Why Most Web3 Marketing Fails — And How to Fix It | Zachary Nelson - Genzio

All right. How's everyone doing? It's almost lunchtime, right? Okay. Keep the wives up.

Next one is about why most web 3 marketing fails and how to fix it. and we've got Zachary who's the co-founder founder of Gen Zo. They're actually also helping out with the Denver. So, off to you. Thank you so much and thank you uh everyone for coming.

As we all know, uh marketing in web 3 is very difficult. I'm sure everyone here is a marketer in some way. If you're on X, I mean, you're marketing yourself. So, I think the knowledge of learning how to navigate social media successfully and marketing in web 3 is extremely important. Um, at Jenzio, we actually are one of the main marketing partners at ET Denver.

So, we've been really proud to be working with them for the past four years. Uh, through that time, we've been working with them on social media, helping their community on Discord, things that really excite people. It may seem crazy, but four years ago, there wasn't the same kind of emphasis on having a presence on X on Twitter as there is now. So, these things really only came into focus in the last 5 years as being really important for web 3 and now we're all on Twitter all the time. We we really can't live without it.

So, learning how to navigate that is really important. My background is I got into crypto, Bitcoin, whatever you want to call it, in 2011. uh worked at Ripple and then OKX. So what is one of the biggest reasons that projects fail with marketing? I think this is a really important one and it's waiting to start building community.

So I think founders, a lot of founders that I've talked with are very technical, which is important. You need a technical founder or someone who understands technology to build the product that people are going to love. But what happens in a lot of times is when you're building a product, you treat it as if it's a work of art and you don't want to show the world until it's perfect in your mind. And for a lot of developers, this can cause things like delaying when you want to put out your Twitter or talking about when the TGE might be or putting out ideas that might be experimental too early. And so I think the thing that's different about web 3 is that community members appreciate when you're transparent and honest about your roadmap where you are and your targets.

So coming out and establishing that Twitter presence early, creating a Discord and building in public is very important. I cannot tell you the amount of times companies have come to us with a TGE in two months with like a hundred followers on Twitter and they want to raise 20 $30 million from from retail and I'm like you know I don't think your 100 followers are going to are going to cash you out in that way or get you the kind of liquidity that you need. So, uh it's really important to start building that build your traction early. Keep the uh community involved. Web 3 is all about openness.

People will will reward the fact that you share with them what's going on even if things take longer than you originally expected. That's okay. What you don't want to do is not communicate because then people panic. It creates a lot of FUD. uh your discord will go crazy with people saying you know what's going on you guys are scammers and so on so communication matters being proactive really matters second part all right we are in the age of AI in 2026 and I think a lot of companies have taken the approach that AI can replace everything and that comes to uh social media management or creating things like videos or content and I will agree that I think AI can be a really important tool when it comes up to uh idea generation or you know trying to figure out what you want to do.

But companies that overly rely on AI for content creation comes off as really cringe. If you see a page where a lot of the posts are AI, um you're less likely to engage. A lot of the social media platforms also have their own AI that they're biased to. And why does that matter? Because let's say you're on X, right?

But you made a piece of content from chat GPT. X is biased towards Grock. They want content from Grock on the X platform just like they don't want you linking to Facebook on X. So, if you go on, I don't know, on X and start posting out copy from ChatGpt, the algorithm is automatically going to start depprioritizing your content and hiding it. It's going to be harder to get followers, harder to get traction, and just by making a a small mistake like that, you've essentially put yourself at a huge disadvantage than if you were to just write the tweets yourself or use the native AI inside of the platform.

So, it's really really important when you figure out how to use AI. Um, I think AI can also be very beneficial. A lot of teams can't afford full video production teams. So, making videos with AI can be very, very important. I think when companies fail is when they try and hide the fact that they're using AI.

Like, have you guys ever seen a video and you're like, that's clearly AI. and the company itself isn't, you know, it's not like they're lying about it, but you can tell that they kind of want you to believe that there's real people. So, I think if you're using AI, you should go all out, make it really wild and crazy and make it very clear this like couldn't be real. And I think people are going to gravitate towards that a lot more. If you're talking about a serious product or you want people to spend their money, right, you you're a token project.

You want people to invest. Nobody's going to invest in what an AI is telling them to buy. So, it's really important that you have that human authenticity on social media. You have an actual person behind the screen uh for people to engage with. The third part, okay, why why we're all here.

A lot of companies uh especially in bare markets, which like frankly, you know, whatever you want to say, I think we are in a bare market right now. A lot of companies when it comes to bare markets, they say, "Well, the first thing that we're going to cut is event spend. We don't need to be going to events. We're gonna stay home and build product." And you know, in a lot of cases, if you if it's do or die, then you got to do what you got to do.

But showing up at events and being active in the community year after year really helps build your brand and trust. We've been doing ETH Denver for four years and I think just being reliable and honestly present means a lot in web 3. In web 2, when you're interacting with Facebook or a lot of these companies, you don't actually have a chance to interact with any of the executives or the people building the product. If you have an idea of how you want Twitter to be better, it's almost like a joke. like getting in touch with someone from Twitter.

Sometimes you have to pay someone or it's not it's not an easy process. And so I think one of the things that makes web 3 unique is that you can directly go and talk to your user base, talk to your investors, talk to your community. What what do they want? What are they here for? And I think why the events is important is because if someone's coming to an event and they're coming to your event specifically, your tokens event or whatever that may be, those are your hardcore community members.

