Most Overlooked Web3 Marketing Tactics (Costing You Growth)

Ty Smith0:07

What is going on everyone? Today I want to go through the most overlooked Web3 marketing tactics. So these are things that people are not focusing on that are costing you growth or money.

Ty Smith0:17

So in Web3 marketing, there's obviously a lot to take in, right? Like the space moves faster than any other space. Marketing in Web3 is totally different from Web2 marketing. It's totally different from anything like e-commerce marketing, SaaS marketing, healthcare marketing, anything.

Ty Smith0:33

It's fully, fully unique, so there's always a lot of challenges, I think, that people that have done marketing in other industries then face once they come into Web3. A lot of that is just overlooking things that work in Web3 that didn't work in other industries.

Ty Smith0:49

Or vice versa, fully thinking that Web3 is 100% different and that there's nothing from Web2 that applies to Web3. So I want to go through a combination of both of those things and just go through a handful of things that I think more people need to be paying attention to.

Ty Smith1:02

Let's go through number one: content strategy being ignored. Most, not even some, I would say most Web3 brands skip on the whole long-form content SEO play, and I think that's a huge mistake. Blogs, guides, middle-funnel content, top-of-funnel content, anything that's long-form content

Ty Smith1:19

can do really well, and the fact that so many companies don't focus on it makes it such a differentiating factor for companies to explore. So whether you're going to make long-form content for the sake of SEO, you're going to target certain keywords that are relevant to your audience,

Ty Smith1:36

or just make long-form content for the sake of educating people, proving your legitimacy, things like that. There's a lot of kind of boxes that an effective content strategy can check that is not checked by almost anything else.

Ty Smith1:51

Very few Web3 companies, I mean we work with so many, we've worked with at this point almost 900, I believe, Web3 companies, and I would say less than half have even approached us with any idea of content strategy at any point in their lifecycle, which is huge. It's so underutilized.

Ty Smith2:07

So that's something that I think more companies should be focusing on. A good content producer goes a really, really long way. It can be extremely cost-effective versus other channels like paid advertising. Long-form content sticks around a lot longer than short-form content, things like a YouTube video, sorry, I should say a YouTube Short,

Ty Smith2:24

a Twitter or X post, LinkedIn posts. All those things have a very short lifespan, whereas like a long-form blog post or walkthrough guide or educational guide, that can be used for years. So that's something I think people should invest in more.

Ty Smith2:37

The next part is somewhat related, which is email being underutilized. This is one of those things that falls in the bucket of like, oh, it's Web2, so it's not going to work for Web3. Like yes and no. Web3 companies still need to focus on email marketing, in my opinion,

Ty Smith2:52

for a number of reasons. One, it's like so much more cost-effective than almost anything else. Most Web3 companies have some version of like a CRM, even if they are like a privacy-focused or something that's like more on-chain and off the internet, have some way to contact important prospects or investors or just like stakeholders.

Ty Smith3:11

So almost everyone has a list of email addresses of people that they want to get messaging in front of. And again, just the amount that it costs to run an effective email campaign is so little compared to like a paid advertising campaign, influencer marketing campaign, anything like that.

Ty Smith3:26

And it cuts through a little bit better than the solution that I think a lot of Web3 companies default to when they try to do like a remarketing, which is the box that email tends to check, which is like we're going to post it in Discord, we're going to post it in Telegram, or on Twitter. Those are great tactics and necessary, but they're not going to get through to an inbox the way that like an email will.

Ty Smith3:42

It's going to get lost in just a sea of other messages from other companies, from other chats, things like that. So there's a lot that goes into an effective email marketing campaign. None of them are really rocket science, in my opinion. Setup like an onboarding flow, setup like a product update kind of like process when you have something new go out.

Ty Smith3:58

If you've got some kind of like governance component to the platform or product that you're building, like create a system for emailing those people. Use segmentation, use, there's so many email marketing tools out there now. Beehiiv is a popular one, MailerLite, most CRMs have an integrated email marketing system.

Ty Smith4:12

So it's a pretty marginal cost usually to run an effective campaign like that. And treat email marketing as like part of the user onboarding journey, not just like an afterthought of like we're going to push some stuff. It should be part of the process. In my opinion, email marketing can almost be part of the whole product experience.

Ty Smith4:25

So that's the second one there is the underutilization of email marketing. Number three: product marketing basics being missed. A lot of Web3 companies, especially, focus on marketing of an entire brand or entire ecosystem

Ty Smith4:42

or entire product rather than how that product affects individual user personas. And therefore, they underdevelop like content or pages or just like marketing collateral that is specific to user personas.

Ty Smith4:57

One part of that is like not doing product marketing correctly. The other part is the user persona piece being neglected. When you create a product, you should understand, not every possible use case, but you should understand the core ones, and all of that stuff should go into your marketing assets.

Ty Smith5:13

You should be able to explain what does person A get out of this product, what questions do I have to answer, all that kind of stuff. Create resources for that. It could be on the website, email marketing, anything like that. And then highlight all of those use cases.

Ty Smith5:28

I think a lot of Web3 companies are so tech-minded and so product-focused in the building of the actual product that they forget that there's different actual use cases. And at the end of the day, the person using your product is trying to solve a problem.

Ty Smith5:43

Figure out what that problem is and help them solve that problem as best as possible rather than pushing the whole thing, which is going to get just way too broad and you're going to not be able to create messaging that's like very actionable or exciting to people. So that's kind of two in one: product marketing, not focusing on user personas and the actual like real-world use cases.

