How to Build a Future-Ready Brand and Create Customers For Life In The Era of Web3

As the world exploded into online everything a few years ago, the reality of reaching your target audience has become more challenging than ever before. The importance of connecting with your audience and truly standing out from all the noise has become essential for businesses, brands, and creators.

If you are an independent coach, trainer, online marketer, in media and entertainment, or any business with an online community, connecting with your audience, creating unique value for them, and building a connection is key for keeping your community engaged.

Navigating an over-saturated online marketplace

According to a survey by the National Small Business Association conducted just a few months after the pandemic began, 80% of small businesses in the United States reported that they had fully or partially shifted to online operations.

According to eMarketer, the total media ad spend in 2022 was over $600 Billion dollars and is only expected to grow as they project total ad spend to increase to over $700 Billion next year and more than $800 Billion by 2025. That’s a lot of company ad dollars vying for consumer attention and a whole lot of congestion in the online marketplace. How can a business or brand stand out?

As the world shifts to embrace technology and many businesses now market in a growingly crowded online marketplace, it’s time for us to also embrace this shift and step into new technology solutions.

Engage the Power of Web3 for your Brand

Individual creators and brands can leverage Web3 strategies to better engage their communities and invite genuine customer loyalty. While Web1 just allowed users to read blogs and static web pages, Web2 allowed for users to interact with information flowing both ways with the emergence of social media. Now, Web3 adds ownership and financial layers through a decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain.

Imagine being able to leverage an online Web3 platform with a tiered loyalty reward program built in. Imagine being able to share a percentage of sales, launch special promotions, and be able to reward your community with special access and unlocked perks and sponsored offers. Imagine how fast your audience loyalty would grow if they could own a stake in your brand. By offering this unique, engaging experience, customers would be more likely to choose you over your competitors.

When most people hear Web3, they likely think of blockchain technologies and NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens). With blockchain, a database stores data in “blocks” that are linked together in a “chain”. It’s essentially a digital system for recording transactions and related data. However, the true implications of Web3 technology extend far beyond data; it facilitates and can amplify connection to what matters most to both consumers and creators.

The Digitization of rights through utility NFTs

NFTs are blockchain-based tokens that each represent a unique asset. This asset could be a piece of art, digital content, media, or even access to real-world value. The NFT acts as a digital certificate of ownership and authenticity for this asset.

Most of what we have heard in the news around NFTs has been the surprisingly simple digital artwork behind the Cryptopunks or the fascinatingly popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, selling in the hundreds of thousands of dollar range while perplexing many onlookers. While Cryptopunks were the first ever digital art collection to be minted on the blockchain, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) gave holders special perks and privileges. The true utility of NFT technology extends beyond their cosmetic appearance and has yet to be truly realized.

Aside from these unique early adopters that raked in the bulk of early NFT success, riding on the novelty and fad of the NFT movement, most projects have fallen flat, primarily because there was little to no utility or “real world value” backing these visual digital art tokens. The industry is in need of a shift toward tangible value, not only perceived value based on the artwork alone.

Web3 platform StarStake is here to change all that in more than a few key ways. First, the platform makes it simple to launch a variety of utility-driven NFTs and add the ever-so-important real world value by providing an easy to use drag and drop user interface with drop down menus and simple sliders to determine what the shared rewards will be for top-performing fans. Using the StarStake platform, you don’t even need to know how to write code to integrate with the blockchain, or know how to create a smart contract. All the heavy-lifting is handled for you by the platform.

It’s not even just about launching a series of NFTs, the capability goes so much further. NFTs just so happen to be the technology and infrastructure running behind the scenes providing the exclusive perks, access to events and experiences and financial rewards. They also serve as the digital certificate of ownership and authenticity for the value that is attached to this digital token which can easily be confirmed on the blockchain ledger.

