How can we approach, scope & develop a marketing TAM, SAM & SOM in Web3?

For a project to succeed, onboard projects and grow an engaged and activity community to their brand and technology, it’s vital to understand the addressable markets at play.

Namely:

Total Addressable Market (TAM):

The entire market that can be addressed at all stages of the consumer journey, in this instance, the entire Web3 market.

Let’s take an example of ‘NFT’, addressing your TAM is of course addresses prior to your marketing development, however, when it comes to addressing your marketing opportunities, the scope of those opportunities and their associated competitiveness.

For this example, let’s assume you are an NFT marketplace focused on the US, UK & AUS looking to launch and utilise the EVM network. This presents two core factors to consider, the number of active users in the space and/or active ETH addresses and the amount of search for the relevant terms.

TAM: ‘NFT’ / Keyword Difficulty ‘high’.

US volume 1,830,000 Per Month, UK volume 1,500,000 Per Month, AUS volume 856,000 = 4,186,000 x Global Markets x Bing, Yahoo, Brave etc.

Google Market Share 84.6% / 15.4% Remaining engines search: 644,644

Total approx. 4,830,644 per month.

Top of Page Bid (Google): £0.66 low range £2.63 high range, average: £.164

As a baseline, we can understand there is huge search for exact match NFT, from here we can start to assign keywords to our target user personas and align those to our leads, deals, user journey and whether or not they can be addressed directly within our SOM.

An approximate outline could look like the following:

Serviceable keywords, i.e. keywords we can utilise to enter a user into a funnel. Whether that be TOTF, MOTF or BOTF, this is content we can produce that is inherently aligned to a core product or solution your project provides. In this case, we can utilise educational content to capture users in the information gathering and educational stages to have your project top of mind when they want to fully enter the NFT project and create or connect their wallet.

Obtainable keywords, i.e. transactional keywords with commercial intent and commercial viability on your project end – e.g. does the project mint or sell NFT avatars, collectables, or facilitate the trading of these assets (marketplace).

These terms should be approached work conversion in mind, macro and micro conversions such as minting an NFT, buying an NFT, trading an NFT (macro). Staying informed on air drops, events and webinars for your project, joining our social community (micro).

This then outlines a clear addressable market, by persona, by intent and can also be mapped to your competitive set to understand the share of voice currently owned by each level of TAM, SAM and SOM.

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Total Addressable Users:

(as of writing) 224M ETH Unique Address.

Total available users, as a concept will give us a potential viable end users scope that we can see as of writing continues to grow. As TAUs grow, we can look to track the projects DAU (daily active users), engagement metrics, on-chain metrics and understand the conversion rate from a user creating a wallet with your project (where-applicable), or connecting their wallet – through to making a purchase, minting, or trading.

Pre-owned Market (POM: ICO/IDO):

Already attained earlyvangelist in ICO/IDO and pre-launch rounds, as these are already attained and the token distribution defined, the ‘POM’ is established. This can be a clear indicator to demand and combined with the tokenomics of the project, gives a clear view of actual TAM.

Total Serviceable Market (SAM):

The serviceable market, as outlined above consists of the desired segment of users within the TAM. In this instance, users looking to learn about the technology and users looking to engage, trade, buy, and collect within the space.

This can broadly be viewed through the lens of awareness, consideration and conversion, with loyalty and advocacy coming in the SOM.

Applying this to marketing, we can look to achieve the following with our marketing tactics and messaging.

Awareness & Consideration:

• Educational Content
• AMA & Webinars
• Partnerships
• PR Releases
• Paid Marketing
• Influencer Campaigns
• Events
• Content Marketing
• Community Channels
• Videos & Explainer Content
• Blog Posts
• Marketing Website

Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM):

Mapping your SOM can be achieved in the early concept stages of your project, however, there will be other hurdles for your adoption such as the competitive market, available Geographies and your market’s penetration into those locales and of course, regulation.

Largely, some elements can be reverse-engineered to improve user flows and accessibly to your product, and reducing friction to provide a seamless user journey. In a marketing sense, this can speak to CRO, A/B testing, personalisation CRM flows and advocacy, rewards tiers and gamification of tokens and assets to empower users to advocate your project and or assets.

• Competition
• Available Geo
• Regulatory Issues
• Financial limitations
• Market maturation
• Network/Wallet limitations
• Viable liquidity
• UX considerations
• Gas fees
• Web3 familiarity

Crossing the chasm.

All in all, understanding the addressable markets from a digital marketing lens allow us to scope markets and assign weight to areas of focus, channel mix and overall attribution and lead/demand generation models.

Adoption Curve:

While not all areas can be addressed directly with marketing, wins within the space of driving mass adoption to web3 can and should be celebrated and amplified to show the growth and success of your project.

In short, consider your markets, user pain points all the available digital marketing mix at your disposal.