At the beginning of every project or marketing campaign, marketers and their teammates should define success according to clear metrics. These should keep teams focused on achieving outcomes, rather than overthinking inputs. For example, “Publish three blog posts this quarter” isn't a very good marketing goal, because it could be achieved without driving meaningful results for the project if the blog posts don't get distribution and no one reads them. The point of a blog post is to drive traffic to a website or to convert users to download a product or join a community. The blog post isn't published for its own sake. With a goal such as “Publish three blog posts this quarter,” teams start to confuse inputs and outputs. Eventually they'll wonder why marketing isn't working.

A better goal is “Bring in 10,000 website visitors from blog posts this quarter.” This is what we call a SMART goal: specific (not vague, clearly identifies what we want to accomplish and the steps involved); measurable (includes quantitative/qualitative metrics for determining success); ambitious (not too easy); realistic (not too hard); time‐bound (a definite period of time in which to assess/accomplish the goal). There are many different but related versions of what the letters in SMART stand for with respect to goals; these are the ones we use. This type of goal fits into the objectives and key results (OKRs) framework we use at Serotonin to articulate goals and the measurable outcomes that demonstrate achieving them.¹

Here are a few examples of good marketing OKRs that are SMART goals:

Objective: Make our DeFi protocol the industry leader by the end of Q4.

• Key Result 1: Achieve a higher TVL (total value locked) than competitors x and y.
• Key Result 2: Achieve a higher total number of transactions than competitors x and y.
• Key Result 3: Grow Twitter following by 100% while maintaining the current rate of engagement.
• Key Result 4: Grow the Discord community to 10,000 members while maintaining quality, defined as community members interested in participation, not merely rewards.

Objective: Introduce our collection to the NFT‐buying community in March.

• Key Metric 1: Sell 10,000 NFTs at a 0.5 ETH mint price by the end of the month.
• Key Metric 2: Convert at least 2,000 NFT holders into joining the Discord community.
• Key Metric 3: Appear in March on two NFT industry podcasts or media outlets.
• Key Metric 4: Host a Twitter Spaces discussion of the project attended by 200 listeners.

Objective: Use our fundraising announcement to drive use of our dapp when it launches.

• Key Metric 1: Set up a marketing funnel so new potential users who discover the brand from the fundraising announcement can easily and with minimal friction convert into using the dapp. (Dependency on product team: the dapp must be ready on time for the announcement.)
• Key Metric 2: Secure a top‐tier exclusive media partner to cover the fundraise announcement.
• Key Metric 3: Secure at least five follow‐on stories and podcasts from the crypto media.
• Key Metric 4: Drive at least 10,000 users into the dapp in the month after the announcement.

Objective: Grow our community to take over certain responsibilities from our team by end of Q2.

• Key Metric 1: Train and pay ten community members to work as community moderators.
• Key Metric 2: Incentivize community members to build at least three dapps using our protocol.
• Key Metric 3: Train five ambassadors who can help participants at our IRL hackathon get questions answered about how to use our code, so that we only need to send two team members.
• Key Metric 4: Launch a bug bounty program that incentivizes the community to search for bugs.

The most common marketing goals for Web3 projects are growing their audiences or communities and converting them into using or buying the product. An audience or community can be retargeted every time a project has a new product or feature, and in time become the project's most passionate evangelists, contributors, and referrers of new opportunities. Good marketing OKRs should cover success at every step of the marketing funnel. For example, there should be OKRs about using top‐of‐funnel activities such as media and content to drive discovery, and also OKRs about mid‐funnel activities, such as hosting a hackathon for community members to start building using the project's technology. In general, before finalizing OKRs, marketers and their teammates should ask themselves, “If we hit every one of these targets this quarter, will we be successful?” OKRs should be a road map for success. We can build them by mapping backwards from the successful outcomes we want and breaking down the steps to get there.

Web3 marketing metrics can be both quantitative and qualitative, as long as quality can be clearly defined. For example, many Web3 projects get obsessed with growing their Twitter followings and Discord servers at all cost. These projects will often buy followers or community members, or launch giveaway programs that airdrop free tokens or NFTs to anyone who joins. This is often a trap for marketers, because it brings people into communities who don't actually care about the project, and who will often leave once they collect their short‐term extrinsic reward, leaving the project no better off for the investment. Vanity metrics such as a high Twitter following and large Discord community will impress some venture investors, but smart ones know to compare the size of following with the amount and quality of engagement. If a channel has 100,000 members or followers, but each post only gets one or two engagements, a smart investor or potential community member can easily tell that the followers or members aren't real. If a project's channels are full of spam, that also signals a poor match between the project's actual offering and the early community it has attracted. Projects should be careful about whom they bring into their early communities, because unless they want to start over and launch new channels from scratch with zero members on them, projects are stuck with their communities for life.

Marketers shouldn't be like the proverbial paperclip maximizer AI, so focused on surface‐level growth metrics that they lose sight of the actual point of those metrics: to grow real community around a project.² The quality of the content a project publishes and the people it brings together will have an enormous impact on its long‐term success. Web3 marketers shouldn't sacrifice quality for quantity. They should do the real work to identify audiences who are interested in their products (or iterate on their products until they fit audience demand) and develop the correct messaging to attract those audiences into communities through testing and iteration. Thoughtfully designed rewards programs can work, but buying followers with low project fit permanently ruins channels.

Goals should be ambitious but not impossible. Usually at the end of a quarter, Serotonin is happy if we hit about 85% completion of our marketing goals. Obviously, 100% completion is better, but if too many of our goals are 100% complete, we start to suspect we made the goals too easy. Many of us are fixated on getting an A+ or 100%, but it's much more important to aim high. That being said, setting goals too high is demotivating to marketing teams. It's rare that a new project with 10 Twitter followers will have 100,000 Twitter followers in a few months. Don't agree to unrealistic marketing goals. Instead, do the work to research what's possible by tracking previous baseline metrics and growth rates and comparing to similarly sized projects.

Once a marketing team is in place that knows its product and audience, and has defined its marketing goals, it's time to design a Web3 marketing funnel.