Over the years, decentralized projects have been on a quest for the wrong numbers. Having a lot of followers doesn't necessarily mean that they are the right kind of followers; having a lot of members on Discord doesn't mean that they are the right kind of members; having a big Telegram group doesn't mean there are the right kinds of users transacting on-chain. There was a different understanding of what LuvKaizen should achieve: Growth in Web3 should be taken as a measure of retention, activation and on-chain behaviour as a serious business would measure growth. LuvKaizen is a complete Web3 marketing stack that helps decentralized projects escape the vanity metric mentality of getting users to join and exit, and instead learn how to build a repeatable model of getting users to join, stick around and increase the value of the community over time. All of the rest of this article is built on that change, from hype to sustainable acquisition.
Web3 User Acquisition is a complex process that encompasses multiple stages, each with its own distinct set of challenges and solutions.
The basic process of traditional digital marketing is: advertise, drop a cookie, retarget the visitor and attribute the sale back to the initial click. That loop is reliant on centralized ID graphs, browser tracking and a platform such as Meta or Google controlling the connection between the advertiser and audience. The cycle there is no longer a viable option for Web3 marketing and, in fact, shouldn't be. Wallets are not names but pseudonyms, cookies are becoming obsolete or unimportant in the mobile world, and the group a crypto project is seeking to target is not necessarily one that's interested in being tracked (in the traditional sense).
LuvKaizen's solution to this problem is to use the wallet address as the key identity as opposed to the browser session. The platform doesn't assume that someone using a wallet on a dApp or swapping tokens on a DEX means they have converted, but rather it measures a wallet’s connection to a dApp, a token swap, a governance vote, an NFT mint or continuous use on a protocol. It's an attribution that's meaningful and different. Impressions and click-through rate are not enough to judge a marketing campaign, it's judged by whether or not the wallets it attracted were valuable after clicking.
It's also a wallet-centric model, which alters the distribution of incentives within the community. Instead of manually identifying the individuals that deserve a reward, LuvKaizen automates the distribution of the community, based on validated on-chain activity – such as wallet balance above a certain threshold, completion of a quest or wallet referral that resulted in an active user. This is where the two concepts of tokenomics and marketing begin to directly overlap. A referral program that pays out in the project's native token is a simple trickle feed test of whether or not people think the token is worth acquiring and is a growth strategy. This means that the incentive structure is no longer at odds with the project's tokenomics and marketing spend and treasury strategy begin to work hand in hand.
Other big changes from the Web2 advertising world are targeting. In LuvKaizen, we do not use third-party tracking cookies or tracking apps, but we use decentralized identity signals, such as a wallet's involvement in a DAO or NFTs held, on-chain wallet transaction history and interactions with other protocols, to determine which wallets are likely to interact with a certain campaign. For instance, a project putting out a DeFi lending product can target wallets which have engaged with lending products before instead of making assumptions about their demographics. This type of targeting upholds the pseudonymity that initially attracts users to Web3, without compromising the marketing teams' ability to have an authentic signal to work with. None of this is a replacement for community management or the quality of the product itself, but rather provides a data layer that is a true reflection of the behavior of crypto users, rather than imposing a web 2 measurement framework that was never designed for crypto.
The Web Portal is a crucial requirement in the world of Crypto Marketing.Web Portals are an essential need in the crypto marketing world.
(Trust is built in milliseconds NOT minutes!) Within a few seconds, a wallet holder who has clicked through a Discord announcement or tweet will determine whether a landing page is legitimate or a red flag, even before reading a single word on the page, if it's not easy to load and simple to understand.
- Mobile load speed is the deciding factor for a campaign to convert or not. Most of the Web3 community traffic is coming from a phone device – and often using unreliable mobile data – a portal set up using BTO Themes has easy-to-load, optimized code and loads a whitepaper summary page or announcement page in a fraction of the time a bloated theme would take.
- The front end security weaknesses are community-wide issues. A lightweight, secure SEO blogger template can protect a blog from phishing overlays or malicious redirects which would be very easy to get if the blogger template is poorly coded and consists of outdated plugins, or out-of-date scripts that haven't been patched.
