Web3 Marketing's Lost Horse: How Many Projects Are Being Buried by Blind Trend-Chasing?
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Web3 Marketing's Lost Horse: How Many Projects Are Being Buried by Blind Trend-Chasing?
Marketing is the most difficult creative work.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Stacy Muur
Translation: Luffy, Foresight News
What's the biggest problem in Web3 marketing? Talent. Or more precisely, the lack of it—lack of creativity, intelligence, and critical thinking.
Ninety percent of teams simply copy-paste the same marketing playbook without ever pausing to ask why they're doing it or whether their strategy actually works.
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Task designs on Zealy/Galxe/Intract that only generate fake social engagement
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X accounts for "interns" appearing out of nowhere
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Discord poker nights with zero attendance
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Airdrops and points programs inflating metrics... while capital flees immediately after TGE
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Blind, unstrategic shilling campaigns
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Rose chatbots as customer support
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Accounts with six-figure followers but zero mutual follows
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Fake engagement across all platforms
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Giveaways, trading competitions...
These strategies are all identical. You've seen them, I've seen them—we've all seen them, over and over. The question is: can we do better? My answer: absolutely.
1. Are You Even Targeting the Right Audience?
Has your team conducted real competitor and vertical analysis? Have they used tools like @Similarweb to capture audience data? Do you actually know who your users are and where they are located?
If you assume your target audience overlaps with Binance, think again: you might be targeting the U.S., but your actual users could be in Asia.
Now guess what happens if you launch a Zealy campaign without verification? A flood of new community members arrives—from regions you never intended to target.
This isn't bad luck—it's poor marketing.
Web3 gives you easy access to transparent data, yet most marketers are too lazy to use it. Instead, they plan campaigns based on vibes, follower counts, and superficial metrics.
The truth is: blockchains are the best user research tool.
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Who adopted early?
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Who stuck around during testnet?
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Who provided liquidity? Who dumped? Who came back?
You think on-chain means anonymous? Not really. You can match on-chain behavioral patterns with off-chain behavior—you just need to care enough to do it. Most teams don’t.
2. Do Airdrops Actually Work?
Here’s a heretical thought: what if airdrops… don’t work?
What’s your post-airdrop churn rate? What percentage of capital actually stays?
Because the tokens you airdrop equal your marketing budget. You could have spent those tokens on strategy, creativity, community, data, or media. Instead, you dump them into the void—and then wonder why your token price crashes after TGE.
To be fair, some airdrops succeeded—Uniswap, Hyperliquid, Arbitrum. Why? Because they had strong underlying products, real demand, and user retention. But that list is short. The list of failed airdrops is much longer.
So ask yourself: does your project truly need an airdrop? Or are you just trying to inflate metrics to secure a higher valuation from VCs?
3. Developer Relations Isn't Technical Support—It's Distribution
If you're building infrastructure, developers aren't “partners”—they're your users. They’re your early adopters, your most honest feedback loop, and your best distribution channel.
Yet most projects still treat developer relations (DevRel) as backend support rather than a core part of marketing. That’s a massive mistake.
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Your documentation is your landing page,
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Your GitHub is your conversion funnel,
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Your hackathons are your product labs.
If DevRel and marketing teams aren’t talking, you’re building in a vacuum.
4. Creativity Is King
Ideally, a marketer’s job is to build a “marketing product” for the product.
Some marketers just recycle existing ideas, repackage them, and toss them into the market. This is no different from teams forking Uniswap or cloning Pump.fun to chase the success of the original. Most of them fail.
So why expect different results from marketers who merely copy others’ strategies?
Airdrops, points programs, zero-fee trading events—they’re all the same thing repackaged.
Yes, being original is hard and time-consuming. It requires months of research, customer development, testing, and iteration. And marketers capable of this kind of work aren’t cheap.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. At the very least, ask yourself: Why am I doing this? What outcome am I actually expecting?
We don’t need more campaigns—we need more conviction. Most projects over-optimize for scale and under-invest in trust.
Your total addressable market isn’t millions—it might be tens of thousands. The people who matter are already tired of hype and allergic to BS. You won’t win them over by:
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Another giveaway
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Another points program
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Another paid shilling campaign
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Another AMA
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Another staking raffle
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Another trading competition
You win them by solving real problems and honestly explaining how you did it.
Start small. Win the first 10 true believers, then 100, then 1,000. That’s the survival rule here.
Before launching your next campaign, ask yourself:
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Do we know who we're talking to?
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Are we showing up where they are?
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Are we saying things worth believing?
Web3 marketing isn’t about hype—it’s about alignment between product, values, and identity. The best projects don’t sell features; they build belief. When done right, they don’t need to beg for attention. Their communities market for them.
Finally
Most people never realize that marketing is one of the hardest creative jobs—precisely because when it’s done well, everything looks effortless.
So don’t cut corners. Don’t throw prompts into ChatGPT, sprinkle in some emojis, and call it a campaign. Dive deep into the product, talk to users, sketch frameworks on whiteboards until insights emerge, write, erase, rewrite.
Great marketing offers perspective. It forces you to step outside your own excitement and into someone else’s needs—then clearly and honestly show how you meet them. That’s the work. Do it well, and your impact will outlast any buzzword.
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@stacy_muur
