What's next for marketing and web3?
Usually I begin my pieces with something interesting like numbers, or a 'did you know’ type of fact. That may not be the case here, especially since the topic of discussion is marketing—the business of people and people as you may know, are very emotional, which of course goes without saying that with emotions you tread lightly and with empathy.
Empathy because the markets are bleeding red thanks to LUNA & UST, as of the time this article was written. Empathy because hundreds of people are building amazing products in crypto and DeFi. Empathy because some of my readers have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, and empathy because you may already be bored.
So, in a previous article I wrote a dummie’s guide to web3. I won’t be discussing that because this piece is meant to be a five minute read. That being said what does marketing have to do with web3?. Like everything that requires you to reach, attract, convert and retain customers, web3 needs marketing. It may not know it yet, but it’s getting there. While the saying is true that “great products market themselves”, it’s a bit different when you’re talking web3.
Reason being that products fit into themselves over here. You dare not isolate yourself and expect excellence, haha no it doesn’t work like that. Especially not with metaverse talk making the rounds these days.
Web3 and marketing have a much more interesting relationship than web2. Interesting is my choice word here because in web2, everyone simply just had to do content, media, brand or creative. The parts made the whole, which is a sweet thing if you ask me. For web3, the whole makes the parts—take it like this, the objective for a startup that built a wallet is definitely user growth, so all its marketing is faced in that direction. It’s a different case for a product that now seeks to grow its average transaction volume monthly.
Marketing in this case now focuses on what we term as “growth”. Before you bite me, I believe growth takes various shapes and forms for marketing folk. Though the obvious talking points are user, volume and revenue. In which case, any way you look at it marketing professionals with web2 experience *should* know their way around making this work while building a brand as they are at it.
Since marketing in web3 is to an extent easily measurable, the problem with the transition into web3 is how easily one can be swayed by vanity metrics. Which is why it is a personal opinion of mine that marketing hires should befriend the Product Managers or KOLs of the product they’re working on. This calls for alignment on SMART goals that can key into marketing objectives and enable the product see actual growth.
The kind of growth I’m afraid you may never really see till you hire someone who understands marketing.
To end this, I’d like to say if you believe your product doesn’t need any marketing, or you’re the kind who idolizes Elon Musk while quoting “Tesla doesn’t do any marketing”, I hate to break it to you but those car showcases and the media parades you see, that’s marketing.
It’s called publicity.
Cheers.