101 Guide to Scale your Web3 Project: Hacks that no marketing agency will tell you
I have been working in Web3 for the past 4 years. Witnessed the good, the ugly and notorious side of this industry. In this article, I will list down all the learnings that I have gathered to make sure that you don’t miss out on any avenues of marketing your project.
Getting Started
First list down your project’s USPs, potential competitors and your platform’s tenets. Decentralised or not? Aggregator? Whether your token falls under security? Have you acquired all the necessary licences?
Example: Imagine you have built an ETH Restaking platform. Now, look at what others are offering. Lets say, as you position your brand as a staking as a service platform.
Look at the proprietary infra of your protocol and what your competitor is offering.
To explain this let me give you an example. Most platforms today are offering staking but they do not offer a fully vetted operator for staking your ETH. Now this responsibility falls on the person who’s restaking ETH. Compared to others, your protocol takes care of the node operator to ensure your restaking journey is seamless.
Second, usually an agency will offer you a media buying package, organic content package with a limited number of posts for three months. Now, will you be able to get a higher brand mention if your handle has less number of posts and even lesser engagement.
Check some of the most esteemed crypto projects. If you take a look you will realise that the social media handles of these brands have a healthy mix of all types and formats of content. Text, video, polls, memes, product features, hero campaign and a brand narrative.
Don’t forget to leverage upcoming social media platforms that are truly decentralised. For example, Warpcast.
Next, brand inclusion, ORM plugging are low hanging fruits that you must pluck. Don’t force it. Let it come naturally. Question is how do we make brand mention and setting notifications for certain keywords that have a link to your platform/ project / industry.
Follow people who are pioneers in your vertical: ‘’Stay in the Know, to row your ship’’.
Well defined user flow: Crypto is a fast stage. So ensure that your product user flow is clear. Let me tell you an example, I worked on a project that collects data of your health parameters through your fitness smartwatch in lieu of their native token. This is an ethical data buying platform. But to do so, you must have their NFT that pretty much works like a soulbound token. The project missed out on telling that the user needs to buy the NFT first. Now, imagine the initial struggle and drop in numbers because of an ambiguous user flow.
Quality of your whitepaper: If your product requires a whitepaper or litepaper ensure that you get the right person to write it for you. There are plenty of projects that have missed out on this aspect. If you want to check some of the best white papers visit www.whitepaper.io
Power of personal branding: Whether you are a CEO or IT specialist in the firm, you must be active on social media. Preferably X, Discord, Reddit and official crypto forums. Write and read the content on crypto forums. Trust me it is a goldmine waiting for you to be tapped.
Examples: Naval, CZ, Brian Armstrong, Krishna Chawla, Shikha (at Zoth protocol) and Tanmay Tarte just to name a few.
Be ready with your elevator pitch: Learned from my previous employers. You need to have your product intro ready. You would need your product pitch ready at all times. Keep it short & informational.
Web presence: Your product website, content on social media, AMAs, updates, new joiners, product roadmap, educational hub (learning of your solution). In addition to social media, ensure that you build a great community.
You can opt to have shillers. But ensure that you come across as a genuine one. We all need a bit of push to get there. If I have to be truthful, don’t we ask our friends, family, partners, project advocates to speak about us? Word of Mouth spreads quickly.
Additionally, encourage your in house marketeer to get talking about your project in communities and at events. You can find like minded people on Truts.xyz — a platform that hosts communities. They really deliver on their promise.
Look for communities that would like to partner up with you. Partnerships can be an amazing way to capture a better brand recall and members. But, ensure that the partnership has equal brand recall equity.
Guerilla content marketing: Why? People tend to read KOL content on X. Take a look at the example below
Plucking Low Hanging Fruits: Coinmarketcap: Yes, it is more of a repository but it is the most visited site for everything crypto. Posting content through CMC too can be valuable. (PS: For the longer run)
Steemit & Publish0x: These have been quite popular amongst crypto content creators and could be an easy way of getting our work notice. Besides these, you can also check mirror.xyz. Positioning
1) The Hero Campaign
From my understanding of brands, the hero campaign runs for at least a month and can go up to three months. In this content pillar we take an insight, a value and the user onto the marketing board.
How to crack the campaign idea? SImply look at the insights. For example, suppose you are a platform that publishes authentic and well researched crypto projects. Why would you buy it? How do you convince them to buy?
Well, in this example, I would like to highlight a campaign idea that my co-writer worked on. The idea was simple. Some people believe that they know it all and some rely on industry standard research. So the idea was to know it all and et all. It may sound sarcastic but it does the job anyway.
2) Evergreen content
This pillar covers a range of content buckets. Pop culture meme, market cap, one liners on crypto & Web3, lesser known facts. For example, it is believed that the logo of Ethereum is believed to be a tribute to Miyazaki’s Laputa. It is a co-incidence. (originally posted on:https://bit.ly/3R9rYKj)
Another post would be on best practices to follow while making chain transactions. Awareness on cyber security is crucial especially when dealing with crypto.
A healthy mix of memes and polls would also be a good addition.
Posts on partnerships, events, AMAs — it’s all out there.
Use of new formats on social media can also be of help. For example, on X we now have communities too. We can introduce our offering and the brand narrative.
UGC snippets: I have been actively reading DeFi content on Reddit and some posts are pure gold. Two approaches on UGC:
- Engage with quality posts on DeFi. Self promotion can be considered. Reddit becomes a much easier way for to get brand recalls and even lead conversion.
- Pick certain posts that add value. Either information that is original and never heard of. (of course fact checked)
Wrapping up
Running a Web3 platform is no mean feat. Hence, ensure that you have a good marketing and promotional plan.
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