Organic marketing is good. Building out a content engine, a social media brand, and a solid community of potential and active users are unmatched tactics for business growth.

But that doesn’t discount the fact that, when done right, advertising yields great results for businesses. Not just in web2 but also in web3.

In web3, though, many might say that the way advertising works goes against the ethos of transparency and user privacy. We do not disagree.

However, we must use the existing ways of advertising in combination with web3 analytics and tools — a tactic we call web3 advertising — to build a marketing system that’s better and attracts the right users. 

In this blog, we will look at what web3 advertising is, how brands can use it to acquire new users, and how you can set up a web3 advertising campaign for your brand.

What is Web3 Advertising?

Web3 advertising refers to buying ad spaces across online channels and distributing different types of media to a target audience. The goal of web3 advertising is to onboard users to a web3 platform or solution through paid advertising.

This web3 marketing strategy is different from traditional advertising strategies. Measuring results with third-party cookies or pixels to track conversions and acquire user data are not as effective because in web3 conversions usually mean that a user connects their web3 wallet to a blockchain platform or DeFi platform and completes a transaction on-chain. Cookies cannot track this. 

As a result, web3 brands need ad tech that can track ad performance across web2 and also analyze conversions and track users across web3. 

Now that you have a basic understanding of web3 advertising, let’s check out why we need web3 advertising.

Why do Web3 Projects Need Paid Ads?

As a founder, you want to acquire a large and engaged user base to grow your revenue. But to achieve this, you need to get your project in front of the right users at the right time. 

Paid ads help you do this. They guarantee you a place in the user’s feed, so you can reach out to them where they are and drive website traffic, leads, and even direct conversions. 

Web3 advertising campaigns also provide you with detailed reports of how your campaigns are performing. This will help you optimize your ads and make data-driven decisions faster than you would with organic content.

How Can You Advertise Your Web3 Projects Online?

When web3 teams think about marketing, they hardly ever give a thought to advertising. That’s the reason you hardly ever see ads of web3 projects.

This general notion that discounts the importance of ads for web3 projects likely stems from the fact that for a very long time, ad companies like Google and Facebook have restricted or outright banned web3 ads.

But today, advertising can play a critical role in your web3 project’s growth. There are platforms that are friendly to web3 ads and host millions of highly engaged web3 users.

So, how do you leverage web3 advertising to propel your web3 project’s growth?

Let’s check out.

Social Media Ads

A large portion of web3 users live on social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Running ads that target specific communities on these channels helps with:

• Reaching your target users where they are. 
• Improving engagement, 
• Building communities, and 
• Retargeting users who have left your dapp without completing a desired action.

For example, Filecoin, a decentralized storage solution, is using Twitter to promote its hackathon because its target audience is more likely to hang out on this platform.  

0xBattleground, is a non-fungible token (NFT ) battle royale game similar to first-person shooter games like PUBG and Call of Duty. And most gamers who play the games hang out on Reddit. 

So, they’re running ads on Reddit to get in front of traditional gamers, because the gaming audience is more likely to try out their new title. 

Sponsored Content 

Sponsoring content like blog posts, podcasts, and newsletters primarily gets your project in front of a problem-unaware audience and improves your brand visibility. 

Take, for instance, a web3 native payroll project like Franklin, which helps you pay your employees in both cash and crypto.

A firm’s finance team may not Google “crypto payroll solutions” if they think it’s normal to manually execute on-chain transactions themselves. So, optimizing your content for this keyword may not yield any results. 

However, it’s likely that your target audience subscribes to newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels to stay updated on the latest industry news.

So, Franklin sponsors a podcast episode and the host gives them a shout-out. This helps Franklin’s target audience discover they have a problem and convinces them to check out their solution. 

Another advantage of using sponsored content is that well-known brands can also use it to improve brand recall. 

For instance, web3 projects like Uniswap and Metamask sponsor the Bankless newsletter to always stay on top of their users’ minds and get them to use their platforms regularly. 

Ad Networks 

Ad networks are intermediary platforms that allow advertisers to buy ad space and display ads across their network of publisher sites or platforms. 

Creating and distributing ads across these networks should be a part of your web3 brand’s paid marketing strategy as they allow you to target audiences at all funnel stages. 

At the top of the funnel, when prospects are first getting to know you and your product, these ads help you build brand awareness by reaching a wide audience and introducing the brand to potential customers. 

And in the middle and the bottom of the funnel, as you’re building more and more trust with your prospects, ad networks deliver ads to a targeted audience to drive engagement and complete the conversion. 

For example, CScalp, an intra-day trading platform leveraged the Portal Link, an ad network in the Binance ecosystem to reach active stock exchange traders on the top of the funnel and attract them to their platform to conduct cryptocurrency trades. 

