How to Stage a Comeback Against the Odds: Web3 Marketing Strategies in a Bear Market
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
How to Stage a Comeback Against the Odds: Web3 Marketing Strategies in a Bear Market
Looking forward to the emergence of various new growth models in Web3, and to the progress of projects utilizing them.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
Author: Alex Topchishvili, Head of Marketing at CoinList
Translation: Linda, Web3 MKT
Editor's note: In a bear market, project marketing budgets shrink and user engagement declines. Many in the Web3 marketing community express the view that "marketing is difficult in a bear market."
But is that really true?
Bull markets bring high user activity, but also much fiercer marketing competition. While bear markets reduce budgets, there are still many available resources that can position your project to stand out in the next bull run.
In this article, the author shares practical insights from personal experience on how to execute effective marketing during a bear market.
Below is the translated content:
In 2022, the crypto industry has long lost its $2 trillion market cap, and with it, the widespread hype around Web3.
For months, as the crypto winter sets in, marketers (and their budgets) have felt the pressure.
Web3 projects worldwide are feeling low, and marketers are waiting for market recovery before ramping up efforts.
But in my experience, this is a mistake.
Bear markets present excellent marketing opportunities for three main reasons:
- They are far more cost-effective
- There is far less noise to filter through
- They represent an investment that yields outsized growth and returns during the next bull market
In this article, I will introduce a growth framework for marketing in a bear market and discuss how emerging Web3 projects should allocate their limited marketing resources.
1. Define Your Growth Metrics
Bull markets and trends don’t last forever, and using terms like “Protocol” or “DAO” won’t sustainably drive user demand for your product or reduce developer workload. Therefore, before thinking about growth, it’s critical to understand specific growth metrics tailored to your project.
While each project may define growth differently, common Web3 growth metrics by category include:
- L1/L2 Protocols: Number of independent contributing developers, number of active wallets, number of interactions, transaction count and volume
- DeFi: Total Value Locked (TVL), number of active wallets, number of interactions
- Gaming: Number of active players, transaction volume per user, number of guild partners
- Marketplaces/Exchanges: Monthly Active Users, number of listed tokens, transaction count, total trading volume
- SaaS: Revenue per customer, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), churn rate
Defining success metrics is a prerequisite—just like achieving product-market fit—before exploring growth strategies, setting goals, and identifying tools.
2. Leverage Existing Assets to Drive Growth
Even as marketing budgets are slashed during the crypto winter, many Web3 marketers overlook one of the most valuable resources they have: existing business assets.
Among all existing assets available to Web3 startups, the following three are the most important:
- Core Team: Your team is your most valuable marketing asset. When launching new products, acquiring customers, or creating content, every team member should be on the front lines, appropriately sharing and distributing project information across their personal networks—especially on Twitter.
- Users: One of the biggest challenges for any Web3 marketer is the lack of case studies and customer success stories. If you have satisfied customers, create compelling case studies to advance your marketing—these serve as powerful proof points to convert prospects into users.
- SEO: Everyone has a website and blog, yet few Web3 marketers invest enough effort to make their sites and apps search-friendly. To ensure integrated effectiveness across marketing campaigns, optimize your site for proper indexing and usability. This will positively impact your organic search traffic. Optimize your keyword targeting during this low-competition bear market and reap the rewards in the next bull run.
3. User Acquisition: Double Down on Native Web3 Growth Channels, Cut the Rest
User acquisition in Web3 is chaotic, especially during a bear market.
Many well-funded teams burn VC money on strategies that neither reach their target audience nor deliver ROI—such as funding lavish global conferences and dinners, sponsoring celebrities, and overpaying crypto influencers and Web2 ad networks (Facebook, Google, Reddit, TikTok, Quora, etc.).
For marketing tactics like influencer promotions and events, measuring ROI is particularly difficult. If you can't properly attribute returns, these efforts may not be worth it in a bear market.
Here are two Web3-native user acquisition strategies that, if executed well, can become strong focus areas during market downturns.
1. Airdrops
A popular user acquisition method in Web3 is token airdrops. Projects distribute free tokens to users’ wallet addresses who meet certain preconditions or complete specific protocol-related tasks.
Assuming you’ve carefully considered tokenomics, token utility, and thoughtfully selected eligible recipients, you can attract high-quality users from day one, rewarding them as early community members and fostering an active, cohesive user base.
While there have been successful airdrops (e.g., Uniswap, ENS), they also come with risks. Since airdrops occur on-chain and projects have little reliable way to assess recipients’ on-chain reputations,
this leads to two issues:
- Tokens going to pure bounty hunters who farm activities for disproportionate allocations
- Failing to include users who haven’t participated in similar airdrops or those genuinely interested in contributing to the protocol
Without sufficient “buy-in” from token recipients or broad trust in the protocol, tokens are often immediately dumped, causing price collapse and harming the entire ecosystem. Poorly executed airdrop examples include Optimism and Ribbon Finance.
