Web3 — Transforming Your Business From Getting Customers For Today To Building Customers For Life
Digital Shiny Object Syndrome
In our overly media-saturated world of digital shiny objects, many businesses are fixated on standing out from the growing crowd in a bid to buy new customers. Targeted advertising, detailed analytics, and meticulous tracking let brands zero in on their ideal customer with laser precision. However, once acquired, there has been little available to turn these customers of today into customers for life.
Imagine you are a famed YouTuber with a million followers. Your fans come back repeatedly for your next content drop, but what’s in it for them beyond the enjoyment of your content? You ask them to like, comment, share, and subscribe though they watch your journey to stardom from the sidelines. Also, as the content creator, how do you know which of your followers are the real contributors, making purchases, sharing, and growing your brand?
The Migration from Web2 to Web3
While Web2 gave rise to digital interaction, catapulting brands into new levels of omnipresence and allowing both creators and their communities to be joined in dialogue, Web3 elevates this conversation to new, mutually-beneficial heights.
Web3 stacks new layers of reward and ownership on top of existing Web2 interaction. This can transform passively consuming a brand’s or a creator’s content into a far more active, more intensely social experience. Where Web2 fostered the ubiquity of digital communities rising up around a brand, Web3 holds the promise of engaging and incentivizing these communities in myriad unprecedented ways to create enduring bonds built on lasting emotion instead of only a momentary transaction.
From Under Control to In Control
Web2, while providing a much-needed digital soapbox for all manner of rising stars to have their spotlight, it also concentrated the control over these creators in the hands of the tech platforms providing that service. “Web3 is about taking back control of the internet from the few, and giving it back to the many.” -Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital.
The current creator-consumer landscape makes it so that the communities are owned by the platform, not by the creator who cultivated them, with audiences being sold to the highest bidder and creators being given a token percentage of revenue or worse, being shut out from their own followers through changing algorithms and community standards censorship. “Web3 is the next iteration of the internet, where people and communities are in control, not centralized corporations.” — Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum.
Web3 ushers in the democratizing of value and the digitization of rights. The implications of this run far deeper than apparent at first glance. Now a creator can own the connection to each and every member of their community independent of any platform. This is made possible by Web3 and the blockchain. Better still, a creator or brand can transparently see each member’s unique contribution and reward them for it in ways that matter to that fan.
Using Web3 to Build Customer Loyalty
A new platform poised to lead the charge when it comes to Web3 reward and community building is StarStake. True to its name, StarStake allows users to become stakers of and have a stake in the success of their favorite stars and brands. It does this through its proprietary FanEngine. Imagine a platform where you put casual followers in on one end, they go through quests, and they emerge as raving superfans at the other end.
“A lot of businesses are focused on buying customers,” says Chris Hawk, CEO of StarStake. “Our focus is taking those casual customers and building lifetime loyalty.” This is something StarStake calls the journey from follower to superfan, and there’s a gamified, immersive rite-of-passage that nurtures individual fans to get there.
StarStake serves as a Web3 on-ramp for any brand or business, allowing brands to quickly and easily add tiered loyalty, fan rewards, earnings, and the distribution of perks and even products for top-performing fans. Creators can launch promotions and competitions in minutes that grant exclusive access, percentage of sales, and even sponsored offers to their product or project.
“I’ve always loved underdog stories,” says Hawk. “You can’t out-spend corporate ad budgets, but you can build an army of more loyal superfans that will grow your brand for you and stick with you because they are appreciated and rewarded.”
It seems somewhat paradoxical, though, in the right hands, technological advancement may provide the missing keys to building deeper connections in our digitally enveloped age. Instead of merely knowing what value a creator brings — something possible in Web2, now a brand can also see exactly what value each unique fan brings — something only possible through the transparent record of actions in Web3. Fan behaviors that are recorded can now be rewarded. Every purchase, referral, time spent, and number of items owned can all be tallied and accumulated into a total that distinguishes one fan apart from another. This can result in fans winning backstage passes, in-person VIP events, exclusive offers, luxury stays, signed merchandise, or inner-circle memberships.
These perks can also be made available for purchase separately. This can greatly enhance the value that creators and brands have to offer by tokenizing exclusive access to something such as the product itself. Now instead of an up-and-coming musician relying on sales of their song to pay the bills, they can tokenize VIP access to their next event and offer unreleased remixes, and also share in their winnings with their fans, leveraging their content and monetizing content with experiences that matter to their audience. They can single out and spotlight these high-performing fans in a variety of ways. This fosters real, lasting relationships and meaningful connections instead of a series of transactions.
Gamification of Behavior and Tokenization of Value
Thanks to the availability of these fan metrics made possible by decentralization and the blockchain, the user experience can now also be gamified. Web3 and gamification combined are like the power couple for building brand loyalty. Gamification is the process of using game mechanics such as rewards, points, and leaderboards in non-game environments to incentivize and drive sought-after behaviors. Gamification is not a novel concept, though it has reached new levels of nuance and immersion with the advent of Web3.
Closing Thoughts
Future-proofing platforms like StarStake make full use of this to incentivize loyalty and facilitate deeper relationships than were possible before. Businesses and brands can use the robust, free feature set to turn their businesses into Web3 advanced loyalty engines. We foresee a future where communities with their members individually recognized and rewarded launch their respective brands to exponentially greater reach and wider success.
To triumph in this new time of tech-enabled business, the question we should be asking isn’t “How do we buy more customers?”, but “How do we convert all our viewers, followers, and casual consumers into loyal fans for life?”, and it looks as though the answer to that question is right around the corner.
