Marketing Strategy and Structure in web3 for 2025

You’ve probably heard it a million times in #web3: “Community is everything.” And yeah, it’s true. But here’s the thing - success in business isn’t just about what you do (because let’s face it, that part’s usually pretty obvious). It’s about how you do it. ???

That’s why I’m kicking off this series of articles - not to repeat the same old stuff, but to dive into the nuts and bolts ??? of web3 marketing. I’m talking real, actionable business processes.

We’ll cover more than just community building - we’re looking at the bigger picture ?? of how crypto marketing is organized.

Why Marketing Structure is important?

Even when you’ve got a stellar team packed with subject-matter experts - whether they shine at social media marketing, community building, or something else entirely - things can go south fast if your marketing isn’t properly organized.

And that chaos? It doesn’t just slow down the team - it drags the whole business down.

Here’s what might go wrong:

1. Uncoordinated Tasks

Disorganization leads to a pile of disconnected tasks that fail to align with your overarching strategy.

Imagine this: The CEO gets an idea and says, “Let’s make this happen!” A marketer picks it up, creates a task, and dives in. But then - BAM - another urgent task pops up, and the first one gets sidelined (hello, backlog ??).

Repeat this enough times, and you’ll soon notice:

• A mountain of unfinished tasks piling up.
• No clear connections between tasks and parent projects, leaving them lost in your task manager.

This disorganization can eat up to 50% of your marketing team’s time. ??

2. Lack of Analytical Standards

Analytics tools are only as good as the team using them. But without standards, things can get messy.

Take UTM tags, for example. These tags have key parameters like Source, Medium, Content, and Campaign. But if different team members use them in their own way, it creates a chaos.

The consequences?

• Data is fragmented, lost, or misinterpreted.
• Analyzing the data becomes a convoluted and unreliable process.

Messy data leads to poor decisions. And poor decisions? Let’s just say they don’t make for great marketing. ??

3. Time-Consuming Data Collection

Compiling and analyzing data becomes a major time sink - think days instead of hours - when you’re using multiple tools without alignment.

This inefficiency is compounded by the lack of standardized analytics (see the previous point). Instead of having everything centralized and easy to access, your team spends valuable time consolidating data from disparate sources. What should’ve been a quick overview turns into a grueling, days-long process.

When you’re just starting out, these issues might not seem like a big deal. Say you’ve got an influencer campaign that’s bringing in tons of traffic - it feels like you’re winning, so why sweat the details?

But scaling is another story. If you’re looking to move beyond “we’ve got a cool community” into building repeatable business processes tied to your financial model, these problems can’t be ignored.

Pro tip: Start on the right foot. The earlier you nail your structure, the smoother things will be. What does “proper” look like, though? Let me break it down ??

We’ll dive into this in Step 2, but first, let’s begin with a foundational element of any go-to-market strategy: Step 1 - Market Research. ??

Step 1: Market Research

No matter what industry you’re diving into - whether it’s crypto or anything else - there are two key things you should focus on right from the start:

1?? Understand your competitors’ traffic structure. Where are they getting their traffic from? What’s driving their audience?

2?? Analyze their high-traffic pages and marketing funnel. Which pages are pulling in the most visitors, and how have they set up their funnel to convert that traffic into results?

Market Research Tools

Here are the tools that can cover 80% of your research needs:

1. SimilarWeb

This tool helps you understand traffic volume and its breakdown by channels. It’s perfect for getting a quick overview of where your competitors are succeeding in attracting visitors.

2. Ahrefs

Once you identify competitors with the highest organic traffic from SimilarWeb, dive into Ahrefs for deeper analysis:

• How is their site structured?
• Which pages drive the most SEO traffic?
• What’s their internal linking strategy?
• Which sites are sending them backlinks, and how many do they have?

3. Your Experience

Yes, your experience is a tool too. To effectively analyze competitors, you’ll need to:

• Be a seasoned conversion marketer to evaluate their CR optimization strategies (funnels).
• Understand crypto market trends and community engagement strategies. While many follow common platforms (Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Zealy, Galxe), subtle variations can make all the difference.

This research will reveal what’s fueling their growth and why they’re leading. From there, your goal is simple: replicate their success and add your unique twist to outperform them.

