elite member roles, etc.
5. Quests
Quests are activities that require users to perform a multi-step action on a certain platform to win a variety of rewards. This way, the user does something valuable for the project and earns a reward in the form of crypto tokens, an NFT, a special role, access to new features, etc.
Quests are an interactive and immersive way for crypto projects to engage and capture ideal audiences and build loyalty. Some of the most common quests involve executing transactions like token swaps and NFT trades to win crypto rewards.
However, a quest doesn't necessarily need to be in the form of a transaction. It can be an interesting puzzle or a riddle or playing a simple browser-based game. Primarily, it's about designing something that goes well with what your project does.
Once you have designed a quest, you can show an action prompt to new and existing users when they come online. The action prompt would lead them to participate in the activity and win rewards.
You can even monitor for times when they're most active and push these prompts at that specific time to increase their chances of engaging with it.
Build Your Data-Driven Web3 Marketing Campaign
If there’s one thing the above examples of marketing in web3 show us, it’s that data-driven marketing is a vast topic. However, if you have the right data, you can achieve spot trends, predict customer behavior, identify buying patterns, and much more when planning your marketing strategies.
The challenge is accessing the information you need and being able to easily organize it. That’s where tools like Raleon come in and help you out.
With a single dashboard on Raleon, you can find all the relevant data on a blockchain and use it to build buyer personas, understand user journeys, build engaging campaigns, and drive sustainable growth for your web3 project.
Need help?
If you need help with building your audiences, using the dashboard, connecting your off-chain activities with on-chain transactions, or simply want to talk about best practices in Web3 marketing, we’d love to have a chat with you. Click here to connect with an expert at Raleon and get your queries resolved.
