Sooner or later, a crypto project has to contend with marketing. You need users, and the “build it and they will come” mentality is, frankly, a massive cop-out. Sure, it sometimes can work in edge cases. But these are extremely rare events, and likely getting rarer every day as consumers and users are faced with more and more choices.
Marketing basics and fundamentals apply to Web3 or crypto projects the same way they do to Web2, Web1, or the coffee shop around the corner. There are definitely quirks to Web3 stuff that can be leveraged to enhance marketing tactics, but the underlying strategies remain quite similar.
This is because we’re dealing with humans who all have limited time and resources. As a hopeful project, you want some share of those resources and time. And you want it from the right people.
Who are the “right” people?
AKA: Target markets
A huge amount of the marketing planning energy should be going into market research. It’s called marketing for a reason. Breezing past market research and right into promotion is sadly all too common. I guess it’s because it’s kinda of unsexy… who wants to spend time nattering over psychographics, user research studies, total addressable market research… when you could instead be out there making noise?
Thing is, most projects have limited resources when it comes to the communications budget. The idea is to be hyper efficient with how you spend time and money. If you waste time with shotgun strategies you’ll burn through your resources with little to show (I half suspect this is why many people don’t think marketing’s worth it—they’ve wasted a bunch of cash on a random Twitter play that produced no results, and blame the concept of marketing versus a lack of proper planning).
So where do you start, if you want to go about it properly?
It’s usually best to know precisely what kind of problem you’re solving with your project, or what value you’re bringing with it. DO NOT just hitch your wagon to the overall Web3 value-proposition (e.g. ownership of digital assets, censorship-resistance, financial freedom). Yes, those are all features and benefits but they’re also the same features and benefits that literally every other blockchain project can trot out.
If you know (with some precision) what value you’re bringing, then you can start to identify a Total Addressable Market (TAM).
The TAM is like, the maximum possible amount of people who’d use your project / buy your product. It’s the fantasyland 100% monopoly situation that can’t come to pass—but it does help define the space you play in.
Image from the TAM Wikipedia Article.
It’s common to be way too liberal in these estimates. “Anyone who uses Web3” is not the boundary of your crypto project TAM—did you translate the project’s UI into every language on the planet? No? Okay, well your TAM just shrunk to those language bounds. What about crypto access and legality? Mobile vs desktop readiness? Minimum investments required? Etc. etc.
Once a realistic TAM is established, the next narrowing down is the “Service Addressable Market” (SAM), which basically asks “of the TAM, who can we reasonably reach?” This where your own budget and resources place limits on things.
Finally: who within the SAM do we start with? You don’t want to reach everyone—you want to target the users who are the most likely to fall in love with your project, the most likely to recommend it, the most likely to become powerusers. This is your Target Market.
How on earth do you know what people might truly fall in love with your project?
Uh oh, it’s even more market research…
Personas are a common tool that marketers use. They try to imagine the ideal user (or customer), then structure campaigns and messaging around their traits, media habits, etc. The more detailed, the better.
“Gamers” is a terrible target market. It’s vague as hell.
Here’s a much better persona / target market breakdown:
- Age range of 24–40
- Likely male, but only slightly, e.g. 60%–40% gender split
- Household income above $80K USD, 0.5 kids on average
- Lives near or in a major urban center
- Prefers PC games over console or handheld, games maybe 10 hours per week
- Is mobile agnostic, as likely to own Android as they are iOS
- Not so familiar with Discord, more comfortable with Slack
- Owns less than $500 worth of crypto, but is very crypto curious
I just made this up to illustrate a fine tuned level of detail for a persona. You’d also want to add bullets around why they’re a candidate for enjoying your project, e.g. “loves to learn from games” or “wants exposure to more crypto without feeling like degen” etc.
The point is, with information like this you can structure much more efficient campaigns, and spend your marketing energy more wisely. Why recruit Discord shills if the target market is using Slack? Knowing that they might have kids, maybe choose to just go after the childless users, as they’ll have more time to get to know your project.
The value of a user
AKA Unit economics: AC & LTV
Warning, acronyms incoming!
Okay, so now you hopefully have a sense of the users you want to attract to the project. But how much should you spend trying to market to them?
Unit economics involves defining a unit around which to run some math. For Web3 projects, the “user” or “wallet” is probably the most common unit.
Then you look at two things:
- Acquisition Cost (AC)—on average how much does it cost to acquire the user or wallet?
- Lifetime Value (LTV)—on average how much quantifiable value does this user/wallet bring?
This isn’t necessarily easy to do. (If it were easy, everyone would do it!) To know your AC, you need systems in place to track how much you spend, how often you convert, how long it takes, etc.
The LTV might be even harder. What is the value of one user? If there’s an upfront cost to the user to join (e.g. whitelist mint, signup fee), then that’s the baseline, but over their time in the project can they continue to add value? Certainly through their potential word of mouth or advocacy… maybe through more tangible things like marketplace or subscription fees.
Well planned projects with good marketing have ways to at least approximate AC and LTV. The goal is to get the AC lower than the LTV. As in, you’re profiting on every user brought into the system.
In the early days, AC need not be higher than LTV. Many digital startups, Web3 or otherwise, need a foundational userbase to build up momentum. So you might spend way more than you normally would like to acquire those critical first users. Over time, the idea is to either reduce AC or increase LTV, until you’re reliably profiting or at least breaking even per user.
Does this crap apply to indie Hive projects?
It depends on how big or longstanding the project wants to be. It’s possible to make your TAM the size of Hive, and then hope Hive grows enough to support the project.
But if you’re more ambitious like @LeoFinance, 
Thanks for stopping by and reading. I hope someone finds this useful. The hero image at the top was made with a Canva Pro License and uses the Leo Finance logo.