To make airdrops effective in a bear market, token airdrops should verify users’ on-chain reputation and prioritize users with a proven track record of contributing to protocols—not speculative users who will dump tokens at the first opportunity.
2. Bounties and Credentials
Another increasingly popular Web3-native user acquisition strategy is launching incentive-based reward campaigns on bounty platforms, where users are rewarded in cryptocurrency for completing specific on-chain actions (e.g., trading, staking, swapping, lending, following social accounts).
- For new users, this is a way to earn crypto while learning and building credibility to become contributors to emerging projects.
- For Web3 projects, it’s a method to identify and acquire high-quality contributors based on proven value-added activities.
Unlike paying Facebook or Google to capture whatever minimal search traffic remains in a bear market, you’re instead paying active users who have already demonstrated value-adding or positive on-chain behavior—making them far more likely to stay engaged and contribute to your community. Some such reward platforms include:
4. Invest in Content → Less Competition, More Visibility
New narratives scare users away. When something triggers fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), most people simply avoid it.
The antidote? Education.
As marketers in an industry plagued by scams and dark history, we must help users understand Web3 products by delivering high-quality content and insightful perspectives that provide real value. There is no better or more effective time for education than during a crypto winter.
Creating high-quality, audience-relevant content during a bear market helps your project attract organic traffic, build trust, improve SEO, and strengthen brand value.
During bull markets, massive amounts of content are produced and shared, making it hard for your content to stand out. But in a bear market, content production drops significantly, making it easier to capture attention, establish your project as a go-to solution, and emerge as a thought leader in your niche.
Remember—Google considers content freshness when ranking search results. Content published during the last bull run may no longer surface. Regardless of what happens in the industry or how much value is erased, long-term crypto users still check Twitter daily and refresh notifications dozens of times—giving your content ample exposure opportunities.
Investing in content during a bear market pays massive dividends in the next bull run, because people remember which companies disappeared and which projects stayed active and visible during tough times. Web3 may never be smaller than it is today, and your competition may never be thinner.
5. Community Is King: Build a Purpose-Driven Community
In Web2, go-to-market primarily targets customers, typically acquired through sales and marketing.
In Web3, marketing targets extend beyond customers/users to include developers, investors, and partners. Since Web3 projects are “community-owned,” not just “community-led,” the lines between owners, shareholders, and users are often blurred—making clear targeting even more crucial.
Unlike Web2, in Web3, purpose, community, and product are key drivers of go-to-market strategy. Often, a project’s growth stems not from users flocking to an existing product, but from alignment with the ideals and identity embodied by its community. Community helps define and shape the product.
Examples include:
- Friends With Benefits, a social DAO that began as a Discord group gated by a token;
- Loot, a game that started with content and later evolved gameplay;
- Smoothie, a discover-to-earn rewards platform that began as a content and community hub for discovering Web3 startups.
Tips for building a community during a bear market:
- Go where Web3 users are: Web3 communities have already chosen their preferred platforms. Building a community means meeting users where they already are. Twitter and Telegram are essential for announcements and open discussions, but Discord has become the platform of choice for project leaders seeking maximum flexibility in community management.
- Clarify your purpose and intent: When newcomers arrive, they should easily understand your organization’s mission by browsing pinned posts and channel titles. Include links to your website, project documentation, or introductory blog posts/videos so people can learn as much as possible.
- Set clear boundaries: Once a culture is established, it’s hard to change. Set clear expectations for acceptable behavior from day one. Specify behaviors that may lead to mutes or bans, and enforce rules consistently and swiftly.
- Cross-promote with other communities: Build partnerships and collaborations that enable cross-promotion among Web3 communities. In a bear market, positive news is rare, so each positive announcement gets amplified. Whether through joint projects, co-hosted AMAs, or collaborative content initiatives, leverage your partners’ marketing reach whenever possible!
- Leverage your community: Whether scaling content for broader reach, gathering feedback, testing features before launch, building analytics tools, or completing bounties—involve your community as much as possible. Make incentives clear and actionable.
As Web3 matures through this bear market, the understanding of customers, growth drivers, and real growth metrics will also mature.
I look forward to seeing new growth models emerge in Web3 and the progress made by projects adopting them.
About Web3 MKT
Web3 MKT is a Web3 growth strategy study group initiated by TechFlow, aiming to dissect case studies, research Web3 marketing and growth strategies, and transform insights into “practical productivity” to help projects achieve better global growth outcomes.
We welcome more friends interested in exploring Web3 marketing and growth to join our learning community. For inquiries, add WeChat zolohands. Web3 MKT Link
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@CoinList
