Community Building Is The Main Marketing Strategy In Web3, Here Is Why

Right after any team has defined their products and services, the next question they always ask before launch is, “So how do we market this?” Unless the team is for charity purposes, this is a hard discussion they must have.

History has shown several instances where big companies had to stop creating a particular product because they could not make sales.

The millennials can remember an incident in the early ‘90s when the Pepsi company had to take off a new product called “Crystal Pepsi” because it wasn't selling.

Now, marketing is the bridge between building solid products or services and making sales. Of course, there are also different strategies to effectively market products which vary depending on industries and peculiar situations.

But with new time comes new tides. There is a paradigm shift, and any veteran marketer who is not paying attention might be missing out.

With the way Web3 is gradually forming shape, marketing is reshaping and taking a new form. According to the CEO of Lens Protocol and Aave, Stani Kulechov, he tweeted, “Marketing doesn’t exist in Web3; community is everything.”

While that is both an overstatement and overstretched truth, it's, however, the truth that community is the crucible of Web3.

In furtherance of this, we will take a critical look at why community building is the main marketing strategy in Web3.

What Makes Marketing In Web3 Different From Traditional & Web2 Marketing?

Marketing is multi-faceted. That is, how to market products or services is relative to each industry. For instance, how to market landed property in the real estate world is different from how Web2 platforms like Google and Amazon sell their services.

It is important to bear in mind that marketing in Web3 is an entirely different ball game. For instance, Alchemy doesn’t run targeted ads, yet it is one of the most patronized and core infrastructure providers in Web3.

This is the point here: We must first make peace with the fact that the modus operandi of marketing in Web3 is different from every other industry. Having entrenched that, let’s look at a few basic factors behind this.

First of all, in Web3, the users own the platform. This is unlike Web2 or the traditional setting where whoever founded something owns it. For instance, Google and Twitter own their platforms and they do not give back to the users.

An average user of Google doesn't gain any reward for using the search engine – except perhaps for the knowledge they gained and all.

But let’s use Brave, a Web3-native browser, as a case study. The search engine rewards users for using the platform and even plans to give them a commission on every ad they come across.

For content marketers, SEO has always been one of the top checklists to be ticked before a piece of content is published. They do this because the higher a content ranks, the higher the chances of conversion and sales.

To this end, some content marketers often try to keyword stuff and play some other tricks to rank on the search engines.

But SEO content marketing in Web3 is different because browsers like Brave don’t rank content based on the usual metrics but as a result of quality that is determined by online human conversations.

That aside, in real-life and Web2 landscapes, businesses often get the email of their customers by signups. But that won’t work in Web3 because users sign in with their wallets and not emails.

Thus, email marketers would need to devise new strategies for collecting emails.

The differences we have highlighted above along with many other ones are the reasons the landscape of marketing in Web3 is different from the others.

Therefore, marketers who are hoping to come into Web3 must first learn the ropes in order to craft marketing strategies that will work and generate the results in this ecosystem.

In The First Place, Marketing Should Not Even Sound As One

Some have defined marketing to mean the sole promotion of what you sell and triggering people to buy it. While that is correct, it’s not a holistic approach.

To get to this point, maybe we should explain what marketing is all about. Foremost, if you want people to buy from you, then you should appear as one who wants to solve their problem more than one who wants to sell.

In the bid to solve their problem, sincerity is also a big factor – and people can smell if you’re not.

Now, when you sincerely want to solve people's problems and you're genuine about it, they won't see you as someone whom all he cares about is selling. Instead, they will see you as someone who has the value to solve their problems.

That way, they will be willing to exchange their monetary assets for your goods or services. Just name your price and they’ll gladly swipe their cards.

The bedrock of our discussion so far is that in the first place, marketing shouldn’t even appear or sound like one. It should be seamless and natural.

But respectfully, you will agree with me that marketing in the traditional and Web2 settings sometimes appears extremely salesy without really caring about how the customers feel as such.

For example, some companies often leave their customers once they have purchased their products.

Meaning that it’s either their customer support team is non-existent or it’s inefficient. That clearly shows that they didn’t care about the customers in the first place, all they wanted was to sell, and they did.

