NFTs have been dominating the headlines for a long time, they have only recently become a huge deal. In 2021-2022, the NFT market experienced explosive growth, and we expect it to maintain a track record of impressive sales in 2023. Nevertheless, the heightened competition in the industry simply highlights how crucial marketing is.
When promoting an NFT, you can use many of the conventional marketing principles and techniques. NFTs have their roots in the digital sphere and the best way to advertise them is through online communities. The online connections that you build can make or break the success of your NFT collection. As many businesses that experiment freely with digital assets have discovered, NFTs can also be used as marketing tools. To put this into perspective, celebrities have started releasing NFTs to promote their personal projects and businesses.
There are many distinct types of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in marketing, but they all share a unique trait. What makes NFTs so valuable is their distinctiveness.
NFTs aren’t valuable only because they’re unique, though. In reality, there are so many of them. The amount of marketing an NFT developer does can also impact the value of their NFT collection. After all, even a fantastic work of art won’t be precious if it doesn’t receive enough publicity and attention to inspire people to purchase it.
Comparing NFTs to pieces of art is a fantastic way to think about NFTs. For starters, a work of art might not have much value if no one is aware of it. Without the kind of publicity that generates a buzz and creates scarcity, the value of this work of art will not increase.
NFTs are undoubtedly more complicated and continuously evolving. Be that as it may, we cannot understate the significance of marketing in the NFT realm. NFT assets need strategic marketing. With the right marketing strategy, NFTs can build profits that they can use to sell their name, business, or organization.
What is NFT Marketing?
NFT marketing aims to spread awareness of NFT initiatives and draw in a sizable user base. It is an effective way to enter the NFT industry and establish a robust company model. Examples of effective NFT marketing strategies include social media marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, and content marketing.
NFTs have the potential to increase in value quickly. NFTs are more loved than ever. Businesses need a thorough NFT marketing strategy to market their art and initiate conversations about their projects if they want to attract attractive bids. The NFT market is inundated and cluttered due to its rising popularity, leading to more competition between vendors and resellers.
NFT developers must look for new ways to stand out from the competition and draw consumers in, especially if they want to sell their assets for a premium price. Additionally, they need to get the word out and make it easy for consumers to find their work. This is where a marketing plan is useful.
Creating demand, locating and interacting with a target audience, and guiding that audience toward a company’s ultimate objective are all key components of marketing. To ensure they are maximizing their resources and making the most of their NFT marketing efforts, companies need to develop a strategy or roadmap beforehand.
The primary characteristic of NFT marketing is that the product a business is marketing should be distinct from that of its rivals. The developers must follow sound principles and make sure their product stands out from the competition while using NFT-based protocols. Brand distinctiveness can be attained by optimizing the website, embedding an immersive experience in the User Interface, and making it visually appealing.
A compelling website description is also crucial for drawing visitors in and inspiring them with the story behind your NFT collection. It is not worthwhile to drown website visitors under tons of irrelevant details. Remember, less is more. Use as few words as possible to describe the features.
How To Create An NFT Marketing Strategy
1) Identify your target audience
One of the biggest errors that marketers make is trying to sell their goods to everyone, everywhere. This can be a significant waste of time. Moreover, it can impede businesses from forging intimate bonds with those who are most likely to purchase their products. If a target audience doesn’t know who they are, how can a business connect with them and convince them to buy their NFTs? Companies should be smart and focused in their approach. A crucial step of this approach is identifying the target audience. This is especially crucial for businesses that have few resources.
Identifying buyer personas is another strategy for identifying the target market.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional, data-driven depictions of a company’s ideal customers. These personas help to focus attention on high-quality leads. Buyer personas also help direct product development to address the target market’s needs. Finally, the identification of buyer personas ensures that all activities inside the organization are coordinated (from marketing to sales to service). As a result, companies will be able to draw high-value leads, clients, and visitors. Once a company has identified buyer personas, all these people are more likely to stick around in the long run.
More particularly, a solid grasp of their buyer persona(s) is crucial for guiding content creation, product development, and sales follow-up. Basically, buyer personas will determine any process that is connected to client acquisition and retention.
In the simplest terms, developing personas helps businesses produce content with a message that appeals to their target audience. Additionally, it enables them to target or customize their marketing to particular consumer segments. For example, companies can divide their database by buyer persona. Next, they can customize their messaging to what they know about each persona rather than sending the same lead-nurturing emails to everyone in their database.
Companies can also map out and produce highly targeted content using buyer personas and the buyer’s journey.
2) Determine the best channels to connect with the audience
Once companies have identified who their target audiences are, they must figure out how to communicate with these people. This can be easier if they already have a following on particular social media platforms. Here are some suggestions for businesses that are just getting started or would like to attract more enthusiastic followers:
Reddit, Discord, and Telegram
A large number of cryptocurrency enthusiasts are active on Reddit, Discord, and Telegram. NFT developers should be active on these channels if networking with other NFT creators, customers, and fans is one of their top priorities.
