What is Web3 Technical Content Marketing? How The Top Web3 Companies Do It!

Introduction

There has been a paradigm shift in the history of technology. Web3, a new evolution of the web, is challenging the old pattern of one entity ruling everywhere and everyone.

The industry has witnessed exponential growth over the last couple of years. We have seen many Web3 companies like Aave, Consensys, and Chainlink making the numbers.

This has also inspired many other people to provide solutions to other problems of humanity with Web3.

After weeks—or even months—of building from the engineering standpoint, new or early-stage Web3 companies often have problems with visibility, sales, and conversion.

This posits a technical marketing problem, and some Web3 companies underperform due to this reason.

This is the truth: Web3 has a lot of innovative solutions, but the target audience can find it overwhelming or unnecessary when they do not understand the technological underpinnings.

From another angle, many brilliant technical Web3 companies do not often have enough PR for their target audience to even know they exist.

Nonetheless, Web3 currently has over 50 unicorns. That means these top companies have hacked how to break Web3 solutions to their audience in a way that they find interesting.

If you plan to build an incredible company in Web3, this is a must-read!

What is Web3 technical content marketing?

Web3 technical content marketing refers to the overall strategy that Web3 companies can use to communicate with their users, make them understand the importance of their products, and make them recurring customers or users.

As against popular belief, Web3 technical content marketing is beyond technical tutorials and guides. It also involves leveraging podcasts, videos, newsletters, documentation, social media, courses, and reports.

In practice, Web3 technical content marketing is similar to pure content marketing as we know it. But there is a big difference: Web3 technical content marketing targets one or more of these people: Those who are;

being drawn to Web3
customers or users of Web3 products or services
developers in Web3, and so on

In essence, the peculiarities of the industry and her audience is what shape Web3 technical content marketing.

Web3 companies engage—or should engage—in technical content marketing for three major reasons: To;

gain visibility
educate their audience, and
convert them into becoming users or paying customers

By the way, “companies” in this piece is a blanket term for protocols, projects, and startups.

That said, another major subtle difference exists between the general form of content marketing and Web3 technical content marketing. Peep into the next subheading.

Technical Marketing in Web3 is Subtle, Not Blatant

The general idea of marketing is, “Hey folks, we are the best thing after sliced bread. Come swipe your card for our products.”

I have been in Web3 for quite some years now as a developer and a marketer, and I can say that the above method doesn’t work.

It doesn’t.

The more you shill your project, the more Web3 devs and users doubt everything about it. Marketing here is subtle, not blatant.

The ones who know this ensure the subtlety idea informs their overall technical content marketing. How do you do this in practice?

Educate and inform your prospective users or customers. The quality of your education will influence them to check out your platform and be a paid user.

With this ethos in mind, let’s look further into how some top Web3 companies run their technical content marketing.

Examples of Web3 Companies That Do Marketing Right

While some Web3 companies have serious issues using technical content marketing to generate visibility and conversion, others do it seamlessly.

You can learn from these top companies—some of which are even unicorns—to up your Web3 technical content marketing game.

Alchemy - Technical Blog Content Creation

Alchemy is an infrastructure provider in Web3. They mainly provide RPC and APIs for the developers. They have facilitated around $100 billion in on-chain transaction volume.

The Alchemy marketing team has always been heavy on publishing tutorials and guides for their audience.

Going through their blog, one can notice a consistent pattern of publishing developer-focused content.

I worked at Alchemy last year and have insights into how they structure their Web3 technical blog content marketing.

They have two categories: conceptual content and tutorials.

Conceptual content is focused on breaking down terminologies or popular concepts. For instance, they can explain metamorphic contracts to Solidity developers.

Conversely, tutorials involve a step-by-step guide for developers to build smart contracts or dApps. The Alchemy content team will use Alchemy endpoints within the tutorials while building.

Subtly, the readers following the tutorial will use and get accustomed to using Alchemy endpoints. No wonder they have about 4 million developers using their infrastructure.

Thirdweb - YouTube Content Creation

Thirdweb is one of the most remarkable dev-tool and no-code companies in Web3. Their recent acquisition of Paper makes them more robust.

The company currently boasts of over 100k developers using its products.