Step 2: Creating Your Marketing Structure

While market research is essential, this article focuses on how to structure your crypto marketing from the ground up. (More on web3 market research in upcoming articles!)

“Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”

Before we build our marketing structure, let’s establish the core pillars it rests upon:

1. Financial Model / Unit Economics ??

Every business needs a financial model that incorporates unit economics as an essential part of its framework.

2. Project Management ???

Managing your marketing activities systematically and efficiently is crucial. It’s not just about keeping track of tasks but doing so in a way that ensures nothing slips through the cracks.

3. Analytics ??

Analytics serve as the bridge between your goals, your financial model, and your management processes. Without it, connecting the dots becomes nearly impossible.

How do we integrate these pillars into our marketing structure?

To answer that, we’ll apply Occam's Razor, the principle of simplicity from the philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49):

“Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”

In practical terms, this means identifying the intersecting components of these pillars, combining them where possible, and discarding anything extraneous.

1. Finance model

We’ll begin applying this principle to our Finance Model - because finance is the backbone of any business.

When we analyze the unit economics of any internet business, two key components stand out:

• Traffic sources ??
• Various conversions (e.g., first visit → registration → paying user).

While there are additional elements in a financial model, for structuring marketing, these 2 entities are the most relevant.

2. Project management

Now, let's take those 2 entities from our unit economics sheet and turn them into 2 distinct "projects" in our Task Management tool. Personally, I prefer Notion, but it doesn't matter which tool you choose - the important thing is grasping the core concept.

These entities will be 1?? Acquisition (”traffic sources” in finance model) and 2?? CR Optimization (”conversions”).

1?? Acquisition

This project focuses on traffic sources. For a crypto (DeFi) project, it might include the following tasks:

1.1 ref_program ??

In the crypto world, community is king. Referral programs can drive significant traffic by incentivizing users to bring others into the fold.

1.2 seo ??

SEO is a long-term traffic source, which is why many crypto projects underestimate its value (since speed often takes priority over a solid site structure, backlinks, etc.). However, if you're aiming to build a major crypto project, SEO is essential.

There are two main reasons for this:

• Few projects properly engage with SEO on a significant scale (aside from the big players).
• There is a huge demand for content that doesn’t currently exist, especially for beginners or "normies" - content that’s not skewed by the typical "crypto-centric" view.

This creates a huge opportunity for many projects to tap into.

1.3 smm ??

This involves leveraging platforms like Twitter, Telegram, and Discord to drive traffic and engagement.

1.4 affiliate_program_internal ??

The key distinction between this source and a referral program is that an affiliate program is designed for webmasters and influencers, rather than regular users.

Whereas a standard referral program might offer points as incentives, an affiliate program involves real money. You won't be able to attract professionals to promote your project with points alone - they expect actual financial rewards.

1.5 affiliate_program_external ??

An external affiliate program involves launching an affiliate campaign through different affiliate networks.

While many crypto offers in these networks tend to be highly specific and require large deposits, which may not fit the budget of most projects, there are networks that offer more suitable conditions - provided your affiliate program is well-positioned and organized.

These programs can include CPA (Cost Per Action), CPS (Cost Per Sale), and revenue share models. I’ll dive deeper into crypto offers across affiliate networks in a separate article.

1.6 listings ??

For a DeFi project, listings can include various aggregators or analytics platforms such as CoinMarketCap, CoinCodex, DeFiLama, and others.

In general, when launching a project in any industry (not just crypto), it’s crucial to get listed on as many platforms as possible, especially if it's free and doesn’t require much effort. While not every platform may bring significant traffic, a key benefit is improving your backlink profile for SEO.

For crypto projects, however, listings are essential. These platforms not only bring actual traffic but also enhance your project's credibility. Being listed on a well-known platform adds trust, making your project seem more reliable.

1.7 referral (traffic from all other sites) ??

In Google Analytics, "referral" traffic refers to visitors who reach your site by clicking a link from another site. This same term is also used by SimilarWeb.

At first glance, you might think this refers to the referral program traffic, but there's a key difference. If Google Analytics labels this as "referral" traffic, it’s more efficient to stick with this terminology. Why complicate things by creating separate entities when the tool already classifies it clearly?