Of course, we need to establish the fact that not all Web2 companies do this, but only a great number of them. More prominently, companies like Figma and GitHub have been bullish about community building right from time.

There has to be a better and more humane way of marketing. That is what Web3 is introducing—or perhaps reintroducing—with a major emphasis on community building.

We shall address this further in the next subheading. Read on:

The Need To Care and Provide Value For A Community

One important fact we should all know is that whether our audiences are into Web3 or whatever classification, customers are first humans; and psychologists have confirmed that a sure way to get human attention and loyalty is by showing them care.

This age-long virtue that has been slightly eroded in the marketing industry is what Web3 is emphasizing. Interestingly, this has been generating massive results for Web3 projects and protocols. Rightly so.

A major way to show that you care about your target audience is when you provide value for them and contribute to their growth, and their overall well-being as human beings.

Using Alchemy, a Web3 infrastructure provider, as an example, the protocol launched a program called "The Road To Web3" which they are training thousands of people on how to become Web3 developers. What they are simply doing is offering value.

Once these trainees become full-blown developers and they need to run a node in their workplace, they will most likely recommend Alchemy to their clients or employers.

By extension, Alchemy will also get to make money at the end of the day. That shows how the community is super important in Web3.

Moving on, centralized exchanges such as Binance and FTX have been touring strategic African countries to hold conferences to engage and touch base with their users.

So far, these two exchanges that are consciously building their communities are the biggest in Africa.

Emphasis on Roles Such As Developer Relations and Community Managers

Since there has been emphatic stress on the essence of community building, blockchain projects and protocols have imbibed the culture of always hiring a community manager or moderator.

Mainly, the work of a community manager is to coordinate the activities of the community; welcome new members, be the bridge between the core team and the members, provide value, and ensure that the community members are satisfied with the products or services of the project.

Creating the role of a community manager is important for any project. Most times, the founders would be concerned with the overall administration and the business side of the project to the extent that they might not have quality time to attract, nurture, and retain the community members.

Hence, the need for someone who would be in charge of that, and would ensure seamless interaction between the team and the entire community.

Apart from that, the next role that broke out of the blockchain space is Developer Relations or Developer Advocacy. This is super important for protocols or companies that are providing Web3 infrastructures.

Their target audience is developers as they will want them to build with their platforms or API. According to the psychology behind marketing, A can only market to B, if he is of B’s kind.

In the same way, it is easier for developers to market to fellow developers. That was what gave rise to this role. This role often demands Dev Rels to attend conferences, write developer-focused guides, or any other action that might be necessary.

Polygon, Chainstack, Solana, and virtually all blockchain-based projects have hired and are still hiring Dev Rels. Let's not forget, that the reason for creating the role of Dev Rels is to build and strengthen the community.

Again, it becomes more apparent every day, that the community is the totality of Web3 – giving attention to the growth of your blockchain community is a sure-fire method of parabolic growth.

Does This Mean That Mainstream Marketing Strategies Are Irrelevant In Web3?

Since there is a whole lot of emphasis on community building, you might sit back and be curious to ask if mainstream marketing strategies are still relevant in Web3.

Put in another way, do we only need community managers and Dev Rels alone? What about experts in brands & partnerships, content marketing, SEO, advertising, social media management, email marketers, and so on?

Other marketing roles are valid in Web3. Rightly so.

Looking at this from a bigger picture, you will come to know that mainstream marketing roles are eventually contributing to the pool of community building.

For example, the content of Moralis always ranks extremely high on search engines. Thus, their SEO is attracting people to read their works and know more about the Startup.

Similarly, Unstoppable Domain has been running YouTube ads for months now. This has been a way of getting in touch with their community members to take action by buying domain names.

This is the main point:

At the end of the day, the end goal of mainstream marketing roles is to contribute to the building of the community. Whether you’re in SEO or content marketing, you’re building and acquiring more audiences in the community.

Conscious marketing efforts lubricate the whole essence of community building to the end of gaining revenues. Thus, it will be fallacious to say that marketing doesn’t exist in Web3.

In place of that, a more accurate mindset is that marketing in Web3 shouldn't be salesy, instead, it should be communally informed at its core.