Top Marketing Strategies to Make Your DAO the Next Big Thing

Today’s technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to revolutionize the way people collaborate and do business. One of them is the creation of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for more transparent and fairer cooperation and investment.

DAOs are built on open-source blockchains and controlled by specific rules. They are developed by the elected members, automatically perform certain actions under specific conditions, and do not require any intermediaries for that minimizing the need for centralized coordination. With that, DAO marketing has its own rules and principles, and here are the golden strategies to follow.

Mission Is Everything

One of the main Web3 marketing credos says community always goes before product. But what makes like-minded people flock together to form a community? The answer is simple — the mission.

Before engaging in community building by starting your Discord server and all that meme hustle, think of the big idea you want to broadcast into the world. What is the purpose of your DAO? For whom are you going to build it? Investing some extra hours to properly formulate your idea and put it into words might save you helluva time and money when recruiting people for your community.

Whether you are trying to create a utopia-style decentralized Web3 neo-state that embraces the principles of direct democracy and equal distribution of benefits or just unite anime-lovers, you need to agree before acting. The clearer you define the vision of your DAO, the easier it will be to drive its growth.

Reach out to People

Although not every community is a DAO, every DAO is, above all, a community. A well-coordinated team of devoted people provides you with more chances to succeed. Before starting an outreach campaign, make sure you know what type of audience you want to attract, whether you want your DAO to be an exclusive club for the chosen, a massive open community anyone can join, or whatever comes in between.

When you determine the ultimate purpose and shape of your DAO, it is time to hit the drums and broadcast this message to the world. The best way to spark interest in your target audience would be to reach out to people on the platforms they prefer (not you) — whether it means shooting funny videos on TikTok or sharing your wisdom on Twitter. Once again, whatever you do, do it for the sake of the community, not your ego.

Promote Debates and Cooperation

A social media post went viral can grab your audience’s attention. But to hold it long enough to shape an actual community requires extra actions. While you need to remain active on multiple platforms to nurture your community with fresh prospects, it would be wise to set up a digital “base of operations” on Discord or Telegram. Community members may be scattered across the world, so they need a digital space to exchange opinions and information.

The strength of a DAO is measured by the strength of interpersonal communication within the community. Of course, nothing prevents people from sharing their opinion with strangers but the social aspect is too important to simply leave it hanging. No DAO should be a calm spot.

Practice What You Preach

Would you trust a startup founder who barely puts effort or funds into their idea? The same goes for DAOs. If your audience does not see the actions behind your words, it either won’t follow you or will get disappointed in your DAO pretty soon. This may result in an audience loss or a massive sell-off of your community tokens or NFTs.

To avoid this, be the first advocate of your DAO not only on social media. Become a shining example to new community members: hold governance tokens to cast your vote, mint NFTs, contribute to the community’s projects, and demonstrate your commitment with your wallet!

Engage DAO Members in the Voting Process

Building a successful DAO is in many ways similar to building a flourishing democratic state. And as no state can be called democratic without giving its citizens equal access to be represented in the government, no DAO can exist without community members actively engaged in voting.

Active debates within a DAO will hardly result in anything meaningful if the majority of the community members does not cast their votes on decisions that shape its future. Sadly, the fact that people have voting rights does not mean they are going to use them. It is your duty as a DAO creator to oversee the health of the community by monitoring the share of the community members involved in the voting process. The smaller your DAO is, the greater the importance of this metric becomes.

Provide Ownership to Community Members

Ownership and possession are strong drivers of human motivation. When a person or a group of people start referring to a DAO as “our,” they become more engaged and eventually, start looking for opportunities to improve it and increase its exposure. Why? Because when they own tokens or NFTs, they become interested in the DAO getting more traction, thus, increasing those assets’ secondary market value and growing holders’ wealth.

The success of your DAO will attract more people who want to monetize from their creative efforts, get increased exposure, acquire more votes on treasury funds allocation, or lay their hand on whatever your community has to offer. Ultimately, make sure members get rewarded for their contribution. It will pay off.

Focus on Contributors, Not Speculators

On the way toward creating the ultimate decentralized autonomous organization, you will likely come through a series of challenges and victories and meet very different people. Some of them will join your DAO because they share your vision, others will do so because they can capitalize on that, be it short- or long-term.

It doesn’t matter whether your run your DAO for profits or to support any kind of social impact initiatives — a bunch of inspired like-minded people gathered together will sooner or later start generating value. As well as there will be people who don’t care much about the community, but they do care much about the price swings.

The market cap, however, is not everything. Especially when you aim at something that is not solely focused on making short-term profits. Building a successful community means focusing on generating value for its members. Make sure core projects within the community get exposure, as well as all contributors, are credited for what they are doing.

Host Promo Giveaways and Airdrops

That being said, the best things in life are free. Successful DAO marketers would specify that those things should be free for new community members while offering some reselling value. At least in perspective. Various types of airdrops, which evolved from giveaways, have become an effective tool in helping aspiring DAOs and other Web3 projects get more traction.

Giveaways and airdrops can not only draw public attention to your project but also allow people, who previously were unaware of your DAO (or, probably, any DAO at all), to sample your project, become part of its distribution model, and even turn into active members of your community. There are several types of airdrops out there so make sure you’ve read our article on Web3 marketing explaining how to make the right choice.

Use Tools That Make Your DAO Management Easier

Now, to the most important part. In order to foster prosperity, each great idea, society, and state must evolve. Walking this path means going through various stages which require different kinds of people along the way — chargers, achievers, even skeptics and materialists. It may be tricky, but today’s market offers a myriad of tools designed to make it easier for you.

While it’s all clear when it comes to social media platforms, there are instruments that address your other needs like management or fundraising. For example, Guild.xyz, Mirror, and Gnosis Safe will be useful for digital asset management and managing roles in communities based on tokens.

Juice Box will help with fundraising as it allows for configuring how the tokens should be minted when the project receives money and defining the conditions funds can be distributed to preprogrammed addresses. Coordinape also serves well for easy and fair distribution of resources to contributors. Don’t forget about Gitcoin, which allows you to build and fund the open web together.

If you need to create legal agreements and facilitate the legality questions, there is the Open Law project, and for those who are looking for DAO delegates discovery options, there is Sybil, to say the least.