Web3 Content Marketing: The Definitive Guide

The interest in content marketing has skyrocketed over the years. The reason is simple — content marketing helps improve brand awareness, drives more organic traffic, and establishes trust and credibility among a product’s users.

Even as the internet undergoes massive change with the advent of web3 technologies, the role of content marketing remains ever so relevant in this new internet age. It helps you build a community of loyal users and drives qualified leads to your website. 

However, most web3 brands don’t get it right. They post an update announcement every now and then or keep putting out different types of content in the hopes that something might stick. 

But neither of these approaches is strategic and cannot be analyzed and scaled to scale business growth. 

So, in this blog, we’ll look at what content marketing is, why web3 brands should invest in it, and how you should go about building a content marketing strategy that grows your web3 users and revenue in the long run. 

What is content marketing?

Content marketing simply means putting out content that reaches the right people at the right time and contributes to your overall marketing strategy.

Its primary goal is to build trust and credibility with your target audience and get them to take the desired action.  This could be anything from joining your community and purchasing your NFTs to trying out your product, or becoming your loyal user. 

Content marketing is becoming increasingly important in a privacy-first world as policies and privacy regulations are making ads less effective. 

Plus, unlike ads, content marketing makes it easier for you to reach your target audience in a non-intrusive way and build a long-term relationship with them. 

As a result, you’ll see improved brand recognition and loyalty which results in more leads and sustained growth.

Also, content marketing, if done right, can get your brand both instant traction and steady growth over time. 

While paid ads help you do the former and are an essential part of crypto marketing, they have a limited lifespan.  

But well-crafted content continues to generate value, attract traffic, and engage users long after its initial publication, so it’s important to not ignore content marketing. 

Types of web3 content marketing 

Creating compelling and relevant content is essential for any marketing strategy, and this is particularly true in the web3 ecosystem. 

To attract attention and build a following, businesses need to diversify their content formats. Here are some formats to include:

Blog posts

Blogging helps build awareness and create interest about your product, especially if your product is such that you need to educate your audience about its benefits and use cases to get them to try it. 

Take Alchemy, for instance. Since they’re a web3 development platform that caters to developers, they post informative blogs on topics that their target audience will find useful, along with product updates and announcements. 

Social media posts

Posting social media content regularly enables you to network with other founders, engage with your target audience, and build and grow your community. 

Messari, a crypto intelligence platform, shares industry insights as tidbits along with product updates and announcements. 

Web3 founders use these tidbits to create thought leadership content on Twitter or other platforms. This helps them get on the radar of potential investors and users and get them to try their tool by building credibility. 

You don’t always have to stick to informational content. You can also post fun and trendy content from time to time or conduct contests as SushiSwap does. 

Case studies 

If you’re a B2B web3 business, creating case studies is a great way to show businesses you’ve served similar companies and convince them to try out your services. 

ConsenSys helps developers build applications on Ethereum. In addition, they help companies build and curate an NFT collection. 

So they’ve created a separate landing page and included a brief case study under each pain point to elucidate how they solved the problem the brand faced. 

White papers 

If your goal is to attract investors and raise funding for your project, white papers are your best bet. They give readers a comprehensive introduction to your project and include everything from the vision to how your solution will address your project’s pain points. 

For example, Ethereum’s white paper goes deep into how Ethereum will improve upon Bitcoins’ limitations and attract everyone from developers to mainstream users. 

Now that we’ve looked at the most common content types, let’s look at how you should go about creating a content marketing strategy and posting content online. 

How to create a web3 content marketing strategy 

A web3 content marketing strategy is a plan that tells you how to put yourself in front of your target audience. 

It outlines how you should provide value to your users, foster trust, build brand authority, and drive user adoption and participation

Here’s a step-by-step process of how you should create an effective content marketing strategy for your brand:

Know your audience

Oftentimes, web3 brands get too wrapped up in what they’re building and fall into the trap of framing content from their project’s perspective.

As a result, they may not connect with their target audience even if their messaging is crystal clear. 

This is because you need to consider what your target audience wants when you’re convincing them to try your product. 

In other words, the key to creating a compelling message to successfully market your product is to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and understand what they want. 

Take Audius, for instance. It’s a web3 music streaming platform that enables artists to get paid directly from their fans. 

From a technical standpoint, it's a decentralized storage solution and a governance protocol that allows users to share and store audio and make decisions about the protocol. 

But the artists and the listeners care more about the benefits and less about decentralized technology. 

All of their content highlights how they empower artists and help them connect directly to their fans without middlemen, and doesn’t contain any web3 jargon. 

However, a solution like Chainlink caters mostly to developers. This cohort prefers crisp text that gets to the point and is averse to marketing-centric language. Plus, they want to play around with the technology to understand it. 

Their website includes resources and CTAs that will enable developers to start building dapps with their solution right away. In addition, they include step-by-step tutorials 

Now, the most important question: How do you know who your target audience is and what they want?

You can start by conducting surveys and interviewing people who you think would be a good fit for your product to understand their pain points. 

If you already have customers, you can create a dashboard on Raleon to track their on-chain and off-chain activity. 

Raleon brings together data from your community platform and dapp frontend, and tracks users’ wallet usage. It gives you everything you need to know about your ideal customer starting from the platforms they hang out on the most to their motivations and pain points.

