Speak and be heard: two key elements of effective web3 communication

This is the third in our series about how to promote your project or ecosystem and attract the right developers. In the first post we looked at four steps to get web3 devs using your tech, and in the second we focused on how a few marketing basics can have a massive effect on engaging devs and driving them your way. Now it’s time to turn our attention to messaging.

Even if you’ve built some great products and tools to benefit web3 developers, you still need to make sure you’re very clearly communicating your value proposition. So let’s explore how you can make sure you’re using the right messaging to say something that will resonate with your target audience.

The essence of good messaging

If you’re struggling with your messaging, it’s likely that you haven’t nailed your value proposition or positioning, two complementary ways to differentiate yourself from the competition:

• A value proposition is a promise of value to your target developers. It’s the reason why they should use your product, tool, or service. It’s a statement that clearly communicates why they should choose you over your competitors or alternatives.
• Positioning on the other hand is the process of creating an image of your product or service in your target audience’s mind. It is how they perceive your brand in comparison with your competitors.

These two concepts are very closely related, and both are important for effective messaging. Your value proposition helps target devs understand what’s in it for them, why they should choose your product or service. Simultaneously, your positioning helps target devs assess you against the competition, and helps them remember your brand.

Having a clear and concise value proposition and positioning strategy enables you to create messaging that makes you stand out from the crowd and attract more of your target devs, by clearly communicating who you are, why they should care, and how you’re different.

The ultimate test

It’s human nature to focus more on what benefits us! Therefore, whether it’s on your website, social media, or in your content, your messaging should be precise and devoid of fluff. It should be specific to your target audience, about how your products or tools will help them.

However, when I first started working in web3 I was surprised to find that this kind of thinking is scarce. For a young, disruptive, vibrant space, there are far too many projects using what I call “wallpaper words”. Everywhere I look I see claims like We’re building the next generation of whatever… but in web3, everyone is building the next generation of something!

So how do you know if your messaging is precise and specific enough? Try picturing your marketing blurb on the website of your competitor, or anyone with a similar project to yours. Would this messaging work for their product the way you think it works for yours?

If the answer is “Yes”, then your messaging is too vague. It isn’t personalised to your project, and it isn’t personalised to the devs you want to target. If what you say about yourself makes you sound like anyone else, why would an audience come running to you?

Placing your audience at the centre

Previously we’ve discussed the different key audiences to target in web3 — four distinct types of dev needed in the space, plus enterprises hungry to adopt this technology as a solution. We’ve also talked about the developer adoption journey and why your marketing needs to be tailored to each stage to increase conversion. Ensuring your messaging speaks to the specific needs, pains, and potential gains of your target developers is absolutely essential.

There may be nothing more important than understanding who your audience is. Even if you didn’t have any product at all, you could always identify people in need and work to give them a solution. By contrast, if you don’t know who to target and how to speak to them, you could be sitting on the greatest toolkit in all of web3 and never see it get traction.

Many web3 projects make the mistake of talking about what they do, rather than how what they do will benefit their audience. But to create audience-centric messaging, you need to understand your audience really well. You should use language that resonates with your targeted audience, covering motivators they find relevant and addressing potential barriers to adopting your technology.

Achieving this doesn’t have to be a struggle. If you want to understand someone, the best way is usually to just ask what matters to them! A simple survey can work really well: focus on asking about which factors motivate their adoption and which ones can become barriers. An excellent strategy is to ask open-ended questions, because when your audience is free to answer in their own words you really get inside their heads — plus you can use what they say in your copy later, so you get to learn and leverage that data on a practical level.

Let me tell you a story…

Humans are storytelling animals. We are wired to respond to stories; when we hear a good one, our neural activity increases fivefold. Neurons which fire together, wire together, helping us to remember more of the information we hear when told as a story.

This screams opportunity for any project that takes this approach when all around do not!

Storytelling is one of the most powerful yet most underutilised tools of good messaging. Very few developer-enabled projects in web3 use this tactic to get their message across. You can use stories in various ways, such as to illustrate potential use cases or examples of how your tech can be used and the benefits.

