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CoinList Marketing Director: How to market Web3 in a bear market

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Bear markets provide a great marketing opportunity.

Alex Topchishvili is Director of marketing at CoinList

Linda, Web3 MKT

Introduction:

In a bear market, the project's marketing budget decreases and users are less willing to interact. Many Web3 market friends have expressed the view that "bear market marketing is difficult".

But is this really the case? Bull market user enthusiasm is high, but facing marketing competition will be greater. A bear market may have a smaller budget, but it still has a lot of resources to draw on, giving you a chance to stand out in the next bull market.

The author of this episode, Director of marketing at CoinList, draws from personal experience on how to market well in a bear market.

In 2022, the crypto industry is long gone from having a $2 trillion market cap, and with that comes a lot of buzz around Web3.

For months now, marketers (and their budgets) have been feeling the pinch as the crypto market has gone cold.

Web3 projects around the world are in a low mood and marketers are waiting for the market to pick up for more marketing.

But in my experience, this is a mistake.

Bear markets offer a great marketing opportunity for three main reasons:

It is far more cost effective

There is much less noise to filter out

This is an investment that generates excess growth and returns during the next bull market

In this article, I will present a framework for growing marketing in a bear market and discuss how emerging Web3 projects should allocate limited marketing resources.

1. Define your growth metrics

Bull markets and perceptions are not permanent, and using terms like "Protocol" and "DAO" won't generate long-term demand for your product and reduce developer workload. Therefore, it is important to understand specific indicators of growth for different projects before considering growth.

While each project has a unique definition of growth, there are some common Web3 growth metrics that fall into categories:

L1/L2 protocol: Number of independent contributing developers, number of active wallets, number of interactions, number and size of transactions

DeFi: Total value locked (TVL), number of active wallets, number of interactions

Games: Number of active players, transactions per user, number of guild partners

Market / Exchange: Monthly active users, number of coins, number of transactions, total trading volume

SaaS: Revenue per customer, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer attrition rate

Defining measures of success, like achieving product and market fit, is a prerequisite before starting to explore growth strategies, develop strategies, and find tools.

CoinList 营销总监：熊市中如何做好 Web3 营销？

2. Use existing resources to drive growth

Even in the crypto winter when marketing budgets are being cut, many marketers in Web3 are ignoring one of the most important resources available to them: the existing assets of their business.

Of the existing assets owned by all Web3 startups, the following three are the most important:

Core Team: Your team is your most valuable asset in marketing. When you launch a new product, acquire a new customer, or produce content, every team member should be on the front lines, helping the team appropriately share and distribute project information across their personal social networks -- especially on Twitter.

Users: One of the biggest problems for any Web3 marketer is the lack of case studies and customer success stories. If you have satisfied customers, drive your marketing by creating compelling case stories that serve as proof of purpose for turning prospects into final customers.

SEO: Everyone has a website and blog, but hardly enough Web3 marketers put in the effort to make their websites and apps search-friendly. To ensure the integration of any marketing campaign, optimize your website for proper indexing and user friendliness. This will have a positive impact on your natural search traffic. Optimize your search for targeted keywords during bear markets where competition is low and reap the benefits of the next bull market.

3. User acquisition: Double down on Web3 native growth channels and cut the rest

User acquisition in Web3 is a bit of a mess, especially in a bear market.

Too many well-funded teams are burning VC money with strategies that neither reach their target audiences nor deliver ROI -- such as funding lavish conferences and dinners around the world, sponsoring celebrities, And overpaying crypto influencers and Web2 AD networks (FB, Google, Reddit, TikTok, Quora, etc.).

Attribution of return is particularly difficult for marketing methods such as crypto influencers and conferences, which may not be worth doing in a bear market if ROI is not properly measured.

Here are two Web3 user acquisition strategies that, if done well, can be a good area to focus on when the market is down.

First, air drop

A popular user acquisition method in Web3 is token airdrops. The project airdrops (or distributes) free tokens to a user's encrypted wallet address that has met certain prerequisites or completed certain tasks used by the protocol.

Assuming you think carefully about the economics of tokens and the potential utility of tokens, and think carefully about which users will receive airdrops, you can attract quality users from day one and promote an active and cohesive user base as a reward for users and the community.

Although there have been numerous successful airdrops (e.g. Uniswap, ENS), but airdrop has its own project drawbacks and risks. Since airdrops occur on the chain, programs have few reliable ways to assess the recipient's on-chain reputation.

So this raises two questions:

Airdrop to pure Wanmao Party, through the brush to gain excess airdrop allocation

Users who have not participated in similar airdrops or who want to contribute to the agreement cannot participate

Without sufficient "buy-in" or broad trust in the agreement from token recipients, tokens are often sold off immediately, causing the price to crash and damaging the entire ecosystem. Examples of incorrect airdrops include Optimism And Ribbon Finance.

