Over 101 web3 startups have raised nearly $1 billion in funding in the span of a year, yet many of them struggle to effectively communicate their value and retain users beyond the initial hype. That’s where Web3 marketing agencies step in. But is a marketing partnership the right step for your company or protocol? This is important because you need to assess your business stage and whether or not you want to outsource your marketing. After concluding that you need to build and scale your Web3 marketing with an agency, how do you choose the right one? In this guide, we’ll show you how to assess your needs, identify risks, and measure potential rewards to make an informed decision. What is a Web3 Marketing Agency? A Web3 marketing agency specializes in promoting blockchain-based companies, crypto projects, and NFTs. They leverage innovative marketing strategies to help clients effectively communicate their value proposition to users, developers, and crypto communities. Web3 marketing agencies provide a variety of services, including: Understanding Your Brand’s Web3 Marketing Needs Before deciding on a partnership, clearly define your brand’s specific Web3 objectives. Are you launching an NFT collection, a DeFi project, or a blockchain-focused service?  Perhaps you aim to build community trust, attract developer adoption, or position your brand as a thought leader in the Web3 space. Clearly defined objectives help simplify communication and set realistic expectations, as without clear objectives, brands risk confusion, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. Assessing In-House Capabilities vs. Agency Expertise Before partnering with an external agency, carefully evaluate whether your internal team possesses the necessary skills and resources to manage a successful Web3 marketing campaign.  Consider expertise in areas like: Technical Blockchain Integration Your marketing team needs to understand how blockchain technology works to communicate its value effectively. This includes grasping concepts like consensus mechanisms, tokenomics, smart contract functionality, and blockchain interoperability features. For instance, if you’re launching a layer-2 scaling solution, your marketing team should be able to explain how it reduces gas fees and improves transaction speeds in terms that both developers and end-users can understand.  Creating Clear, Educational Web3-Focused Content Curating Web3 content is harder than Web2 because you’re selling an ecosystem, not a product. This means creating tutorials, documentation, explainer videos, and guides that not only help users navigate your platform but also educate them about Web3 and the blockchain as a whole. Additionally, Web3 content must account for the fast-paced changes and frequent updates to most protocols. This requires writers who can quickly adapt and maintain accuracy across multiple platforms. Effective Community Management Building and maintaining an active, engaged Web3 community involves continuous interactions across platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Discord. You not only need to maintain regular communication but also consistently produce and schedule content that resonates deeply with your community. An internal team lacking experience in managing these communities might overlook essential community feedback or fail to effectively convey your project message, risking the community’s trust and your project’s reputation. If your team consistently struggles in any of these areas or you consistently experience delays, it likely signals the need for external support. A Web3 marketing agency can quickly bridge these gaps by crafting precise messaging that resonates with your target audience, thereby effectively communicating your project’s value and building credibility for your brand. The Risks: What to Watch Out For As more companies look to get ahead by hiring Web3 agencies, careful founders should weigh a few key factors before committing to a partnership. Here are the most important ones: Technical Complexity Web3 marketing involves technical concepts like smart contracts and wallet integrations, which can be overwhelming if not handled properly, as they require skilled developers. For example, explaining how your DeFi wallet custody solution works or how users can interact with your API requires some level of technical understanding.  If your marketing team lacks this expertise, they might oversimplify complex features, leading to confusion or, even worse, misrepresenting your product’s capabilities. This technical gap can result in campaigns that fail to resonate with your target audience or inadvertently mislead potential users about your product’s functionality. Cost Web3 marketing can be expensive. Typically, you can expect to pay a Web3 marketing agency between $1,000 and $15,000 per month, depending on your brand’s requirements. Factors influencing these costs include campaign complexity, the level of technical expertise required, and other content creation costs.  ​​Let’s say you’re running a campaign and you need to create educational content about your project or develop technical documentation. This requires experienced writers who command premium rates, and many startups tend to underestimate these cumulative costs, but they can quickly add up in the long run. Niche Expertise Effective Web3 marketing requires specialized knowledge, which calls for experienced consultants whose expertise comes at a premium. Traditional marketing tactics rarely prove effective with Web3 communities. ​​An agency without proper Web3 experience might apply traditional marketing playbooks that fall flat in crypto communities, thereby wasting both time and resources while potentially damaging your brand’s reputation. Regulatory Uncertainty The crypto and blockchain sectors still operate within regulatory gray areas. Poorly managed campaigns could inadvertently breach regulatory guidelines, leading to lawsuits, fines, or reputational damage. For instance, in cases where promotional content unintentionally promises financial returns, projects might face investigations by regulatory bodies like the SEC or other financial authorities. Analytics & Tracking Measuring success in Web3 marketing can be difficult due to blockchain anonymity and the limitations of traditional analytics tools. Setting clear goals proves all the more important in web3 marketing. Traditional metrics like Google Analytics, email open rates or website conversions don’t capture the full picture of Web3 user engagement. Furthermore, activities such as wallet-based user interactions or smart contract interactions require specialized blockchain analytics tools that are often expensive and technically complex. Without proper measurement capabilities, you may struggle to optimize campaigns or demonstrate ROI to stakeholders. Assessing Your Needs: Do You Need a Web3 Marketing Partner? Not every business needs a Web3 marketing partner. Here are a few questions to ask