It’s very easy to just state the possible use cases of your tech and list a bunch of relevant benefits. Alternatively, you could create a character who embodies the same characteristics, pains, and gains as your target devs, and craft a story about the problem she was trying to solve, how she came across your tech, how she used it, and the results she achieved. The key is to create ways for your audience to “see” themselves in your messaging, to feel that they can relate to your project even if they are not yet part of it.

If you have devs using your products, ask if they’d like to be featured in your content — most will say yes! People are always flattered to be invited to talk about themselves, and you get to present real-world experiences as stories in your messaging. On the other hand, if you’re still in the early stages of your project and trying to attract devs, or are launching a new product that’s yet to gain a user base, simply create a character to represent the goals and needs you’re aiming to satisfy. Just remember to be clear it is a fictional character!

Writers of fiction are often advised to “show not tell”, and marketers can spin this advice as well. Simply telling your audience why your product is exciting won’t necessarily inspire excitement in them. Showing someone’s excitement about your product (even an imaginary someone!) paves the way for the audience to feel it for themselves. Now, when you start detailing why the product is exciting, you’re suddenly reinforcing an existing urge to adopt.

Speak to the heart, not just to the head

Web3 as a whole tends to position itself in relation to the technological. It’s a fact that devs are eagerly getting involved already, and in many cases they’re fired up by being part of a movement — but web3 messaging generally doesn’t try to appeal to them on an emotional level, even though in almost every single web3 project “community” is central to their profile.

Contrast this with many marketing efforts to come out of web2 organisations — in the nearly forty years since Apple’s famous 1984-inspired ad, traditional tech companies have had no hesitation to attempt to personalise products and the organisations behind them, to make them seem relatable to their present and potential users in one way or another.

Good marketing is underpinned by an understanding of human psychology. Despite the fact that we like to believe we’re rational beings and make rational decisions… we’re not. We’re emotional beings, and up to 95% of our decision-making is actually subconscious and driven by emotional reactions. This is why understanding your audience and what drives them is so important. It enables you to use language that elicits positive emotions such as excitement and belonging.

Take the title of this post: everyone wants the freedom to “speak and be heard”, to feel like others are paying attention when they want to communicate; this choice of phrase is aimed at provoking a moment of recognition and engagement for the reader. Then we build on that positive reaction with the offer of sharing a valuable benefit from reading on. If you’ve come this far through the article, it seems like our messaging is working the way we want it to.

Clarity trumps cleverness

We’ve proposed some powerful messaging strategies here — thinking smart and evoking emotions, being creative and audience-centric — and that’s all good. But there’s a fundamental rule that you should always keep in mind:

Never sacrifice clarity for cleverness or creativity.

I’ve seen this mistake time and time again. When teams try too hard to play with words and visuals to make their message stand out, they often just end up confusing their audience. However, today this may be more of a danger than ever before.

Unlike previous technological revolutions, where people around the world had very different access to the big new thing, web3 exists in the context of global connectivity and availability. Blockchain technology is being eagerly adopted by people from wildly different cultures, and although the use of English remains the typical professional default you should always take into account that your tech adopters may be second-language English-speakers with varying degrees of skill level, or whose linguistic idiosyncrasies are very different from your own.

Clarity in your messaging strengthens all its other aspects — and strong messaging is the core of an effective adoption strategy.

Nihal is the head of marketing at B9Lab and has over 17 years of experience in marketing and tech.

If you want to know more about maximising the effectiveness of your communication, download our white paper, The Definitive Guide to Web3 Developer Adoption, and learn how to design a developer adoption strategy that fits your project whether you’re at 50 or 5000 devs.

If you’re interested in discussing how you can improve your communication and messaging, you can also reach out to us here.

At B9Lab, we’ve been designing and building developer adoption strategies for leading web3 organisations since 2015. Through our onboarding and learning journeys, we’ve minted thousands of developers. Our team covers the whole spectrum of developer adoption strategy and management. We’re developers, business strategists, marketers, and blockchain educators.