With the saturation of gamified mining apps on Telegram, every app now feels the same, following similar approaches to building a community. From a player's perspective, it is boring. Imagine having several games to play daily just to maintain streaks and earn rewards; which one will you prioritize, and which one will you abandon?

Pioneers Usually Gain More Traffic

Observing marketing tactics from popular Telegram-based mining games like Hamster Kombat, it's clear that subsequent apps started including more interesting quests. This contrasts with how it started with Notcoin, where players primarily had to follow partner accounts on X and join groups on Telegram.

Hamster Kombat incorporated content marketing into their strategy with a strong educational component. Players watch videos on YouTube to find cryptic codes, which help them earn rewards by discovering in-game cards that are assumed to have actual use cases when the project launches its token. This ‘new’ strategy helped Hamster’s YouTube channel achieve record-breaking growth by gaining over 10 million subscribers in six days!

This explains why ‘upcoming’ projects attempt to follow this similar strategy at the detriment of players’ interest.

There will always be more downsides of doing the same thing everyone else is doing especially if you're not the first. Familiarity will ruin the creative intention.

This fizzles out interest in the project seeing that nothing makes it stand out from others. Why do I have to join at least 10 telegram channels and X accounts (which may not be useful to me) because I want to secure a reward? How valuable is even that reward?

Think Outside the Box

It's time for projects to think outside the box. One of the beauties of Web3 marketing is the opportunity for creative experiments. If it doesn't work out, at least you've tried and learned something about your target audience's behavior. Most importantly, you can earn free PR for your project even if it fails.

Here are some things you could do differently:

• Rethink rewards – consider creating in-app rewards, such as cards, that have real-life use cases or can serve as a form of status in other games. This will foster better collaboration with similar projects aside from the follow-for-follow quests.

  • If rewards are distinctly defined, you can reach a higher number of players.

  • With real-life use cases attached to rewards, you are able to cripple the mindset of players immediately selling off their tokens during launch.

• Create a different gaming environment other than ‘tapping' – let's face it, tapping is exhausting even with the invention of bots to assist with offline mining. An ‘exhausted player’ will not want to go through the route of spending time to tap the nth mining app especially if rewards seem uninteresting.

Dare to be different by creating an exciting gaming environment that doesn't scream 'stress’ but interactive storytelling of the project. While diligent players should be rewarded more than others, the experience shouldn't be burdensome.

• Explore limitless partnerships – currently, most Telegram gaming apps tend to partner only within their circle, strictly with other Telegram gaming apps, rotating the same players.

You could change this. Imagine collaborating with an on-chain game like Axie Infinity or Web2 games like Minecraft.

This could bring fresh players and new dynamics to your app. You could have players earn rewards that can be used in any of these games just as explained above in rethinking rewards.

• Include creator's economy - You can create a framework that allows players to improve the game. This will increase participation, as players will not just use what you've created but also contribute their own input.

Additionally, explore user-generated content to boost virality. By giving players the autonomy to create the best type of content with the game and rewarding them for it, you can significantly enhance engagement and reach.

Also, bear in mind that whatever technology is created must be well-suited for Telegram's application and capable of scaling to accommodate a massive number of users.

To Wrap Up

Telegram games are doing the same thing in terms of marketing, making it difficult for them to stand out or appeal to new and existing players.

If truly, we are serious about onboarding the next billion users into crypto through Telegram, it's necessary to adjust.

To adjust, we should think outside the box by embracing more gamified techniques and removing borders in terms of partnerships.

I help Web3 projects create and execute ideal GTM strategies and have assisted top-tier Web3 projects in crafting impeccable stories. Send an email to [email protected] to get started.