Digital marketing will become Web3’s next major use case, says report

More than 70 startups have raised over $600 million in the embryonic Web3 digital marketing sector.

The Web3 ecosystem could become the next golden opportunity for digital marketers, with almost 200 companies already thinking deeply about how to utilize the Web3 tech stack.

On July 25, Web3 marketing analytics firm Safary released a comprehensive report titled “The Web3 Growth Landscape 2023.”

It noted that the 2010s were the “golden age of digital marketing” with Web2 growth seeing 150 marketing companies in 2011 increase to 11,000 in 2023.

However, over the last three years, the digital marketing landscape has moved to a more privacy-centric environment. Therefore, marketers may also need to change tack and embrace the Web3 tech stack, it said.

Their findings reveal that there are currently almost 200 companies already “thinking deeply” about the new digital media landscape, and 71 of them have collectively raised $600 million in funding.

Messaging, Questing and Loyalty platforms are the most well-funded categories, it reported, with each attracting more than $100 million in funding.

Quest platforms like Yield Guide Games create engagement marketplaces, directing users to complete incentive offers. This facilitates a more direct brand-user relationship than ads.

Additionally, loyalty companies help brands increase customer value and retention through rewards programs powered by NFTs and tokens.

There are also analytics tools for marketers like Nansen and Dune that aggregate on-chain, platform and social data to uncover growth insights on Web3 communities.

Discovery platforms such as DappRadar “have the potential to be some of the biggest ad real estate proprietaries in Web3,” it added, provided they invest in long-term strategies like SEO. It also cited CoinMarketCap as an example of one of “the highest trafficked websites on the internet.”

There are also 18 Web3 growth agencies that advise and deploy growth strategies on behalf of blockchain projects.

Related: Web3 has permanently changed how marketing works

Marketing industry analytics outlet Chiefmartec has logged 11,038 marketing solutions and services this year overall, an 11% increase from the 9,932 it charted in 2022.

As Web3 evolves and grows, marketers will need to keep up and it appears that hundreds of startups have already got a head start.

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