Even though a great product is essential for success, building a strong community with community-led marketing can help an idea spread and be noticed by those with the resources it needs to survive.

I’ve been working on several projects as a marketing lead in the past six years, creating different methods of building & growing communities together with teammates. This article will share some of my learnings from those experiences and what DAO marketing principles actually are.

DAO in a nutshell

A decentralized organization, also known as a DAO, was first created in 2016. It was initially called The DAO by Slock.it, a German developer. This project aimed to connect the world’s transactions to the blockchain. Unfortunately, the project was completely destroyed due to a security vulnerability.

Since then, the number of decentralized organizations has increased. As of January 2022, there were 4,227 DAOs operating across the globe. The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies related to The DAO was around $21 billion.

Several new organizations emerged attracting a lot of funding. These projects are currently accomplishing various impressive tasks, such as trying to buy the NBA’s franchise or the US Constitution.

DAO communities go beyond being a Discord server. A DAO is made up of individuals who share a common goal and are committed to achieving its success. This concept is similar to how people work together to achieve a common goal. The best part? It’s a pure community-led machine.

In 2011, when it came to launching its first smartphone, Xiaomi adopted elements of DAO. This strategy allowed them to successfully launch their first product. Without a huge marketing budget, they recruited individuals from the tech community to help develop the phone. These individuals became advocates for the company and helped build a strong community around the device.

How DAOs are running their marketing?

A community-owned business known as a DAO requires creating a unique and like-minded community. In crypto, community is typically established before a product is released, and it involves creating a group of like-minded individuals.

Before a community is built, its creators usually share a roadmap explaining what the community can expect. They then engage with their members and transfer the control over project’s development, content production and marketing activities in general.

For instance, DAOs can let their community vote on a marketing campaign — deciding on the budget to be acquired from a DAO fund — and then commit to completing it.

With the development of a DAO, the producers and hosts of content will no longer be able to control the content they create.

DAO model is very effective in self-marketing and community engagement. Through a community, users can continuously engage with one another, generating content and activities that’s relevant to their interests — be it Pepe memes or BAYC meet-ups.

How to run DAO marketing without … being a DAO?

From here, I’d like to suggest some marketing tactics that can be applied within an ‘ordinary’ crypto (or even non-crypto) project, as there’s a lot of things we can learn from DAOs.

Incentivizing behavior and content creation around your product/idea can boost marketing activities’ frequency and virality. You don’t have to run after people with your marketing budget trying to get them to notice or at least acknowledge your existence.

Just imagine that you now have a perfect tool for brand awareness promotion, and you don’t have to spend budgets on testing ads looking for a suitable option. It’s just here from the very beginning (except when you have 0 community members, obviously) — and you can spend on community engagement to grow the community to get bigger engagement…

Instead of having to make decisions based on the results of testing, where you used to spend most of the time, the changes are now made based on the feedback received from the community. The deeper your project is DAOing, the greater community’s feedback will be.

Note: though your community is one of the best marketing assets available, there’s no magic wand if your project idea is shit or your product team over-promises & under-delivers. Sad but true. 🤷‍♀️

Tbh, I’ve been trying to help a project a few years ago — with building an ambassador program and acquiring community. Though it was pretty successful on ICO in 2017 (who wasn't?), the initial community was weak, consisting mostly of bounty hunters. Hence, they didn’t have the initial fuel of good community members — there was no one they could invite to the Ambassador campaign. All attempts to invite people outside the community, who have never heard of the project, have also failed because the product itself was too far from being sexy.

Luckily, the ICO era has gone, and there are enough things you can try to build a DAO-inspired community, apart from running hundreds of airdrops on the Bitcointalk forum, haha.

Before we jump to the list of community engagement campaign ideas…

I’d like to give some advice. Create a bounty map (similar to the roadmap) for an upcoming period depending on your marketing planning timeframe. This will be handy for budgeting and KPIs setting, but also allows you to build engagement in series and tied to special events or even holidays.

Remember, community campaign preparation is tough. It requires a pretty sufficient period of time to get prepared, managed, and prized after all. And if all goes well, you’re going to be so happy about what’s going on, that you’ll complicate your life even more — by making more pictures, more videos, more merchandise, and so on.

Cool, now let’s see what I have there…

Coomunity — Product Loop

This type of engagement is based on building some educational stuff for the community with an incentive for those who spend time learning about your project/product/service/etc.

The level of complexity is up to you:

• Post product-related riddles in the community chats;
• Embed questions in your newsletter;
• Make a series of blog posts with question boxes and incentivize those who’ve answered them all.
• Use special LMS platforms to build your project academy and teach the community the nuances of your tech by paying them with stables or native tokens.

Last year we had a great experience running a riddle campaign at PARSIQ. It was a special series of blog articles with related questions our community was invited to answer. It was a really lovely campaign, a win-win for both the project (getting its community more educated about the product — thus more excited about it — thus a higher potential of telling about it to their friends, you got it 😉) and the community (getting the prizes & having fun, obviously 😁).