What’s more, you can also create different personas and personalize the content accordingly with our action prompt feature.

Create a content plan

Most web2 and web3 brands take a top-down approach towards content marketing — they put out content on different channels and hope that it will resonate with their target audience.

However, the right approach is to study the preferences of your community, observe the actions they’re taking, and use that as inspiration to double down on content creation. 

For example, the Crypto Coven project’s NFT holders were tweeting side-by-side pictures of themselves next to their NFTs. 

When the founders noticed this, they did the same and this set off a chain reaction which led to the creation of a viral trend on crypto Twitter.

In addition to employing this tactic, you can take a leaf out of web2 brands’ playbook and incentivize user-generated content as Push Protocol does. 

It distributes an NFT to one community member who does something to help spread the word about their platform. Here are a few things that their community members have done that they loved earlier. 

Here are a few questions you should answer to create a content plan and put out content that appeals to your target audience and helps you grow your brand:

- On what platforms is my audience currently active?

- Is there a particular type of content that they pay attention to?

- What other products does my audience like and what do they have in common?

- What other communities or groups is my audience part of?

- Is there any type of messaging style or platform my target audience doesn’t like?

- What do our members want from our product and the community?

Set SMART goals and establish your KPIs

Before you start putting out content, you need to set goals and define clear metrics to understand whether your content is bringing traction to your project. 

Most marketing teams go about this the wrong way; they focus on inputs rather than the outcome the content should achieve. For example, it’s not too uncommon for teams to set goals like:

“Publish five blog posts and social media posts every month.”

The problem with defining marketing goals this way is that they can be achieved without driving any meaningful result to your project. 

You could publish five blogs that don’t bring any traffic to your website or make users join your community. 

In this case, you would have achieved your goal but you’d also wonder why your marketing isn’t working as it’s not moving the needle for you. 

A better way to go about setting goals is to make it SMART — specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time-bound. 

Specific:  Clearly outlines the outcome you want to accomplish and how to go about it. 

Measurable: Can be measured qualitatively or quantitatively. 

Ambitious and realistic: Not too easy to achieve but also not impossible.

Time-bound: Should be achievable within a certain time. 

Here’s what SMART goals look like:

- Bring 5,000 website visits from blog posts this quarter. 

- Grow Twitter followers by 50% by the end of this quarter. 

- Grow our Discord community to 1,000 members by the end of this year. 

Once you’ve set a realistic goal, you need to work backward to define your key metrics. 

For example, if your goal is to sell 100 NFTs by the end of this quarter your key results and metrics could look like this:

- Pitch to X NFT industry podcasts and appear on at least Y of them to get 1,000 people to check out your project.

- Get a total of 1,000 listeners to tune in to your Twitter Spaces discussion by the end of six months.

- Get at least 1,000 of your Twitter followers and website visitors to join your Discord community. 

- Convert at least 100 Discord members into NFT holders during the launch. 

While the goals above do focus on vanity metrics like follower count and the number of members in a Discord community, it’s important to not get too caught up in them and focus on distributing quality content that attracts genuine engagement. 

After all, you don’t want to reach 100,000 followers on Twitter only to find that only a few hundred people are interested in your project and will stick with you in the long term. 

Analyze and optimize your content

You’ve done everything in the playbook and started putting out content. What’s next?

You need to analyze your content to see if it’s performing well and make changes to it from time to time to ensure that you’re getting the most out of it. 

With Raleon, you get an idea of where your audiences are coming from and group them into different user personas based on their behavior. 

Plus, you can display personalized messages based on different personas, track your on-chain and off-chain campaign data, and set up dashboards that give you a full picture of how your content is performing. 

Clipper, a decentralized exchange, used insights from Raleon to optimize their campaign and grow the number of liquidity providers on the platform by 20%. 

The DEX wanted to analyze their off-chain and on-chain data to better understand and engage with their customers. 

With Raleon, Clipper was able to build better customer profiles by looking at activity on the Clipper website and dApp, and their on-chain behavior. 

The platform also enabled Clipper to further divide each profile into different categories based on factors like competition, the likelihood of converting, and existing acquisition and retention data. 

Armed with this extensive user knowledge, Clipper was able to launch a personalized marketing campaign with tailored offers for each user segment.

In just one week, Clipper experienced a significant growth of 20.3% in the number of liquidity providers, surpassing the baseline growth rate by 17.1%. 

The number of potential customers that actively engaged with the campaign also grew by 18%. And this will only rise as Clipper continues to analyze their current campaigns and optimize the offer, messaging, and call-to-action. 

Set Your Web3 Brand for Success with Content Marketing

Taking a strategic approach towards content marketing will position your web3 brand for success in a privacy-first world. 

By understanding your target audience and creating valuable, relevant, and engaging content, you can build trust, credibility, and long-term relationships with their community.

However, it’s difficult to create detailed buyer personas and attribute channels accurately with the plethora of on-chain and off-chain data your dapp collects.

Raleon connects on-chain and off-chain data to help you create detailed buyer personas and analyze and optimize your campaign so you can continue seeing growth from it. 

So you can analyze how many users read your blogs, visited your website, connected their wallets, and completed a transaction on your platform.

And for more information on how Raleon helps you get more leads and improve the KPIs of your content marketing campaign, get in touch with us.