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​The New Key Competitive Advantage for Web3 Startups​

The web3 market’s collapse in the last few weeks will reverberate across the ecosystem, especially for marketing teams.

Blind airdrops, multi-million dollar ecosystem funds, sports team sponsorships - predominant marketing techniques redolent of the bull market - won’t last.

A tighter fundraising market and competition will catalyze web3 marketers to adopt a new discipline. Why? Marketing efficiency is a vital competitive advantage.

While this is just as true in web2 as in web3, crypto brings new complexities that create opportunity. Token efficiency accounting isn’t widespread. For example, most web3 companies don’t consider tokens as a cost-of-customer acquisition, but they ought to be. We need to invent new marketing math.

Also, web3 user data doesn’t mirror web2 data. Wallets replace cookies, an improvement for both user and marketer. They maintain user anonymity, and reveal user behavior across applications. Public blockchain data enables look-alike modeling not possible on the web without full credit card or banking data.

Those fundamental changes create opportunity for marketing startups to serve web3 marketers better.

How will the web3 marketing stack evolve? In three steps:

First, marketers will seek user analytics to answer questions like: How many users use the product? How is the user base growing? Where do they originate? How active are they? What is their lifecycle?

Marketers will classify users by behavior. How many behavioral segments emerge in the user base? How much is each worth to the company? What actions improve their customer health?

Last, marketers will implement campaigns that match different clusters’ to maximum effect across various channels. Incentivized token drops, Discord lifecycle messaging, cross-application promotion (reminiscent of mobile apps cross-advertising).

None of this tooling exists in web3. But it will soon.

This new marketing discipline will enable the first generation of crypto martech (marketing technology) startups. At the same time, this wave will improve web3 startup’s capital efficiency and ultimate success.

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