For airdrops to work in a bear market, starting a token airdrop would need to confirm a user's on-chain reputation and focus on users with a proven track record of contributing to the agreement, rather than airdrops to speculative users who sell tokens at the first opportunity.

Ii. Bounty and vouchers

Another increasingly popular Web3 native user acquisition strategy is to create incentive-based rewards on the bounty platform that reward users with cryptocurrency when they complete certain on-chain actions (such as trading, pledging, swapping, lending, social following, etc.).

For new users, it's a way to earn cryptocurrency while learning and building credibility to become contributors to emerging projects.

For Web3 projects, this is a way to identify and acquire quality contributors based on their proven and value-added activities.

With payment Facebook Or Google's fee to capture any minimal search traffic left in a bear market, where you pay active users who have previously demonstrated value-added activity or positive on-chain behavior, which is an activity that is more likely to keep the crowd engaged and contribute to your community. Some of these reward platforms include:

Flipside Crypto

Layer 3

Project Galaxy

Rabbithole

Quest 3

DappBack

Crew 3

CoinList Karma

4. Invest in content to reduce competition and get your content noticed

New narratives scare off users. If an event causes fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), most people will simply avoid it.

And the antidote to that fear is education.

As a marketer in an industry plagued by a variety of frauds and dark histories, we have no choice but to help our users understand Web3 products and bring them real value through quality content and insight. Education in this matter, there is no better than the winter encryption, more effective time.

Creating quality content relevant to your target audience in a bear market will help your project attract natural traffic, build trust, boost your SEO, and build brand equity.

In a bull market, with so much content being produced and shared, it's hard for your content to be unique and stand out. But in a bear market, far less content is produced, making it much easier to focus on your content and establish your project as the go-to product and thought leader in your niche.

Remember -- Google considers the timeliness of the content when deciding which search results to serve. Content published during the last bull market may not appear again. No matter what's going on in the industry, or how much value is being erased, longtime crypto users will still be checking Twitter and refreshing their alerts a dozen times a day, which will also provide ample opportunity for your content to show off.

Investing in a bear market will pay huge dividends during the next bull market because people always remember which companies are in trouble during a bear market and which projects continue to be active and get the most attention. Web3 will probably never be smaller than it is today, and your competition will never be less than it is today.

5. Community is King: Build a community with a specific purpose

In Web2, the primary target of a go-to-market is your customers, usually acquired through sales and marketing efforts.

In Web3, marketing will target not only customers/users, but also developers, investors, and partners. Because Web3 projects are "community-owned" rather than just "community-led," the distinction between owners, shareholders, and users is often blurred, making it all the more important to define goals.

Unlike Web2, in Web3, the purpose, community, and product are key to leading the go-to-market of the project. Often, a project grows not because users flock to an existing product, but because of the ideas and perceptions embodied in its community. The community helps define and shape the product.

A few examples of this include:

Friends With Benefits, a social DAO that started out as a Discord group with tokens as a condition of entry;

Loot, a game that starts with content and then moves on to gameplay;

Smoothie, a discover-to-earn rewards platform, started out solely around discovering content and communities for Web3 startups.

Some tips for building community in a bear market:

Go to where the Web3 user is: The Web3 community has already identified their platform of choice, so building a community means meeting users where they are. Twitter and Telegram Is a must-have tool for making announcements and open group discussions, but Discord has become the primary platform of choice for project leaders who want maximum flexibility in managing their communities.

Be clear about your purpose and intent: When new people arrive, they should be able to easily find and understand your organization's purpose (why you exist) by browsing the regular posts and channel titles. Include relevant links to your website, project documentation, or introductory blog post or video so that people have the opportunity to learn as much as possible.

Set clear boundaries: It is difficult for a community to change a culture once it has endorsed it, so clear boundaries of acceptable behaviour must be set from the outset. Be clear about what actions might lead to a gag, and deal with violations quickly and consistently.

Cross-communicate with other communities: Build partnerships and collaborations that help cross-communicate the Web3 community. In a bear market, good news surrounding cooperation is rare, so every relatively positive announcement is amplified. Whether it's through project collaborations, joint AMA, or joint content initiatives, when you do have the opportunity to cross-advertise and leverage your partner's marketing clout, make sure you do it!

Leverage your community: Whether it's expanding your content to reach a larger audience, providing reviews or feedback, testing new features before they go live, creating analytics tools, completing bounty programs - engage the community and spread the word whenever possible, the incentives should be as clear as possible.

As Web3 matures in this bear market, so will the need to understand customers, growth drivers, and actual growth metrics.

I look forward to the new growth models that will emerge in Web3 and the progress that will be made in the projects that use them.