'You can't fake your way into Web3' says Zerion's Head of Marketing
Host: Ioana Lungu (Growth Marketing Manager @ DOT)
Hosted by Ioana Lungu (Growth Marketing Manager @ DOT Ads) and joined by Alexander Guy (Head of Marketing and Growth @ Zerion)
Zerion is a crypto wallet for everything onchain so you can manage all your investments, collections, staked positions, and airdrops across 14 chains in one place.
📖 Read the Highlights
Ioana: How that transition [from web2 to web3 marketing] was for you and did you learn on the go or did you already know some stuff that you could use specifically for the web3 audience?
Alex: I was a user of a lot of web3 by the time I joined Zerion. So I understood, at least at some level a lot of the fundamentals and dynamics of how these projects tend to grow. But it was theoretical and any marketer will tell you a theoretical knowledge is not the same thing as practical knowledge.
Basically a lot of the things that you can fall back on as a web2 marketer, you know, I mentioned ads, SEO email, none of this exists in web3. It is not the way to grow an audience or engage a community.
I just learned by doing, I am somebody who's a pretty big observer and I like to watch what's going on and try to adapt accordingly. I like to try to apply things that worked for me in web2 and bring them over to web3.
One of the things that have really helped out was [the fact that] I have a great relationship [with my CEO] and a lot of trust was basically from day one, handed over to me. So I never felt like I was being judged. I never felt I was being unfairly criticized. I always felt like it was a very collaborative kind of relationship I had with the founding team.
One of the first things I did when I joined Zerion was what's called a marketing tear-down analysis.
So I basically just like looked at a lot of the leading projects in the space. Brands that I knew, companies, and protocols that were successful. And I said, what are they doing? How do they do it? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses, what don't they do at all? A good example is Aave, the borrowing and lending protocol. I recognized pretty early on that they were one of the few projects that were leveraging in real-life events and they were at everything, their CEO would speak at every event.
This is counterintuitive learning for me because web3 is so online that sometimes we forget the power of these in real-life interactions.
Ioana: What are some of the strategies that you use and could be applied to web2, as well as web3?
Alex: Content, specifically educational content, is still something that we just don't do very well in web3.
We have video, we've done live streams, we do a podcast. We have a sort of resource-like knowledge base, but very, very detailed.
We've done biweekly now, but for a while, we were doing weekly community calls on our Discord that would get between three and 5,000 people logging in. We've done Twitter spaces, we really have invested a lot in trying to use content and figure out what content can do to help us grow and reach a larger group of people.
We don't want just to create content for content's sake. [Adding value]: that’s been our focus from the beginning.
—
Ioana: And how do you maintain this trust within your community for what you're building?
Alex: From our side, it's by trying to be as transparent as possible. Maybe this comes from the nature of crypto. It's also on us to do things that allow for the community to verify on their own if they want to.
So for example, our extension, which we launched in December - we open sourced it. So technically anybody can take our GitHub, fork it, and create their own Zerion browser extension. But to us, that's about transparency and making sure that we show our work.
I think the core of trust in web3 is transparency, and that includes when something bad happens.
—
Ioana: You mentioned earlier about an ambassador program - are there any other things that you do to keep the Zerion community engaged?
Alex: The other thing is probably the biggest driver of our community at this point. It is this NFT project we released called Zerion DNA. Zerion DNA is a generative NFT that users can mint inside their Zerion wallets, and the NFT changes and evolves over time. So the more assets you hold, the more transactions you make, the different networks you use, which will all impact the way that the avatar looks and feels.
This tool [is] to basically give our users some way to express their on-chain footprint visually. So DNA now has over 220,000 unique holders, and it actually is the second largest NFT collection on Ethereum after ENS.
—
Ioana: What tools did you use to grow this project and what was your strategy when you started sharing it with your community?
Alex: This is obviously the first major thing that we did from an on-chain marketing perspective. So instead of a funnel, I like to think about a kind of 360-degree ring. A circle with concentric rings inside. And at the very center are the Zerion diehard users who collect everything, who mint everything, who are very present.
But those are few and far between. So the further out you get from the center is basically like the degrees of separation from our brand. And so we like to talk about our overall sphere of influence. How big is that? And then how do we move people inward? Also recognizing that people are going to move freely between these rings.
Our whole philosophy is to increase the widest possible tam [the sphere of influence on the outside] and do things as much as we can to push people from all directions into the center.
So it's a very dynamic exercise and much more accommodating.
Learn more about Zerion’s strategy, team structure, and web3 philosophy.
Ioana: What is one thing that makes you now excited about web3?
Alex: I am very excited by the different forms that web3 social is beginning to take. I've been looking for a reason to get off crypto Twitter and we're almost there with Farcaster and Lens.
This is very exciting to me, and I hope that we continue to see real evolution and innovation in this space, but there's a lot more stuff to do on the social side than there ever was before, and that's only a good thing for the space because I think a lot of people are sick of Twitter, of TikTok, or something else.
And I can't wait to see what the builders of those projects and some of the other new ones that we don't even know about build in 2024.
🚀 Subscribe
Subscribe to our Substack or YouTube channel for more growth insights from top web3 companies.
👉 For Those New Here, What’s DOT?
DOT Ads: The crypto ad network with a Google Ads-like experience. Discover our self-serve ad platform and get your ads on 300+ crypto sites. DOT
Marketplace: The Amazon of Crypto PR. Get sponsored articles & press releases from top sites like BSC News & Benzinga to amplify your brand.
📍 Find Us
Website: dotaudiences.com
Linkedin: Click Here
Twitter (X): Click Here
Youtube: Click Here
📧 Contact us
hello@dotaudiences.com for guest appearances and collaboration inquiries.