Community — Community Loop

Another attractive way you can grow the community while making it more cohesive. Use your partner network of projects to set up a competition or even a real battle royale!

There’s no better thing than a feeling of belonging, so every team will be fighting for the prize, getting more connected emotionally to your project. Even though the fight might not be bloody, rather than just a meme competition maybe? 😛

A few weeks ago, Casey, our brilliant head of Community at PARSIQ & IQ Labs, held the ‘Into the IQVerse’ community competition with 16 different projects involved.

1. He first drafted a proposal to the partners describing the campaign mechanic, required prize pool, and joint marketing budgets to promote the campaign.
2. After getting enough projects on board, the battle royale began.
3. It was a nice few weeks of different tasks for the communities competing for the grand prize (collected from all 16 projects) — from a Twitter poll battle to a creative art contest.
4. A win-win for 16 projects and their communities!

Even if your project is young and hasn’t gained a partner network yet, you can always reach out to other projects with such a co-branded marketing proposal. Or, just drop me a message (anastasia@parsiq.net) and tell about your project. PARSIQ and IQ Labs are always happy to get new friends 😉.

Community — Company Loop

This is what people usually refer to as Ambassador Programs or similar names. The idea is to build a certain group of brand fans and involve them in the company’s activities — be it brand promotion or lead generation — more tightly.

At PARSIQ, we call it SWARM Program:

Our swarms are four divisions of the most active community members divided by the role:

1. Content production
2. Community management
3. Tech support
4. Lead generation / Sales

SWARM represents a common goal: the continued growth of PARSIQ. Being a member means being involved in focused, targeted outreach through content creation, community level marketing and project outreach.

This actually reminds a DAO structure, though it’s managed by a single company representative. Each active Swarmie gets compensated monthly, and they are free to suggest a campaign or any other activity they’d like to spearhead. Anyways, our program is still early, and we have lovely plans to make it more DAOed.

Results? I can only tell that the SWARM Program unintentionally became an HR accelerator of ours: with a lot of brilliant talents hired full-time.

Community — DAO Loop

Now let’s turn on the hardcore mode.

It’s not a secret that some of the popular and successful DAOs started as pretty centralized companies. For instance, the business development function of MakerDAO initially was handled by a centralized team. However, as it increased its decentralization, the business development function became the responsibility of the growth core unit, a sub-community of Maker token holders often referred to as a SubDAO.

I was researching the ways DAOs build their route from centralization to decentralization, and got super amazed by the proposal that FWB created for their organization:

FWB was created by a core instigator who had a vision and began inviting close friends to a Discord. As friends brought more friends in, certain contributors began to step up and play lead roles to support growth. We’ve taken these learnings and built them into a clear participation framework. It prioritizes leads and active contributors, making it easier for community members to get involved.

These two schemes above illustrate the org structure of FWB before and after becoming a DAO. Now it’s made of dedicated teams where community members are offered participation, based on their skills. Each team gets a seasonal budget according to the community voting.

In this framework, the community members become the core engine of the entire organization and are able to vote, plan and decide on company’s plans and activities. Every single person becomes an employee motivated for the project success. And since the project offers them several option to be inclusive (membership team, editorial team, product team) in, community members are free to apply their best skills where they’d like to.

I believe this approach can be borrowed for non-DAOs as well. At PARSIQ, we are currently working on structuring a community DAO that will be involved in the development (via development grants), marketing, and decision-making of the company.

Actually, if your project is not going to be a DAO, it doesn’t mean your community can't be it, in a sense. Think in this way:

• Have a separate community treasury, a fund, for your tokenholders to manage. For example, they could use it to plan marketing campaigns or run a dev hackathon.
• Each community branch (or team) can still have an accountable manager from the company’s core employees.

Now your community will have incentives (decided by community itself), budgets, and motivation to help you grow. They could be free to vote on project development ideas and then be responsible for implementation.

Example: Chainlink’s grant page for blockchain developers. Imagine similar initiatives managed and completed by a smart community, which engage itself in the process.

Conclusion

DAOs are growing more popular in the crypto world because they give a lot of power to the people involved and because new opportunities emerge as these organizations grow and start working on more valuable applications than just money transfers.

This is why future marketing campaigns can be run by people who have the power to vote on the proposals, which then require community support to become successful.

It might seem strange to give people rewards for participating in promotional activities. But when you think about it, it makes sense. It’s much more profitable to pay them for being contributive rather than spend budgets on advertising for nothing.

We have better tools for managing decentralized relationships. This means we don’t need to waste money on unnecessary intermediaries anymore. We can join communities we like and help with the work that needs to be done if we believe in its potential.

👋 Hey there, I’m Ana — the visionary behind the marketing engine at PARSIQ, an established Web3 data provider. Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride through my articles, where I unveil battle-tested tactics, golden insights, and secret treasures mined from over 8 years of diving headfirst into the electrifying world of blockchain marketing.👋 Don’t hesitate to reach out and say hello at ana@nesterova.marketing — let’s spark some revolutionary ideas together!