From the very day you got the idea of what your Web3 startup will be, you will also think of various ways it can possibly become big. Even though you have read Paul Graham’s essay about doing things that don’t scale, you have some low-key plans of how you want it to scale. Today is not the day I catechize on various Startup building rules. But this is my main point: from launch to seed stage and series A, you always think of scaling in whatever way possible. If the Startup is bringing an average of $3k MRR now, as a visionary founder, you will think of ways to increase it to $5k MRR ad infinitum. And that feeling, my friend, is valid. Without much ado, I am writing this short essay to teach how you can dramatically increase the activities and revenue of your protocol. You might want to ask, “John, have you built production-level Web3 protocols or startups before? Why should I listen to you?” I understand you. It’s normal. We are in the internet age where everyone tend to tell you what they haven’t even practice. So I think I should commend your intelligence for bringing up that observation — impressive! I won’t beg the question, here are a few reasons you should take what I will tell you seriously: So anything I tell you is a result of various insider-level experiences I have. That was quite an unusual introduction, don’t you think? Anyway, let’s quickly get into the main discourse. The Era of Developer-to-developer Content What marketers or DevRels call “D2D Content” means Developer-to-Developer content. This often involve publishing developer tutorials, documentations, workshops and lots more. Here is a good fact to keep in mind: developer-centric content have been a thing from the Web2 days. So it is not native to Web3. For those who are aware, Postman, RapidAPI, Vercel and other Web2 companies are really focused on pushing out content to educate and marinate the developers that use them. Why is Web3 content marketing also going this route? You need to understand that the bulk of Web3 is technical. There is always one migration to do, a component to reroute, an API to call, an ABI to insert. You should be familiar with these things too. For example, an RPC provider will always push out content around smart contract development and deployment because that is what their target customers do. A smart contract security firm will center their content marketing efforts on how to build secure code and educate people more around Web3 security. Why? That is the audience they are trying to attract. In short, the services or products of several Web3 companies are technical. Now, do you see why developer-to-developer content is essential? But there is something more exciting, and I will share it with you. D2D is now the Gateway to Web3 B2B For the technical folks who might not understand what B2B approach means, it means a Business-to-Business content narrative. Now, you might wonder, how will D2D lead to B2B? Let me give you two examples: The first one is Linea, an Ethereum L2. Their content marketing is entirely focused on developers. This way, they attract people who build DApps on their network. The ROI is in two ways; a DApp that exists on another blockchain can support them, and a new founder looking for a suitable blockchain might come across their content and choose to settle on Linea. That means they are attracting more businesses to build on them. The more these DApps growing in user activities and revenue, Linea gets more network activity and slices of fees from the DApp’s revenues. This is how L2s make money. Another example? The second example is Biconomy, a protocol that helps abstracts gas payment for Web3 DApps. They also create a lot of D2D content, which makes them prominent whenever developers are thinking of implementing gas abstraction in their projects. This way, they are selling their products to other businesses or protocols in the space. How can you commence D2D content? Now that you know Web3 D2D content is the way, you might wonder about how you can commence it for your Web3 protocol. To make everything short, these are the two things you should look out for: Teach Devs What They Can Build With Your Product There is a saying in marketing, “don’t say the feature, but the benefit.” It is old, but gold. Don’t say you are the next gen L2 with abstracted ZK layer using lightweight microprocessor. What people rather care about is how your product helps them. In the same way, if you are building a protocol similar to The Graph, spend the bulk of your content effort teaching developers how to index and query on-chain data with ease with their favorite stack. Show people what to do, and a good way to show this is to create tutorials—whether video or content—on it. This will help prospective users know the capability of your product. Hold Workshops There is a Web2 developer Startup that I love so much – Platformatic. One of the things I admire about them is how they hold periodic Node.js workshops to groom developers using their product. I have always loved and followed each of their workshops because they make me a better dev; I will always learn something new. Indeed, their attendance grew. That is something you should keep in mind: devs will always be where they are getting value, and D2D content in workshops is a goldmine. Plan the workshop in a way that will not overwhelm you; the best frequency is the monthly one. Here is another bonus: you can turn your D2D blog content into what you will explain in greater details during the workshop. How about a technical content engine for your Web3 D2D content? Really, how does it sound? While you are going about with business development, product building, and other core tasks, what if there is a