Those are the people who flew on a plane. They're there in person. They're basically representing all the other people online who who aren't there in person. So, when someone comes up to your booth or talks to you and and says, "Heck, hey, I I really think that you guys should make this change, take that really seriously because they are there speaking for all the other people who are not there in person and they cared so much, right, that they came to your event and met with you to tell you this. So, um, for projects that are not going to events in bare markets, if you really can't afford it, I understand.

But even just going there as an individual, if you don't have a booth and networking is absolutely critical uh during this time. Um, we have we have a couple more minutes, so I just wanted to open it up if anyone had any questions about marketing, ETH Denver, anything you want uh to ask me. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, you go first.

Sure.

Okay.

Okay. I'll I'll I'll re I'll I'll reiterate the question

100%. And so the question is we're seeing a lot of uh kind of trends down in uh Discord usage and how do we kind of balance the use of Discord versus Twitter? Also, how do you avoid getting hacked on Discord? Because that's a huge hassle. Also, a lot of projects get hacked on X.

So, why why have a Discord in the first place, right? A lot of projects are just like it seems like the default. Every other crypto project has a Discord, so I'm going to go ahead and make one. The real reason that you want a Discord is for the more day-to-day community interactions of people who are trying to use your product and so that honestly it doesn't spill out onto uh the public sphere. What do I mean by that?

Say you're a wallet provider, right? And for some reason you're having a system update where people are not able to withdraw for a couple of hours. If you have a Discord, a community member can go in there, they instantly see that there's a problem, they chill out, life is okay. If you don't have a Discord, that problem is going to erupt onto your social media and under all of your posts, people are going to be like, "Scammers can't can't withdraw and and all of that. So, I think having the ability to manage your community and and almost like a customer service aspect is really really important."

And the cool thing about Discord and those layers uh is that as the community grows, you can reward your most active community members and actually onboard them into the team of the company. If you know, not to the level they can control it, but as a contributor or an lower level administrator. And this is actually how a lot of people got their jobs even at like the Ethereum Foundation. They would come on as a Discord mod helping out doing what they could for free, you know, work their way up. It's obviously not as easy anymore.

I think we can get some people who can really relate to that journey. So, it's really important to manage uh your Discord and don't lose sight of its importance. Um I don't think it's dead yet. And the security part of it, find a really good security team. Like we have a really strong security team.

We've never been hacked. We've recovered Twitter's from being hack. We've recovered ETH Denver's Twitter from being hacked. We've recovered other big ones. Um, not very long, only maybe an hour or two.

But the point is you got to have the right people in there. Um, what was the qu next question?

Like what's what social media platforms are most important basically. I mean, you you live and die by X. I mean, I think if you don't have a presence on X in crypto, no one will take you seriously. Um, the first thing anybody does when they meet you and they hear about your project is they probably check out your Twitter before your even website. You know, before anything else, they're they're they're checking out your Twitter.

So, Twitter's got to be number one. And then, uh, if we're looking at just community management platforms, I would say Discord is number two, depending on the type of project. If it's a lot more tokenheavy, you're going to need Telegram. Uh it really depends on on the project and the needs. I think an underutilized hugely underutilized platform in crypto for a lot of companies is YouTube.

Uh there's something like a billion and a half or two billion people that use YouTube, right? And so it's honestly a lot of the educational point for people when they come on and they want to learn something. How do I mine? How do I trade? YouTube is is generally that primaryformational source.

more so than Twitter because Twitter can be really hard to search uh for video content even still. So, I think YouTube is is highly underutilized. And what we've been finding honestly is that traditional advertising actually works a lot better than crypto companies think. like running Google ads for example or YouTube ads you can hit a lot more people for a lot less cost because one the space isn't as uh polluted so there's a lot less ad dollars being spent which means you're getting high higher ROI and two a lot of companies don't even know that you can advertise on Google or YouTube anymore you used to not be able to do that because uh basically regulation and they've sort of loosened that up in the last couple of years to make it a lot easier and So using channels like that I think can give you a huge advantage. Um especially if other people aren't using them.

You can even start with like I don't know $10 $20 a week on YouTube ads and you will see an impact if you uh have some basic knowledge immediately in your numbers. that. Yeah. So, I mean, she just basically said she was advertising MetaMask Snap and it had a 99% bounce rate on uh YouTube. So, the campaign was not strong.

And I think a lot of the the key here is figuring out what's been done before uh and kind of almost like using that information to maximize what you've been doing. I can't speak to what happened on every campaign. All I know is that we've worked on a lot of these campaigns before. I think it also honestly helps to have the relationship with the platform itself. If you have a representative at YouTube or Google, you're going to have a huge example.

you you can go to them and tell them about what's going on. They want you to keep spending money on their platform. So, usually they're going to do something to help you to see better results um as like a last resort. If not, I mean, you could work with an agency like Jenzio. We could help you uh optimize those results.

Oh, I can tell you Poly Market. I mean, you can want Poly Market's a crypto project, but they no one even thinks of them as a crypto project anymore. That's how you know they've done a good branding job, right? Like, nobody really I mean, we do because we're in crypto, but they've sort of branded themselves as just a prediction market even though it started in crypto. They did the popup in New York City.

I'm sure like every person in this room saw that on Twitter. That was genius, right? There was so much press around Mom Donnie launching that and then they did it first. So they basically took something that was viral in the news and captivated people from it. I think they're absolutely crushing right now.

I think the most fascinating thing happening in marketing is the war between them and KHI right now. If you're watching that, that is really interesting. Um well, thank you all so much for listening to my presentation. Really appreciate you guys and uh look forward to seeing you soon.