Metaverse 

In the Metaverse, digital advertising takes on a new dimension — you can create interactive ads that appear as billboards, banners, or product placements within the virtual world. 

Your users will see these ads as they explore games, virtual events, and storefronts within the Metaverse. 

doWoW, a web-3-ready content broadcasting tool used ads in the Metaverse to improve user interaction and brand awareness.  

They created interactive experiences across 12+ billboards in a music concert during the Metaverse Music Festival. 

All the billboards contained content from Decentraland’s artist community and allowed attendees to jump in from one stage to another without missing a performance. 

Since doWoW’s billboards practically demonstrated their capabilities — streaming high-quality videos without lag — in real-time, they managed to create hype about their tool and build brand awareness. 

What’s more, one of the artists also indirectly tweeted about the product, which also helped build brand reach organically through user-generated content.

Newsletters 

If your web3 startup just launched a new product, forming partnerships with newsletters and paying them to advertise your product is a great way to get your product in front of a broad range of audiences and expand your visibility.

For example, Milkroad creates blog posts for other brands and links to them at the end of every newsletter to maximize their exposure. 

Make the Most of Web3 Advertising with Raleon

The biggest advantage of using paid advertising strategies is that it’s possible to target a specific audience, personalize campaigns to that audience based on analytics, and obtain immediate results from it. 

But if you don’t know who you’re targeting and the right platforms to reach them, you’re going to end up losing ad spend and delivering a poor user experience. 

If you’re a web2 brand, figuring out where users are coming from and learning about their preferences is a piece of cake. That’s because you can acquire personal data and track their activities with cookies or Facebook Pixel. 

In the web3 world, this is difficult because users are pseudonymous and their journey to conversion involves on-chain and off-chain activities.

For example, a user may connect their wallet to your platform after they read your post on Twitter or Discord. But it’s difficult to track these touchpoints and learn about their behaviors as it’s not possible to attribute wallet activity to a specific user off-chain. 

This is why you need tools like Raleon. 

Here’s how Raleon helps you create an effective campaign, track user journeys, and optimize your campaign to get the best results.

Know Your Audience With Dashboards and Audience Builder

Without defining your target audience and understanding their problems, you can’t create ads that convert. 

So, the first step to creating a successful campaign and improving conversion rates is knowing who you’re marketing to. This is where Raleon comes in. 

With Raleon’s dashboards, you can get important details about users, such as the top tokens traded, most valuable tokens held, etc. You can use this data and correlate it with web2 audience data to create different user personas. 

Then, you can use the audience builder to segment your audience and inform personalized campaigns designed for each user persona.

Set Up Personalized Campaigns with Embedded Quests

Embedded Quests are an innovative addition to web3 marketing campaigns, providing a unique and engaging way to connect with users. 

By integrating quests into the user experiences, you can take users through personalized journeys according to their interactions with specific campaigns. 

For example, if you’re driving users to your website from a specific newsletter, you can set up a quest that greets readers personally. 

This personalized touch enhances the sense of continuity between the campaign and the website, fostering a deeper connection with the brand. 

To further incentivize conversion, users are offered exclusive rewards aligned with the newsletter’s theme or the ad campaign, such as special discounts or non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The conversational user interface of Embedded Quests adds an element of interactivity and personalization, leading to significantly improved conversion rates.

Moreover, this approach nurtures long-term loyalty as users feel a genuine connection with the brand, and creates a sustainable and dedicated user base.

This is also a league above regular quests as you no more have to redirect users to a third-party quest platform. Hence, you can build a better quest experience that’s tailored to your brand and users’ preferences.

Get Insights Into What Worked With Analytics

Once you’ve set up your campaign, you need to look at the metrics and analyze its performance to know what worked and what didn’t and evaluate its effectiveness. Over time, this iterative process will yield the best return on ad spend (ROAS) and maximize growth!

Raleon’s user analytics tools help with this. You can analyze both on-chain and off-chain user activity and map them to each other. 

That means apart from the usual insights like ROI and the number of conversions, you can also create a customer journey and attribution map to learn which platform most of your users are coming from. 

Re-engage Users With Action Prompts

Re-engagement campaigns should be a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy as they enable you to engage customers who are about to churn and save ad spend on acquiring new customers. 

Raleon’s Audience Builder segmentation tool and Action Prompts in-app messaging system help you segment at-risk users according to their activity and reach out to them at the right time with a personalized message through a pop-up on your website so they’re incentivized to take action. 

Advertising is a powerful tool in the growth toolbox. Platforms like Raleon are absolutely key to getting the most results from your ad spend. Use Raleon to target the right users, measure conversions, and build loyalty with your customers from the very first time they visit your website. 

Try Raleon today to see how we can help you set up paid campaigns that drive maximum ROI and help you grow your user base.