There has been a paradigm shift in the history of technology. Web3, a new evolution of the web, is challenging the old pattern of one entity ruling everywhere and everyone. The industry has witnessed exponential growth over the last couple of years. We have seen many Web3 companies like Aave, Consensys, and Chainlink making the numbers. This has also inspired many other people to provide solutions to other problems of humanity with Web3. After weeks—or even months—of building from the engineering standpoint, new or early-stage Web3 companies often have problems with visibility, sales, and conversion. This posits a technical marketing problem, and some Web3 companies underperform due to this reason. This is the truth: Web3 has a lot of innovative solutions, but the target audience can find it overwhelming or unnecessary when they do not understand the technological underpinnings. From another angle, many brilliant technical Web3 companies do not often have enough PR for their target audience to even know they exist. Nonetheless, Web3 currently has over 50 unicorns. That means these top companies have hacked how to break Web3 solutions to their audience in a way that they find interesting. If you plan to build an incredible company in Web3, this is a must-read! What is Web3 technical content marketing? Web3 technical content marketing refers to the overall strategy that Web3 companies can use to communicate with their users, make them understand the importance of their products, and make them recurring customers or users. As against popular belief, Web3 technical content marketing is beyond technical tutorials and guides. It also involves leveraging podcasts, videos, newsletters, documentation, social media,  courses, and reports. In practice, Web3 technical content marketing is similar to pure content marketing as we know it. But there is a big difference: Web3 technical content marketing targets one or more of these people: Those who are; In essence, the peculiarities of the industry and her audience is what shape Web3 technical content marketing. Web3 companies engage—or should engage—in technical content marketing for three major reasons: To; By the way, “companies” in this piece is a blanket term for protocols, projects, and startups. That said, another major subtle difference exists between the general form of content marketing and Web3 technical content marketing. Peep into the next subheading. Technical Marketing in Web3 is Subtle, Not Blatant The general idea of marketing is, “Hey folks, we are the best thing after sliced bread. Come swipe your card for our products.” I have been in Web3 for quite some years now as a developer and a marketer, and I can say that the above method doesn’t work. It doesn’t. The more you shill your project, the more Web3 devs and users doubt everything about it. Marketing here is subtle, not blatant. The ones who know this ensure the subtlety idea informs their overall technical content marketing. How do you do this in practice? Educate and inform your prospective users or customers. The quality of your education will influence them to check out your platform and be a paid user. With this ethos in mind, let’s look further into how some top Web3 companies run their technical content marketing. Examples of Web3 Companies That Do Marketing Right While some Web3 companies have serious issues using technical content marketing to generate visibility and conversion, others do it seamlessly. You can learn from these top companies—some of which are even unicorns—to up your Web3 technical content marketing game. Alchemy – Technical Blog Content Creation Alchemy is an infrastructure provider in Web3. They mainly provide RPC and APIs for the developers. They have facilitated around $100 billion in on-chain transaction volume. The Alchemy marketing team has always been heavy on publishing tutorials and guides for their audience. Going through their blog, one can notice a consistent pattern of publishing developer-focused content. I worked at Alchemy last year and have insights into how they structure their Web3 technical blog content marketing. They have two categories: conceptual content and tutorials. Conceptual content is focused on breaking down terminologies or popular concepts. For instance, they can explain metamorphic contracts to Solidity developers. Conversely, tutorials involve a step-by-step guide for developers to build smart contracts or dApps. The Alchemy content team will use Alchemy endpoints within the tutorials while building. Subtly, the readers following the tutorial will use and get accustomed to using Alchemy endpoints. No wonder they have about 4 million developers using their infrastructure. Thirdweb – YouTube Content Creation Thirdweb is one of the most remarkable dev-tool and no-code companies in Web3. Their recent acquisition of Paper makes them more robust. The company currently boasts of over 100k developers using its products. First of all, Thirdweb ships market-fit products that developers want. Their infrastructure spans across UI components, SDK, Auth, and so on. Apart from technical blog content, another form of marketing channel Thirdweb mans well is YouTube content creation. Most of the content spans around building projects using Thirdweb tools. In addition, they maintain a pattern of 1 video per week, and none of their videos have less than 1k views. This sends a message: 1 quality video per week is enough for your Web3 company. Consistency matters more than intensity. Magic Eden – Social Media Marketing Many companies are fighting for their users with only their blog page while neglecting social media as a less important channel. This is not true, and I can say that as a marketer. Developers and prospective users spend an average of 4 hours on Twitter or similar social media platforms daily. What a perfect platform to meet them! Magic Eden is a wallet in the Solana ecosystem, and their social media management team is doing wonders. They use their Twitter to communicate with their users and share updates. Recall that this is Web3, and their audience are degens, so they share memes occasionally and a little shitpost here and there — on a lighter note. In addition to the above, you can use your social media as a platform