Community is King in Web3 Marketing

Why Community is King in Web3 Marketing

Regarding Web3, one of the most demanding challenges isn’t the technical aspect of blockchain development, it’s how to gain traction and build a community.

Communities are the heart of Web3 much more than any other market, partly due to how the industry was first established. From the grassroots of early Bitcoiners, an industry worth over $1 trillion has grown.

With so much money in the industry, it’s easy for projects to believe they need a big marketing budget to stand out. This has been the downfall of many projects that watched as their runways shrank while their traction stalled.

People who have been in crypto and Web3 for a while naturally become suspicious of projects that buy advertising. After watching FTX go from sponsoring an arena to trying to find enough loose change for a coffee, those suspicions are well-founded.

That’s not to say that marketing doesn’t have a place in the industry; it does. The critical point in Web3 is that the marketing approach has to be different; it has to involve the community more than trying to impress them. Several strands to this approach are borrowed directly from typical marketing scenarios – for instance, influencers or key opinion leaders (KOLs).

Just as brands use KOLs when integrating their products into YouTube videos, so do Web3 projects when they use KOLs to gain exposure. From this perspective, there’s no difference in approach; it’s about getting eyeballs on your product or service.

However, relying only on this approach rarely, if ever, works in the long run. It’s one thing to get people to look at what you’re offering; it’s another thing to get them to invest and stay.

For marketing to succeed in Web3, the project needs several factors to work in the same direction. The team needs to be able to engage with their audience, and for that to work, they need an effective way to measure the impact of their words and actions.

For example, reward campaigns are part of Web3, deeply woven into its fabric. These can be as simple as asking people to follow, repost, and like some content on X in return for a chance of receiving an airdrop.

These essential campaigns still exist in Web3 because they work well here; Web3 communities are interested in quick, easy rewards. Why else would people buy into a memecoin that has no intrinsic value or functionality. It’s the lure of fast returns.

However, after the initial burst of engagement, what has the project’s team learned? What valuable insight have they gathered to help refine and improve their engagement? Usually, little to none.

Reward campaigns without insights are like driving a car blindfolded. You can move quickly, but you’ll only reach your destination if it’s a tree at the first bend in the road.

There are many bends in the journey from starting out to developing a successful project, and to navigate them, you need good eyesight. That’s why we’re creating apps to give projects the vision they need to see the bends in the road and stay ahead of the curve.

Leveraging advanced AI integrations, our reward campaign app will seamlessly integrate with tools that monitor community activity across social platforms. Rather than superficial metrics, such as post volume, AI gives more significant insights into the content quality, and sentiment.

This takes reward campaigns to a whole new level, allowing project founders to see what’s working and why, so they can double down on effective campaigns. This approach will make Zesh stand out from our competition and enable the projects we work with to do the same.