Ty Smith5:58

Number four on here would be ineffectively using communities. And when I say communities, I'm mainly talking about Discord and Telegram, to a lesser extent Twitter or X. A lot of Web3 companies look at their communities as sort of like announcement boards

Ty Smith6:17

where they're pushing out messaging, they're pushing out product updates. All that kind of stuff is important and a big reason why we set up those communities. But in and of itself, using a Telegram chat as an announcement board and just posting updates, it's not going to accomplish most of the goals that are possible to be accomplished with those communities.

Ty Smith6:32

You need to have like it has to be a two-way conversation. One-way, one-sided communities don't accomplish goals of a community. That's really just like a new marketing channel. So not only pushing messaging, but like figure out what is your pull messaging strategy.

Ty Smith6:47

How are we getting people to communicate more? How are we incentivizing users or community members to meaningfully contribute to the community? There's a couple ways to do that. There's like ambassador programs, there's contributor programs, which are more on the product side.

Ty Smith7:02

There are like more marketing-focused ways of just like incentivizing user-generated content. That's a good way to do it. You can create systems in your Discord, it's a little bit easier in Discord than Telegram, but in either one, you can create systems for like elevating and rewarding people, either with like roles or something like that.

Ty Smith7:17

There's a lot of really creative ways that we can discuss on more episodes of this. But make sure you have a strategy not only for pushing content and messaging to your community, but also getting people engaged. That's number four. Number five is analytics

Ty Smith7:33

and attribution. Analytics and attribution has like always been, in my opinion, like kind of a sticking point for Web3 marketers. It's the kind of thing where there's no tool out there that like just fully comprehensively can pull in all the data that you need the way it can in Web2.

Ty Smith7:48

Like in Web2, something like a free tool like Google Analytics can do most of the stuff that you need. And you tie that in with like your CRM and things like that, and you can probably get 90% of the data that you need to make effective marketing decisions. That doesn't exist in Web3 marketing, at least it never did.

Ty Smith8:03

It does more now, which is like a really refreshing thing to be able to say as a Web3 marketer. None of the tools are perfect. Every week I'm looking at new like analytics and attribution tools for Web3 marketing. None of them are comprehensive yet, but there's a lot of companies that I think are on the right path.

Ty Smith8:18

We've worked most of them in some way, shape, or form into our workflow as an agency. So obviously, beyond our ability to actually deliver results, we have to be able to communicate that like this is what we did, this is what it resulted in. So we've tried essentially all of them. Again, not 100% yet, but we're getting there.

Ty Smith8:33

The reason I say it as like an overlooked tactic, which is a weird thing to say because analytics isn't a tactic, but an overlooked piece of marketing, Web3 marketing, is that especially kind of like the old guard of Web3 marketers, people that have been in it for a couple of years,

Ty Smith8:48

they've almost given up in a way, a lot of times, on like doing proper analytics and attribution. They, when they first got into the industry, they said, look, there's nothing that's going to show me what I need, so that's just not what I'm going to focus on. I encourage all those people to like re-look at the tools on the market now

Ty Smith9:03

because it's more possible than ever to attribute marketing to actual like on-chain data, off-chain data, anything like Web3 companies need to be able to see. So that's, that's number five, and that's a huge one, honestly. Number six: no localization strategy.

Ty Smith9:18

Most of the Web3 world speaks English and is in like North America or Europe or just places where English is a commonly understood language. That said, there's now more than ever a huge part of the world that doesn't speak English or is outside of like the United States or Europe

Ty Smith9:33

where you should be focusing some resources to be able to like effectively serve and educate those people. So not doing like localized landing pages, not doing website pages in different languages, producing your white paper only in English, creating community content that's only in English, those are like kind of whiffs nowadays.

Ty Smith9:48

Not working with KOLs that are not only specific to a certain language or other like non-English KOLs, but like KOLs that have a good following in a specific area. Those are all things that, again, similar to the last point, like were more difficult in the past or maybe not as important, but crypto as an industry has grown quite a tremendously

Ty Smith10:03

in the past couple of years, and as such, we need to realize that the market now looks different than it used to. And we need to focus and build strategies that are like built for specific markets, geographic markets. That's number six. Number seven is the depth of influencer strategy.

Ty Smith10:18

Everyone in Web3, I feel like, goes into marketing saying we've got to have some influencer strategy, right? We've got to have some plan to activate influencers and have them post about us on social media. The depth of that strategy, though, is where people, I think, neglect things.

Ty Smith10:33

They say we need influencers, these are influencers I know and I like to consume their content, let's activate them, whether directly or through an agency or something like that. There needs to be much higher-level thinking regarding how we're activating the influencers, who are we activating, why are we activating.

Ty Smith10:48

Is it just because they're accessible to us? Is it just because I DM'd him and he responded to me? This is one of those places where I feel like companies really should at least explore working with an agency that's specialized in influencer marketing. Obviously, that's like a biased point for me, but influencer marketing is not the kind of thing you could like half-ass.

Ty Smith11:03

It needs to be data-driven. It needs to be based on the results of past campaigns. It needs to be run by someone who has seen hundreds of campaigns and has real-time access to data to like what's working this week, this month. And it needs to be done by someone who can think high-level about how the influencer strategy works.

Ty Smith11:18

Like what are you pushing them into? How does that play into like the whole user journey that we're trying to create? How does it play into the brand that we're trying to cultivate? Does it have the same kind of messaging and tone? Do these influencers have the same kind of audiences? These are things that people like kind of think about, I feel like, but not

Ty Smith11:33

don't feel like they have the tools or resources to like effectively do. And I think they really should because you're leaving a lot of like money and growth on the table by not doing that. So that's number seven. Those are seven things that I think a lot of Web3 marketers, unfortunately, are neglecting to really fully think through or action.

Ty Smith11:48

There's obviously a ton more. If you've got ideas, I'd love to hear comments on social media. As always, if you liked the episode, if you found it valuable, please remember to rate, review, and recommend to a friend. And we will catch you on the next one.