Unique strategies to drive your project’s growth without aimlessly giving away free tokens.
As a marketer or founder building a project with real-world utility, one constant challenge is identifying and engaging your target audience. The over-reliance on incentives as the primary marketing tool has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between opportunistic users and those genuinely interested in your project. This article, will explore the expanding scope of Web3 marketing and look into more su stainable growth strategies to attract and retain your crypto tribe.
Web3 marketing adapts traditional marketing principles to the crypto space. It focuses on creating, communicating, and delivering the core values of Web3, such as transparency, decentralization, security, and privacy, to attract users, partners, and investors.
A Web3 marketer is someone who can conceptualize the ideal user, create targeted messaging, develop a funnel, and analyze and iterate based on results. The first Web3 marketers were businesspeople without clearly defined roles, simply individuals who executed guerrilla marketing and used grassroots strategies to drive engagement.
A popular strategy often used by marketers is airdrops. Many view airdrops as the quickest way to boost metrics like sign-ups or community size, which can appear impressive on paper but don’t necessarily translate into meaningful engagement. It’s a common mindset: if Project A can launch an airdrop with minimal marketing effort and see results, why not follow suit? While some marketers consider the Endowment Effect when distributing tokens, the numbers tell a different story—9 out of 10 airdrops fail. I wrote an article exploring this, which you can check out here.
Now, it’s time for Web3 marketers to focus on building authentic communities and communicating Web3 concepts in creative ways that resonate with users, even beyond the Web3 audience.
When building a real Web3 community, it’s important to understand the psychology of the Web3 audience, which includes visionaries, pioneers, speculators, pragmatists (real users), and skeptics (paper hands). As a crypto marketer, your job is to understand these groups and attract the right audience to your project.
You definitely don’t want to attract those on the far right — the paper hands — who are only interested in short-term gains, driven by the potential of a token’s value increasing over time and the opportunity to resell at a higher price. Instead, your focus should be on attracting real users who genuinely seek access to unique features, services, and experiences within a Web3 ecosystem that offers tangible value to their everyday lives.
Real communities are built on a well-defined value proposition, meaningful discussions, and an open, transparent, and inclusive ecosystem. Real users want to feel part of something larger, so it’s essential to empower them and make their decisions count.
To attract genuine Web3 users, projects should plan their long-term technology roadmap, publish it on their website, and regularly communicate progress through messaging, meetups, forums, and social posts. At the end of the day, it’s the projects that consistently deliver on their roadmaps that inspire trust and encourage retention, while those that fail to follow through damage their credibility.
Here are other creative ways to growing a project without throwing away free coins
Here are some other creative ways to grow a project without giving away free coins.
Given the current state of Web3 growth, most new projects that solve real-world problems will likely attract both Web3-native and Web2 users. While it may be tempting to highlight blockchain and its powerful features when presenting a product, the reality is that most Web2 audiences don’t care that a project uses blockchain technology. In fact, some users even see it as a barrier due to the negative media surrounding failed and scammy projects.
As a project building real-world utility, it’s important to avoid crypto jargon and focus on communicating the value propositions from the audience’s perspective. For example, instead of calling it a decentralized gaming platform, a gaming project could highlight seamless access to your favorite games. Similarly, a music app could emphasize a new way to share, support, and experience music.
To drive adoption across various platforms, it’s crucial to understand your audience and speak their language. Brave browser is a prime example of a project using blockchain technology with clear messaging: blocking ads and enhancing the user experience—straight to the point, with no crypto jargon. Audius, Filecoin, and others are successfully following this approach.
Project discovery often happens during key moments, such as news coverage of significant network activity or partnerships. Another creative way to describe this is co-marketing.
A great example of this is the popular Chainlink marketing strategy. The Chainlink marketing team maintains consistent messaging, ensuring that whenever a project integrates with Chainlink, it’s announced widely.
Usually, both Chainlink and the new project publish joint posts announcing the collaboration, emphasizing Chainlink’s value proposition to both audiences. This approach boosts domain authority and gathers credibility from various websites, helping grow the platform’s reputation and build trust with investors or users following the project closely.
You need to deliver value to their communities that goes beyond financial gain, focusing instead on strategies that truly engage their target audience. You have to prioritize intrinsic incentives over extrinsic rewards in Web3 projects.
For instance, a “friends with benefits” model or a token-gated DAO community provides real utility. Only token holders can access meetups and participate in Discord activities, with members being removed if they sell the token. Another example is Mirror.xyz, a decentralized publishing platform that empowers writers to monetize their content through NFTs or crowdfunding, offering more than just financial rewards.
Some Web3 projects naturally have higher user retention than others. For example, wallets tend to retain users more easily since transferring a full portfolio of tokens from one project to another introduces friction. However, DeFi protocols can lose market share quickly if another protocol offers higher yields. To improve retention, existing holders could be given the opportunity to join a whitelist, granting them access to future airdrops and rewards.
Leveraging the substrate of Web3, any project, including DeFi protocols and utilities, can design incentive systems that enhance user retention.
To grow a Web3 project, regardless of role or title, you must understand the audience and present the project’s core values from their perspective, while staying true to the fundamental principles of Web3. Unlike Web2 companies that rely on giants like Meta and Google for revenue and audience reach, Web3 projects can build self-sustaining marketing systems rooted in community culture.
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