Communities are the backbones of web3 projects. Increasingly, community marketing is being also adopted by established brands outside the blockchain sector.

What are the main goals when building communities?

• Connecting with your end users
• Product updates and business updates
• Building customer loyalty and developing ambassadors
• Customer support. Sharing tutorials and offering support for your product.
• Gamification. Leverage quest and community tools like Tide to provide web3 based experiences that speak to users at an emotional and utilitarian level. Other notable players (like Monad) are bringing gamification to the next level, building out Minecraft servers for their users.

Regularly pausing to consider these questions is beneficial:

• How can you infuse energy and interest into your community, encouraging their continued participation?
• What distinguishes my community from others and how you can leverage that distinctive quality?

Web3 makes it very easy to incentivize community members. The purpose is to build more engagement loops that can make your users sticky .Having a good tiering and reward system is paramount to answer these questions. We will present now a three steps framework to do it.

1) Identifying Key Members

It is important to start with a customer centric approach to work out which users deliver the most value to your product / community in the web3 space.

We find it very helpful to use a three segments framework:

• Best users in the community segment. The top 5–10% of users that actively contribute to the project in an organic, selfless way. They are very aligned with the mission, participate to governance and contribute positively in the discussions. An examples are social media accounts popular in your niche that actively engage with your content.
• Best users in the product segment. The top 5–10% of users that are often visiting an using the product. This users care about your product as it solve an actual problem for them.
• Anyone else. The value of users in this category is transient and depend on the probability to turn them into best users in community segment or best users in the product segment. These users don’t really move the needle when it comes to your community

Point systems, airdrops, NFTs usage should be focused around identifying and nurturing these segments.

2) Focus on Relevant Actions

Quests and engagement are based on user actions. That is why it is important to request the right action to the right users. When possible, actions should be designed as recurrent.

• Proof of work. It should not be easy. It should be scarce. It should be for selected members that look for the status. Example of proof of work: write a twitter or debank post, be active on discord, write a long form content.
• Proof of usage. Quests are campaigns based on actions. Actions should be performance events that bring revenues to the projects.

Designing the right actions is about avoiding brand dilution.

3) Get better at designing rewards

At Tide we have tried any kind of campaign. Tokens, dynamic NFTs, rewards.

The most powerful idea is that Status it the most underused driver.

Users often engage in activities and interactions that enhance their status within the group. This can include contributing valuable content, participating actively in discussions, or achieving certain milestones within the community.

In web3 environments, where decentralization and community-driven initiatives are prevalent, the status can be more explicitly tied to digital assets like NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) or other blockchain-based rewards. These digital assets serve as tangible symbols of a user’s status and contributions within the community, thus motivating ongoing engagement and participation. The concept aligns with the decentralized ethos of web3, where value and status are determined more democratically, as opposed to being centrally controlled.

• Incorporate the concept of ‘Status as a Service’. People are status craving animals. Rewards should offer a sense of status and exclusivity, making participants feel valued and unique. Your USDC raffle is not enough.
• Use gamified elements to make the quest experience engaging and enjoyable, increasing user participation and brand loyalty. Check out Mapgie use case.
• Meaningful and proportional rewards. Offer a range of rewards that are both tangible (like merchandise) and intangible (like special recognition or exclusive access), ensuring they are meaningful and relevant to the target audience. Reflect the importance of different user groups in the reward structure, with greater rewards for higher levels of engagement and contribution.
• Continuous Engagement: Design rewards to encourage ongoing participation and long-term engagement with the brand or product. Repeated engagement builds retention. An example of continuos engagement campaign in web3 is requesting users to weekly use your app (you can monitor and track this easily with Tide campaign editor)
• Multiplatform. Discord, debank, Twitter.

How to get started with web3 marketing in your community

• The first step is to create tiers and define levelling criteria. Understanding which users really move the needle (community and product) is pivotal.
• The second step is to choose rewards to incentivize participation
• The third step is to implement, coordinate and manage your community.

About Tide

Tide is the next-gen marketing and analytics suite for web3 projects to incentivize their users and build vibrant communities.

• A quest engine that supports the tracking of sophisticated on-chain actions
• A CRM / performance marketing dashboard to know CAC, LTV and ROI of campaigns and iterate (currently live) on those data‍
• Integration options that include widget and SDK

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