- - Announcement pages with lots of content have structure with Citron. It's designed to be read in a magazine format, ensuring that the page doesn't become too much of a ‘wall of text' for crypto reviewers and Web3 project leads to digest all the frequent updates, partnership news and roadmap changes.
- Light Spot is designed for a news portal that is oriented towards speed. A bare bones, fast loading template such as Light Spot will allow the reader to focus on the announcement and not a page that's still loading images and scripts, which is the case for teams with frequent updates, listings and those who break protocol news.
- - It is designed in a way that is AdSense friendly and doesn't impact sites' revenues. BTO Themes offers premium AdSense compatible blogger templates which will be designed such that there is no compromise between ad placements and blog loading speed – especially significant for blogs that review crypto news and rely on ad-monetisation to keep the content independent.
- - The back-end is stable, which decreases the chances for scam impersonation. A lean, well-maintained template structure reduces the risk of bad actors being able to add fake wallet connect popups – clunky, complicated themes with unnecessary third party scripts add more opportunities for bad actors to add the fake wallet connect popups.
- SEO and Trust signals go hand-in-hand. Web3 users will engage with portals that are fast, mobile friendly and secure as will search engines, so you can have a win-win scenario.
- In the world of cryptocurrencies, consistency is essential and more crucial than in most niches. A whitepaper breakdown or tokenomics explainer should look the same on a desktop when researching, as when opened on a phone or other mobile device in the middle of a livestreamed Twitter Space, and templates designed to be responsive and lightweight to load will do just that.
Reducing the cost of scaling Decentralized Content Hubs cost-effectively
The challenge for Web3 marketing teams is creating a lot of publishing volume. When a project is still in its early stages, it might need to post a few bits of content per week as you update the protocol, propose governance, form new partnerships, have AMAs and spotlight your community. Most teams don't have the resources to keep up with that pace of publishing web pages and can't afford to hire a web developer on each occasion, which quickly becomes cost-prohibitive.
Here it begins to become important what kind of underlying web infrastructure is used besides the content strategy. The strong, simple design eliminates the need for repeated engineering development, enabling the marketing or community team to publish directly, without having to wait for engineering resources to be available, typically elsewhere. The Maggy theme and other high converting templates in BTO Themes library were designed with this in mind – stable structure which can be maintained safely and week after week by a non-technical member of your team without spoiling the layout and introducing new bugs.
By dollar, the savings continue to build up over time. A project investing developer resources in operating a custom-built announcer platform is investing these resources that could otherwise be used on liquidity incentives, community grants, further growth campaigns (via LuvKaizen or other platforms), etc. In contrast, a project that uses an ultra-stable, pre-built content hub template is able to devote all that money to growth initiatives, and also have a professional look and feel for the front end to the community. It is not something that can be overlooked and is simply a matter of how the business runs. It's a strategic decision on where a project's small resources make the most impact and for most teams in the early and mid-stages of Web3, that's the community and the users, not redoing something that has already been solved: the web.
There's also the “resilience” argument which can be made. If the template has been designed to be lightweight and well supported, it is easier to migrate, update and secure the template over time than to do so with a custom built template that only one contractor, who is no longer around, knew well. When a project starts to ramp up its content production that maintainability is a determining factor between a viable content hub that meets the community's expectations and a content hub that slowly drops behind.
Creating the next generation of Digital Engagement.
The next step in the growth of Web3 will not be to the highest bidder or the one that promises the highest return. It will be won by those teams who grasp user acquisition as a measurable and incentive driven system and invest in a digital infrastructure that's fast enough and secure enough to be trusted the first time they are acquired. With platforms such as LuvKaizen as a way to monitor real on-chain conversion and reward true participation, as well as a fast, clean and secure web foundation (the type that BTO Themes was engineered to provide), that same community has a reliable platform to land on. Together, they make up a more truthful and viable way of digital engagement, that isn't based on noise.