First of all, Thirdweb ships market-fit products that developers want. Their infrastructure spans across UI components, SDK, Auth, and so on.

Apart from technical blog content, another form of marketing channel Thirdweb mans well is YouTube content creation.

Most of the content spans around building projects using Thirdweb tools.

In addition, they maintain a pattern of 1 video per week, and none of their videos have less than 1k views.

This sends a message: 1 quality video per week is enough for your Web3 company. Consistency matters more than intensity.

Many companies are fighting for their users with only their blog page while neglecting social media as a less important channel.

This is not true, and I can say that as a marketer.

Developers and prospective users spend an average of 4 hours on Twitter or similar social media platforms daily. What a perfect platform to meet them!

Magic Eden is a wallet in the Solana ecosystem, and their social media management team is doing wonders. They use their Twitter to communicate with their users and share updates.

Recall that this is Web3, and their audience are degens, so they share memes occasionally and a little shitpost here and there — on a lighter note.

In addition to the above, you can use your social media as a platform to repurpose your blog content for a wider reach.

Moralis - Documentation

On the surface, documentation doesn't sound like a content project that attracts potential customers and makes them users.

But this is the logic:

Assume a developer is looking for a tool to query on-chain data and comes across detailed documentation of one company A that guides him to do so.

Subsequently, he will keep using company A's tool whenever he wants to query and might even pay for the premium.

So even though documentation is not a marketing material prima facie, it get more users for the company.

In the instant case, we refer to quality and clear documentation.

Moving on to Moralis, they have robust documentation about all of their products. They also update their doc from time to time. Developers have straightforward documentation to help them achieve whatever they want to build.

At Blockchain Alpha, we believe your products are as useable as your documentation, and the stats prove us right.

Bankless - Podcast Marketing

Bankless is one of the foremost media companies in Web3. They created and hosted the popular Bankless Podcast, featuring some top people in the industry, such as Vitalik, Tim Beiko, Hayden Adams, and so on.

Their episodes can have as high as 38k listeners. Many people probably didn’t know Bankless until they listened to a couple of their podcasts.

The quality of conversations is the distinguishing feature that makes the Bankless Podcast the favorite of the degens. I personally listened to their Proto-danksharding episode one time, and I understood the whole technicality around the upgrade.

In addition, they often invite popular people with an outstanding audience to their shows. This increases their listening rate in no small measure.

You can listen to some of their episodes to better understand how they do it.

A16z is an age-long venture capital firm. Originally, the firm funds tech startups on a general note. But the disruption of Web3 was too imminent to sideline, so the firm created an arm called a16z Crypto.

A16z Crypto focuses on funding crypto projects and sees them through their growth. They have a newsletter called Web3 Weekly from a16z.

The main information in each issue is a quick recap of the recent happenings in the space. They do a good job of breaking down technical incidents too.

Perhaps you are building a Web3 company, learn technical newsletter marketing from a16z.

Messari - Technical Reports

Publishing high-quality, well-researched technical reports is one of the easiest ways to hit the spotlight in the developers community. Messari is a pure crypto intelligence and research firm.

As a person, I got to know Messari through one of their yearly reports. Here is a backdrop:

Every year, Messari publishes a report about the entire crypto industry mentioning everything from infrastructure to security and adoption.

Their reports are always lengthy and deep. There is a strong likelihood that some fraction of people who read their report signed up for their pro-research plan.

Alchemy also does something similar for the Web3 developer's ecosystem. You can adopt a quarterly or yearly frequency for your technical reports.

Pick Specific Channels and Maximize

So far, we have examined how some top Web3 companies run their technical content marketing.

I need to march a break of caution here:

You shouldn't be on all channels trying to be like these companies. Understand the context of your products and the peculiarities of your audience.

Then take it one step at a time. We encourage starting with technical blog content, then podcasts, and so on. But don't do everything at once.

Let Blockchain Alpha Do The Work For You

There needs to be more clarity between knowing what to do and getting it done. Yes, podcast marketing and documentation work, but how do you move from ideation to performance?

Don't bother.

That's why Blockchain Alpha is there for you. We are a technical content marketing agency for Web3 companies. We all are developers who have knacks for marketing.

We can take your company to the next level; increasing visibility and revenue. Reach out to us today!