Olga Kazmina is a renowned expert with over ten years of experience in growth marketing and lately mastering web3 marketing and community building. As the founder of zero1team.xyz — a boutique agency dedicated to community development across Web3 and fintech — she has successfully helped numerous FinTech, IT start-ups, and consumer brands build a loyal customer base. In this interview, Olga shares her experience in navigating the evolving landscape of Web3 marketing. We discussed the impact of decentralization on engaging communities, talked about the importance of transparent governance, and explored some practical tips for growing vibrant communities in the decentralized era.
Q: As the interest in Web3 rises across sectors, which specific Web3 marketing trends have caught your attention? How do these trends shape the marketing strategies used by companies in this space?
During the last Ethereum Dev Conference in Dubai this March, I met many teams building Web3 martech solutions: community CRM, analytics and attribution platforms, and incentive distribution services. This software is becoming essential for marketing campaigns and community building, and I expect a lot of Web3 native martech to arrive soon.
I feel that the next big trend is in capturing the Web3 audience in the way we did in Web2 but — hopefully — respecting user data ownership and privacy. You see, the growth loops inherited from big consumer tech brands like Facebook, which are based on owning user data, emails, and social graphs, are not applicable in Web3. The lack of information about users to perform traditional targeting and retention strategies is a big and well-known problem.
We are monitoring the developments regarding the identity layer and communication tools, as they will probably link and map Web3 users most profoundly and allow us to build retention acquisition strategies around them.
Q: From your extensive marketing experience, what sets community building for Web3 companies apart from other sectors?
A Web3 community is a group of people — users, contributors, investors, developers, and other team members — who are economically aligned and have an upside from the growth of the product. So building a community for decentralized tech benefits its members directly. This is fundamentally different from Web2 communities, where members do not own any part of the company’s product.
As community members can own a stake in the network, they are very keen on the network's growth. The role of the marketing team is to ensure they foster relationships within the community, strengthening bonds and connections and creating more organic opportunities for the community members to become active contributors.
Airdrops and retrodrops are another blessing of Web3. It’s one of the most popular strategies that helps distribute value between a large number of users, helping increase the number of active wallets, incentivize early contributors, and boost engagement — and, therefore, protocol’s adoption. Still, this strategy should be used with care, as airdrop cases the token price to drop in medium term for most projects.
On the downside, many traditional growth technics do not work in Web3. For example, marketers can’t rely on paid channels to bring people in because crypto and DeFi are limited in advertising on many platforms; second, paid acquisition results in low retention of new active users.
Also, as I mentioned above, with anonymity and data ownership being the pillars of Web3, we cannot rely on in-depth analytics and attribution as we would do with Web2 (at least before the new tools arrive).
Q: The concept of decentralized governance is inherent to the Web3 ecosystem. How does it impact community building?
One way to look at it is to think of democracies: we all want to live in countries that respect human rights, have transparent voting processes, and build robust public goods and services. Same thing with decentralized communities. People want to have their votes counted; they want to make an impact.
At the same time, teams that live (and are governed) by the values of the community attract new members and expand naturally. Remember the stories when the community stood up to defend their values as a group? Ethereal Name service DAO voted to re-delegate tokens from Brantley Milligan, basically firing him from his management role after they discovered one of his early homophobic tweets.
That made the community members feel empowered — which is inherently much more impactful than nice tweet designs or paid articles. It draws the attention of the wider community, attracts new members, and boosts the loyalty of the existing ones.
Q: Which strategies do you use to foster long-term growth and sustainability for new Web3 companies? Are there any initiatives that you find effective in nurturing vibrant and active communities?
I advise sticking to organic community growth as much as possible. After we’ve gathered the core community, we can boost the acquisition through various instruments: even the paid ones. In a very basic form, our community growth loop looks like that:
The first step is to set up values, mission, and the future vision of the community, so people can get aligned around a mutual goal. Then, set up platforms for your community to go live and grow – Twitter, Discord, Reddit, and others depending on the origin country of your members and the Web3 vertical (gaming, DeFi, NFTs, etc.).
Make sure the onboarding process for new members is smooth and entertaining, gamify it as much as possible — and make sure they understand why they joined.
