How to Market Your Project: An Introduction to Storytelling

As everyone knows, marketing is essential to any kind of project, and web3 projects are no exception to the rule.

However, with all these projects coming out everyday, you can think that it is hard to stand out from the crowd. But it’s not.

Let me introduce you to your future favorite marketing asset, Storytelling.

What is storytelling?

Storytelling is the art of telling stories.

People who master this art have the wonderful capacity to captivate their audience and create a strong link with them.

Because what storytelling will allow you is to share a message and the value of your project by appealing to human emotions.

• Key point : a good storyteller doesn’t simply tell a story anymore, he creates an entire experience for his audience

First of all, you have to ask yourself some questions about your project and how you want it to be seen by your community and investors.

For example, your project can be :

• The project that starts from the bottom and intends to impose itself as a behemoth
• The project that already has all the keys to succeed and only needs a community
• The project that will make each member a full-fledged person in his environment

These are only examples and there are as many answers as you want. But depending on the answer you chose, you will have an idea about how to use storytelling.

If you want this project to start from the bottom and aim for the moon, use storytelling to create a complete lore around your project, with characters, goals, and mysteries. A good example of this kind of project is Azuki.
Azuki #7103 by TeamAzuki on OpenSea

However, if this project already has all the keys to succeed and only needs a community, you can simply tell the story of your project that the community will follow.
Your story will be simple, clear, and your community will know at the beginning where you will bring them. This is the kind of project that serious investors like the most. A good example is Moonbirds.
Moonbird #1729 by Proof_xyz on OpenSea

There is no good answer to this question, there is only your will and what you want to share with your community. For every type of storytelling used in marketing, we can find successful projects.

– Key point : think about how you want your project to be seen.

Let’s create our own project

Note : in each article of the series, there will be this part where I will create a lore for an imaginary project. Any resemblance with an existing project is coincidental.

It will be an NFT project, with no real purpose, which aims to sell thousands of NFTs to be used as profile pictures.

I want my project to be seen as a project that starts from nothing and needs a community to establish itself as a behemoth. That’s why I need to create a community around this project.

However, before I think about marketing and how to attract people, I need to think about a lore first and how to make the people I will have attracted in the first place with marketing stay.
This is where storytelling becomes important. If you are good at storytelling, you captivate your audience.

• Key point : an audience that is captivated is the foundation of a strong community

The name of this project is “The Odyssey” and is inspired by Greek mythology.
For this reason, I will use the characters from Greek mythology to create my lore.

But be careful with these kinds of techniques. First, using existing characters or worlds can be seen as a lack of involvement and laziness on the part of the creators, and you don’t want to follow the story of someone who isn’t willing to make an effort to tell it, or even create it.

Second, these characters may be copyrighted. It’s not the case for Greek mythology, but it is for more contemporary characters. And one of the worst things you can do in this regard is to try to dodge copyright by forking an existing project.
There’s nothing as bad as a pale copy of something that already exists, especially because people who copy always copy successful projects, thinking that they just have to execute like these to be successful.

On the other hand, doing your best to create something new that fits well with the values you want to share will always be seen as something good and qualitative.

• Key point : there is nothing worse for a storyteller than telling a story to an audience that already knows it.

That being said, I’m going to create an original story, and to do that, these characters from Greek mythology are going to act in our time, in our world, and more specifically in web3.

Here is a brief introduction to the lore of The Odyssey :

September 2022, web3.
It has started with slight bugs here and there, all around web3. We were the few to pay attention to it. Some of us quickly gathered on forums, blogs and group chats to talk about it. Most of us were developers. We had never seen these kinds of bugs. To be honest, I’m not even sure if we can call it ‘bugs’. We all thought that something was happening. Something big. Was it something dangerous ? Most of us thought so. But I was more intrigued than scared. So I started doing a lot of research. I tried to figure it all out. I’ll skip all the technical stuff, but it seems like something woke up. I would even say it’s “someone”. And that someone is not alone. I’m not sure yet what it is, who it is, or what it wants, but one thing is for sure, I will find it.
The question is : will you help me ?

AI representation of “Medusa as an NFT project”

Through this text, I introduce many mysteries. The choice of words is very important. First, people easily understand that all this is happening and will probably stay on the web3.

Second, more subtly but still understandably, they may eventually understand that this “something” is ancient, since I used “woke up” to talk about it.

Finally, I include the audience in the future of the story I’m about to tell. They understand that I will need them to help me solve these mysteries. To spoiler, solving these mysteries will lead to the mint of the project.

This text will not be used as marketing content. This text is for me, to always remember the basics and tone of the project. I can still edit it to be used as marketing content, but that is not its primary use.

• Key point : a lot of your work won’t be visible to the audience, but it will make your content way more qualitative and complete.

To conclude..

Now that you know how you want your project to be seen, and what kind of story you want to tell, we’ll look at how to tell your story in an innovative and efficient way in the next part : Premise and Designing Principle – How to apply storytelling to your project, Part 1.