5 tips for your Web3 marketing, or the anatomy of pump

A Web3 Marketing and Communications Executive advising crypto startups on growth and GTM strategy.  Led user acquisition, secured partnerships, and helped raise funding for DeFi and Layer-One blockchain platforms: Gnosis, Subspace Labs, Taraxa, Akropolis, and more. Olga is a mentor at Techstars Web3 Accelerator, based in Mountain View, CA.

The usual suspects: funnel, channels, metrics.

When starting marketing for your Web3 project, you might find yourself asking these questions:

· How do I get the word out about my project without doing an obscene airdrop budget?

· What distribution channels should I prioritize for my dApp?

· Which growth metrics should the investors care about?

· Who are my super users who will drive the network adoption?

The good news is that a Web3 marketing funnel is not so different from its Web2 counterpart, plus there is a ton of Web3-native tooling popping up. A typical marketing funnel in crypto goes something like this: 1/ a user learns about a project on some high-traffic news aggregator/newsletter, or bumps into a shill/ad on Twitter, 2/ googles the project and lands on your page, 3/ hopefully, the next step would be joining your Discord or Telegram. The actual user acquisition strategies will vary based on the audience segment and the type of product you’re building: what works for L1, won’t necessarily work for a dApp.

Content is king, even in crypto.

Building a strong knowledge base is the first thing you wanna do when launching a crypto product. One issue here is that not so many people are ready to delve into the depths of complex concepts of DeFi and tokenomics.

I wrote my first piece on DeFi circa September 2018, and content has truly been my go-to tool for building brand awareness ever since. Start small: a few thoughtful threads on Twitter with the right amount of tagging will get you the first eyeballs. From there, start building out your blog but make sure you heads-on address your platform’s competitive advantage. All sorts of visuals work great, and we saw some great results with simple infographics explaining the platform’s value props.

How do you go viral in crypto?

The token is not a panacea for success but it will get the eyeballs on your product. When we launched a token, the level of attention and expectations skyrocketed: suddenly we were under the microscope, and there came the price talk. Lesson learned: ask yourself if you’d rather have a high quantity or high quality of users. Then you won’t need to over-moderate your Telegram and kick people out for spreading FUD.

The beauty of this space is that we’re still fairly early and there’s lots of room for the first-mover advantage. Here’s an idea: a visualization of the current L2 / rollup landscape charting the network fees. The topic is super trending and no one has really done anything like that so far. A good example of a viral campaign is Gnosis Safe’s recent ‘March for Account Abstraction’ hackathon with up to 50K in prizes that featured brilliant motion graphics in line with their big rebranding campaign.

Like airdrop, but make it last.

The recent Optimism airdrop when a huge portion of newly acquired users just bounced after claiming their tokens, illustrates that acquisition via instant token incentives doesn’t work for long-term retention. 40% of the airdrop remained unclaimed, and a majority of users just dumped the token.

One way to tackle this is to implementretroactive distribution, which implies rewarding users who demonstrated a certain degree of activity in the past. Plus, the airdrop needs to be claimable: get the user to actually create a wallet and interact with the platform, even if it’s a simple asset swap What you’re trying to create here is  a sustainable incentive mechanism with user tiers based on contribution (GitHub commits, Discord activity) rewarded by tokens, loyalty points, or badges (all of that can be redeemed for a token later). Call it a loyalty program on Web3 steroids.

Incentives, incentives!

The next phase in the Web3 funnel requires a lot of thinking around the user perks, or ‘incentives’. General awareness campaigns are great, but the community attention span is short in crypto, so we need to keep the user entertained with targeted campaigns. Quests, bug bounties, anything goes. And make sure you throw in some token-gated features: access to premium content, exclusive invites to IRL events, or a 1:1 Zoom call with the Founder.

Most importantly: keep the excitement alive! A great example here is BLUR’s recent multi-step airdrop with their Care Packages that was gamified in such a way that gave users a sense of the unknown knowns playing upon their psychology.

Campaigns that earn users tokens (or points and badges for the pre-token stage) to interact with the protocol by completing simple actions, such as swapping or sending assets work great for top-funnel acquisition. These can be executed at quest-to-earn platforms or through your own proprietary community platform for posting and rewarding submissions - gamification and cool UX are very important here.