After you’re finished with the setup, move on to engagement and deepening bonds. The primary engagement tool is the content and narratives we create. Another is interactive mechanics that require some actions from the user: from simple polls and mini-games to contests and competitions, from contributing content to interactive formats that build the bridge between core team and community: AMA sessions, Twitter Spaces, and online events.
After a couple of months of deliberate narrative-building and engagement, the community core starts to shape. Then we can start applying more growth strategies, including referral mechanics, formulating incentives, and rewarding members.
Q: Can you share examples of successful strategies or initiatives employed by Web3 companies to build and engage their communities effectively?
Depending on the company and community vertical, these strategies would be very different.
If we are dealing with an NFT community, consider captivating storytelling as your primary tool. A good example here is Chiru Labs: by July 2022, in less than a year after its launch, the total sales of its Azuki NFT collection surpassed $781 million. To find the best practice in NFT storytelling, I would advise checking out the very beginning of their Twitter feed (Azuki has launched in August 2021) and start scrolling up the feed to see how their captivating storyline unfolded.
Every post was a key leading to the next one, the narrative was extremely interactive, and the reader felt as if he was playing the game. This is a marvelous example of Web3 storytelling that was created solely through visuals and narrative, leading to remarkable community engagement and NFT trade volume growth.
For protocols like Arbitrum, the key ingredients of its success are partnerships and carefully performed retrodrops. The one Arbitrum did is particularly interesting because of the well-designed eligibility and distribution schemes involving their vast network of partners and connected apps.
Another awesome tactic is to play with scarcity and invite-only onboarding techniques. A good example is how the Lens protocol did it: you had to interact with one of their partners, be an active member of a wider Web3 community and use projects linked to Lens.
Q: Beyond the Web3 community itself, how important is it for Web3 companies to engage and collaborate with other stakeholders, such as developers, influencers, or industry leaders?
An important paradigm shift in Web3 versus Web2 marketing is that users, developers, investors, influencers, and even the team are a part of the ecosystem. Different audiences blend together, so your strategies should breed curiosity and satisfy the demand of every segment.
As we work with our clients, we reach out to other projects, influencers, and ecosystem players non-stop to make collaborations and cross-promotions. It is not necessarily paid or motivated contests — we propose themes for live discussions, and Twitter spaces or create campaigns to support activity within both communities. The foundation to make these collaborations happen is common values that our communities share.
Q: As Web3's influence grows, do you see traditional marketing strategies evolving or adapting to the unique dynamics of Web3 community building?
Remember 90s offices? Everyone was sitting at their desk. Modern offices, though, are more like a comfortable public space. People move around freely — and the same is happening in marketing.
There is no mythical ‘client’ anymore — now we have stakeholders that might engage with what you’re building in so many ways. Our work is to create public online spaces where people can come to chat, contribute, give reasonable critique, and be co-creators. It’s not about consumers anymore — it’s about co-creators with multiple roles.
Ideally, in a steady community, growth happens on its own: someone starts a fan group, volunteers to host a meet-up in their local cities, or creates a Telegram sticker pack. If you think about that, this is so amazing — your community is on your team! You just need to feed the bonfire once you spot a spark that comes naturally.
Q: And lastly, do you have any practical tips or advice that could benefit emerging companies in the Web3 space seeking success in community building? What are the key principles or strategies they should prioritize?
I risk sounding unoriginal if I say one should be transparent and friendly — but it is the foundation of any Web3 community marketing. Using personal aspect (be it founders or team members) boost engagement and raises attention. Then, there’s consistency: say, by rolling out weekly updates and letting community members look forward to a new drop, news, or a release.
And lastly, entertain them. Don’t let your platform become a boring corporate space: people engage with others on social media because it is fun. I like to see the company’s Twitter feed (Web3’s front page) as a never-ending series about its path: its hero journey.
I strongly advise avoiding cliche marketing. Web3 team must learn how to tell stories and be very humble about the way they communicate. Avoid marketing slogans and selling lines, and stock images. Build your authentic voice and image, explain and inspire rather than “sell,” — and don’t be afraid to put your face forward. These are the building blocks of your future community.
