Why Web3 Brands Favour Community Roles - Importance of Web3 Community Managers

Published on
August 22, 2022
Written by
Michael Ebiekutan
Read time
5 min
Category
Articles

Competition in web3 is a war of communities. The projects with the most engaging and active community always end up on the winning side. However, managing web3 communities can be quite challenging, considering web3 solutions come with unconventional approaches to building and managing businesses.

In this piece, we explored the importance of community management in the web3 space.

Importance of Web3 Community Managers

Web2 companies are focused majorly on building products and making as much sales as possible. Hence, the need for marketers and a sales team to help nurture customers through different sales funnels.

This strategy is dominant across businesses today - companies create personas, collect email addresses, and employ traditional software to monitor their potential clients/customers with the end target of eventually making sales to them.

These infrastructures and information enable web2 companies to scale their products in no time. For example, a company can commit most of its resources to creating a digital marketing strategy by leveraging the services of platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to move potential customers through the sales funnel.

While this approach has largely been successful in web2, implementing the same in web3 will be almost impossible. Web3 companies function quite differently because of their fundamentals and architectural design. Additionally, the available tools and information that empowers the web2 approach are limited.

For one, users in web3 are highly private with their identities as you'll mostly find people using pseudonyms and not email addresses. You may not know if it's a 12-year-old that's behind the wallet you're interacting with. And unlike web2 where the algorithms of social media giants can track people and create user profiles to sell to you, web3 standards limit such possibilities.

Hence, you may not be able to gather enough information about potential customers through the traditional process. The question becomes: how do you tailor your product to match their needs?

This is where community comes in.

While traditional forms of sales and marketing may struggle in web3, community managers excel, because at the core of every crypto project is a community. Community managers in web3 enable you to relate with potential customers beyond their pseudonyms, understand their feelings and tailor your products to match their needs.

Web3 users do not want to be sold to. Rather, they prefer investing their money and time in a vision centred around a community.

To put this in perspective; while you may have a great web3 product today, communities are responsible for the future trajectory of the project. And if people don't see your community as one that will thrive, they may not necessarily want to invest their money in your product.

When people buy a web3 product, they see it as an investment, not just in the product, but also in the community.

Traditional web2 sales and marketing activities may attract people in web3, but it won't get them to commit their funds or time.

However, community managers enable you to scale through this hurdle as they can cultivate those important experiences that can make your community active and vibrant. And when people see value in your community, they can easily commit their resources to whatever it is you're building.

For example, many people who own Dogecoin are aware that the project provides no utility. But they commit their funds regardless because of the activeness and vibrancy the Doge community has shown in times past to take the currency to new heights.

Web3 users aren't only interested in using and enjoying products. They are as much interested in the underlying community as the product. The web3 dream is about decentralization and a democratic web. When it's just your employees and affiliates backing your product and playing the convincing game in the market, you're indirectly communicating web2 vibes which web3 folks are sceptical of.

However, when there's a diverse community talking about a project and flaunting it without the direct incentives of generating money off sales, it serves as a stamp of approval in the decentralized world of web3.

Successful crypto founders understand this character in web3 folks, hence they commit more effort and resources towards growing a community by hiring experienced community managers. Most often, the community manager is chosen from the community itself.

In web3 marketing of today, community roles are treated as a core function rather than a support role like in web2. In fact, web3 marketing is almost impossible without establishing the right frameworks to manage your community.

Community managers will drive brand events, generate customer insights and influence the overall brand experience. They will not just represent the company's needs; they will also stand for the community and ensure their voice is heard.

They move from the customer service inclined tasks to becoming that fundamental part of the project that naturally weaves your project's key value proposition into daily community interactions.

As web3 is revealing a new path where the connection between users and brands is more of a relationship than transactional, founders have to invest more in talents that can build and sustain this connection.

For example, most restaurants and fashion brands are beginning to exploit community relationships by launching and purchasing NFTs - Adidas is on Decentraland, Hublot launched an NFT watch series, Nike purchased RTFKT NFT studio, Starbucks is launching a web3 reward program, etc.

Without community managers to nurture the connection and experience such launches will bring for customers, it may not yield the desired result.

A popular example is the failure of the Ubisoft Quartz NFT project. While the concept was innovative, the community of gamers didn't buy the idea as there was no community expert to nurture the experience.

In web3, the community is a core part of the product.

Many bitcoin evangelists - libertarians especially - are not in the network because they just want to transact with the Bitcoin blockchain. They are holding bitcoin to express their belief in a decentralized censorship-resistant currency. Web3 users aren't just customers but they are a community and a core part of the product.

Community managers enable you to attract believers to your project and engage them until they automatically become brand ambassadors. Unlike web2 where you spend so much effort to attract customers for the sole purpose of selling to them, web3 community managers help you nurture your user base and turn them into an army of free marketers for your project.

You ready to take the next steps? Let our team at SIGNVM help you integrate that community spark into your brand.

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