Gamification and Building Fan Loyalty

Even better yet, meaningful gamification functionality is built into the StarStake platform. Gamification is a powerful tool for a business or brand to increase their audience engagement by motivating them and incentivizing them to participate and interact more with your brand as you launch promotions that reward top performers. This win-win scenario is set to increase their loyalty by encouraging repeat purchases and a deeper sense of connection to your brand. Users can now have a stake in the brand’s success and be part of the journey to stardom.

StarStake achieves this through a proprietary technology called the Fan Engine. The Fan Engine calculates each fan’s score based on their behavior, giving brands measurable metrics to identify and reward loyal and active fans. With the click of a button, you can now add a new promotion to grant exclusive access or launch a contest to engage your followers. As your audience takes action, this increases their FanScore which unlocks new levels of perks as they advance in this gamified environment.

Max Koziolek, member of the Forbes Technology Council, highlighted the challenge of connecting with and engaging your audience and future customers in a recent Forbes article, “The marketing landscape is noisy… It’s hard to stay ahead of customers’ changing preferences for engagement. And if you can catch a customer’s attention, how do you provide something different that will make them want to engage with and buy from you?”

As technology continues to advance at lightning speed, now is the time for us to leverage emerging technologies to stay ahead of the curve and we can leverage new creative strategies to stand out even more.

Introducing BrandClubs

To truly engage customers, we need to connect with them in a meaningful and unique way. We need to cut through all the noise and find a way to provide value that they care about. One way to do this is by creating a BrandClub. BrandClubs are like the successor to brands simply having subscribers. BrandClubs are like VIP members clubs for your brand, and like any member clubs, joining a BrandClub can come with a host of perks and benefits that can be set up in minutes. This creates a variety of exciting ways fans can engage and interact with your brand, complete with leaderboards, prizes, even a percentage of sales.

A platform like StarStake can simplify the steps toward enhanced user engagement and provide a unique connection to your audience. When you’re able to identify what your audience really values, you can activate that brand loyalty by providing access and experience in ways that were never possible until now. That personalization of experiences, as well as individual appreciation and acknowledgement, can fuel the desire to contribute and can transform followers into raving SuperFans! This will help you increase the lifetime value of your customer as SuperFans are loyal fans for life.

Why Loyalty is So Important — It Makes Dollars and Sense

First, there’s the cost of customer acquisition. According to the Harvard Business Review, it can be up to 25% more expensive to bring on a new customer than to keep an existing one. As famously outlined in the book Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70% whereas the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5–20%.

Then, there’s the value to your overall revenue. Bain & Company and Harvard Business School report that “increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. According to Gartner Group and “Leading on the Edge of Chaos” by Emmett C. Murphy and Mark C. Murphy, 20% of your repeat customers are responsible for over 80% of your future income!

That whole Web3 FanEngine and BrandClub strategy is starting to sound pretty good right about now, isn’t it? But wait! There’s more.. The best part about launching your brand on StarStake is that there are no upfront costs or monthly fees. Unlike a label or traditional publishing deal where an agent keeps the lion share of the profit; on StarStake, creators keep the majority of the revenue with only a small percentage given to the platform when sales are made. That means you can create your entire economy with a range of tokenized access and value on offer, supported by a slew of training materials and support, and retain the bulk of the revenue when successful.

This is a far better deal than paying for ads upfront on social media platforms where you don’t even have your own connection to your audience and the algorithms are in constant flux. If you post the wrong thing and your account gets shut down for going against the increasingly sensitive community guidelines, you could lose your entire fan base in the blink of an eye.

StarStake gives the power and control back to the creator, back to the brand. While many new websites are sprouting on the interwebs with promises of loyalty-building features and Web3 functionality, few have their own proprietary technology that can deliver on that promise in-house through an interconnected and intuitive experience. Unlike many up-and-coming projects, StarStake doesn’t have or need a roadmap, as the platform is already built. The destination is here, and ready for you to establish your new home amongst the stars.