Any marketer worth their salt will know that you have to understand who you're talking to before you can, well, sell them something. Generally these audiences are broken down into age, gender, and location brackets. With the increasing wealth of data that many sites now collect, though, there are an ever increasing number of brackets.
But, for Web3, these metrics have less sway. This is partly due to the difficulty of actually getting this information in such a privacy-focused industry. Rather, what starts to be important is to understand where on the learning curve a user is. Are they a weathered dev from the earliest days of blockchain? An experienced investor? Or a newer entrant, still beholden to the wild swings…and often burned…by this wild market?
While this is one way to break it down, there are of course others…belief-based or money-motivated? Creator or collector? Dev or investor? As audiences continue to expand and more ethical data collection takes off, this will change. But for now, focussing on the learning curve gives you a lot of information about who and how to target.
So, how do we categorize audiences?
Generally, it can be broken down into four categories.
Crypto Natives
- Early adopters, like pre-2016 at least.
- Sophisticated understanding of the space, generally including some technical expertise.
- Consider themselves to be value-based investors.
- Have held on through multiple market cycles, and generally have more long-term confidence.
- Predominantly men aged 22-50 living in the US, Asia, and Europe.
Motivations
- Be in the know and take pride in being ahead of the curve.
- Feel that they are engaged in a larger tech experiment.
Crypto Enthusiasts
- Bull market-driven adopters, who often fall off during bear markets.
- Different classes have emerged from the different cycles, such as TikTok investors, degens, and NFT investors.
- Know enough, but may still fall for sophisticated scams or hype-based tokens.
- Predominantly men between 18-45.
Motivations
- Feel smart and ahead of the curve.
- Land a windfall.
TradFi & Techies
- People coming from TradFi, so they'll have experience working in hedge funds, banks, tech companies, and incubators, who are now entering the space.
- Making or driving the push for institutional facing products.
- Advising and helping products become more compliant.
- Investing
Motivations
- Feel accomplished by adding value and contributing skills as blockchain becomes more mainstream.
- Diversify investments and portfolios.
Devs
- Existing Web3 DeFi dApp developers, who may already be building on blockchains like Ethereum, Near, Solana, etc.
- Developers interested in entering the space.
- Typically men 18-45 who live in North America, Europe, and emerging markets.
Motivations
- Feel good building future solutions they believe in.
- They care about community, resources, and quality of tools available.
Of course, Web3 is rapidly changing. Even now, the foundations are largely based in crypto, but as more uses for the technology, and more industries onboard, it's changing. Crypto is still a major part, but it is expanding out…
New Audience Trends
Now there are several current trends as far as new audiences go, including:
- Celebrities & Influencers
- Artists
- Mainstream Brands
- Gamers
- Gen-Z
- More Women.
There continues to be a massive collective push to onboard new members into this space. This, in turn, is driving forward the draw for new members. Specifically, there are many, many groups now focused on improving the gender-diversity of Web3 — efforts which appear to be paying off.
As the space continues to grow, more traditional targeting should work better in this industry — moving away from the current monolith that currently exists. But, in the meantime, check the experience!
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