For our purposes, we use this category to cover all traffic sources that don’t fall into the other specific categories. Examples include:

• ProductHunt
• Various PR placements (such as Yahoo Finance, Investing.com, etc.)

1.8 partnership ??

This is a source of traffic about various collaborations with other crypto projects, so all the tasks here are about them.

1.9 web3_quests ??

Platforms like Galxe and Zealy are indispensable for driving traffic in the web3 space.

1.10 kols ??

Traffic generated through influencer collaborations across Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, and more.

1.11 paid_traffic

In crypto, paid traffic should supplement organic one. It’s not about flooding the market with ads but about using PPC strategically to enhance engagement and scale once product-market fit has been established.

2?? CR Optimization

Alright, we’ve finally arrived at the CR Optimization project! If you remember, this was built around the different conversions outlined in our Finance Model.

This one’s pretty self-explanatory. While the Acquisition tasks focus on specific traffic sources, the CR Optimization tasks are diverse, but they all share a common goal: improving various conversions across the business ??

2.1 /why-your-project

This is crucial for any brand’s positioning - explaining to users why they should choose your services over your competitors.

In the crypto space, where positioning is often weak, this is rarely done, but it can significantly boost conversion rates on any landing page, especially when placed in a dedicated section with separate articles for each benefit - just like Kraken does ??

2.2 /product-landing-pages

Many web3 products skip proper landing pages and send users directly to the "app," where they’re expected to link a wallet and dive straight into the product. This may work for experienced users, but it’s a nightmare for beginners.

Have you tried showing your crypto product to your mom or a 7-year-old? Web3 projects need better onboarding, as what’s out there right now is not sufficient for a good conversion ??

2.3 product videos

Once your landing page is set, the next step is creating a product video to place there. It’s important to guide users step by step, showing them where to click and how everything works ??

This was a top request from our community managers.

2.4 chat bots / CRM marketing

If a user visits your site, they might have questions. Modern chatbots can load your knowledge base and then be trained to answer most questions accurately. You can link users to other sections of your site, your social media communities, or promotional pages (like Airdrops). But the best part? You can use chatbots for marketing:

• Run campaigns targeted to specific user groups
• Collect emails and follow up with email funnels
• Subscribe users to push notifications and re-engage them (pushes work wonders!) ??

We’ve tested several tools, and while Intercom is great, it’s quite pricey for large user volumes. Instead, we use Livechat.com + Chatbot.io, which offer the same features at a much more affordable price.

2.5 emails / pushes

These tools help bring users back or improve onboarding, which in turn boosts product usage.

We used SendGrid for email funnels, a reliable service that meets our needs, and we leveraged the push notification features from our CRM tools mentioned above ????

2.6 support

From a financial model perspective, quality customer support boosts conversion (depending on the business type, the conversion action may vary).

Sure, you could consider support as part of Retention, but that would mean creating a separate entity in our business process structure, which we’re not aiming for.

More importantly, focusing on Conversion offers a clearer and more actionable business goal compared to focusing on Retention ??♀?

3. Analytics (wrapping up)

So, we’ve covered the main issues that come up when there’s no solid marketing structure in place.

I’ve also shared the key tools used for market research.

We’ve highlighted the main pillars that should support your marketing strategy and overall business organization:

1. Finance model ??
2. Project management ???
3. Analytics ??

And, we’ve introduced the Occam’s Razor principle – basically, "Keep it simple, don’t overcomplicate things."

But, we haven’t yet explored how this principle connects to analytics and how we track traffic within these business processes..

That’s it for today! ?? This was just the kickoff in my series on Product Marketing Strategy - we’ve covered the groundwork with market research, organizing your marketing structure, and key pillars like finance ??, project management ???, and analytics ??.

Coming up, I’ll take you deeper into analytics, uncover strategies for optimizing traffic sources, and break down the nuances of brand positioning ?? - all tailored for Web3 marketers looking to scale efficiently.

Now, it’s your turn: How do you organize your marketing strategy? ?? Whether you’re in crypto or another field, these principles are universal, and I’d love to hear how you apply them.

Let’s chat in the comments! ??