Clubhouse
NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and DeFi are all popular topics on Clubhouse. Clubs like NFT and NFT.tips are great places to engage with the NFT community, add to the discussion, and get professional assistance.
Facebook has the most active users per month of any social media site. Although Facebook is renowned for catering to an older demographic, 86% of people aged between 18 and 29 years old are active on this platform. In addition, Facebook groups are great for fostering a sense of community and promoting NFTs.
The main users of Instagram are young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 years old, and the platform has 500 million active daily users. The demographics of Instagram are largely balanced between men and women. Launching a company profile on Instagram is a smart idea because 83% of users claim to find new goods and services there.
Twitter is the best social media site for quickly sharing updates or announcements and interacting with followers by replying to their Tweets. Retweets, shares, and mentions are fantastic tools for increasing visibility. Companies must strategically arrange their postings, however, as social media users spend the shortest amount of time on this platform (about 3 minutes per session).
LinkedIn may be a helpful tool for building a brand and making connections with essential investors. The bulk of LinkedIn users is males aged 25 to 34 years old, from the middle and upper class. There are numerous NFT and cryptocurrency groups on LinkedIn.
Steemit
The cryptocurrency STEEM is native to the blogging and social media platform Steemit, where it is used to reward people for posting and creating content. You can think of Steemit as a Medium site dedicated to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
Rarity Tools
Rarity Tools is used to rank and find new NFT projects. The website is a useful source for pricing a company’s NFT because it offers a plethora of information on NFT collections, including rarities. Along with information on drop dates, mint prices, and social media channels for new projects, they also provide a section for upcoming NFT drops. This well-known website is where collectors and companies alike may find the best NFTs.
3) Create content for all stages of the buyer’s journey
The process that a person goes through before making a purchase is known as the buyer’s journey. Following are the key steps as perceived from the perspective of an NFT marketer:
- Trigger & Awareness – A potential customer gains knowledge about NFTs in general and is aware of the opportunities for creating, acquiring, and selling NFTs.
- Consideration – A potential customer has sufficient knowledge of NFTs and is now evaluating various creators and payment options.
- Conversion happens when a potential customer decides to buy the desired NFT.
- Delight & Advocate – A prospect has already made a purchase or placed a bid on a company’s NFT. The objective is to make them feel valued so they can use the company’s services again and recommend them to their friends.
Each person’s buying process is a little bit unique. A user might opt to buy a product after discovering it on an NFT marketplace platform, for instance. On the other hand, someone else could see one of their Tweets, visit their website, read a blog post about NFTs, and then choose to submit a bid for their task. Most consumers need to interact with a brand numerous times before making a purchase. Companies will need to produce and share several forms of content at each stage of the buyer’s journey to convince someone to purchase their NFT. Their objectives are to increase public knowledge of NFT, draw in contacts, engage them, and delight them once they become clients.
How the buyer’s journey should guide content creation
Awareness: Businesses aim to educate their customers. At this point, it’s fair to assume that most people have minimal knowledge of NFTs or their particular use cases. Therefore, they ought to consider producing instructional films, blogs, and social media posts. Possible topics include who they are, what an NFT is, and how to produce, sell, and purchase one. The content that NFT developers create at this point should also address how to use NFT marketplaces, and how to start using cryptocurrencies.
Consideration: Companies strive to position themselves as authorities. Since buyers at this point are probably familiar with NFTs, their content can be more intricate and detailed. Some good content ideas include a detailed look at several NFT selling platforms or a behind-the-scenes video of how they developed their most recent NFT. NFT developers can also write a blog post offering advice to others just starting in the NFT community, and create social media posts advertising their particular NFTs.
Conversion: Businesses should strive to demonstrate why their work is better than that of their competitors. Here, they reaffirm the benefits of purchasing NFTs in general and their NFTs in particular. Again, promotional content is ideal for this stage, as are live Q&A sessions and giveaways.
Delight: Companies need to continue interacting with customers at this point. With the right strategies, content creators can convert potential customers into supporters who will share and advertise their work on their behalf. Personalized material, like a thank you email, a special discount, or a social media shoutout, performs incredibly well at this point.
4) Collaborate with influencers
Collaborating with respected NFT influencers can help businesses to increase the exposure of their projects. Although influencers can be found on practically all social media platforms, the most widely used platforms for cryptocurrencies are YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and blogs. Businesses should be aware that they may have to pay influencers to promote their NFTs.
Influencer marketing is a fusion of conventional and modern marketing techniques. It mixes the concept of celebrity endorsement with a current marketing approach focused on content. The main difference in influencer marketing is that businesses and influencers work together to create positive results.
Increased sales, social proof, and a direct relationship with audiences are some benefits of influencer marketing. Of course, increasing sales is the ultimate benefit of influencer marketing, but examining influencer marketing data can help businesses determine the efficacy of this marketing model. According to research, for every dollar invested in influencer marketing, businesses make $18.
For many brands, this figure is significantly higher. Depending on how much businesses spend on influencer marketing and how well each campaign performs, the actual value will vary. Nevertheless, the ROI is indisputably significant.
A corporation needs social proof regardless of the kind of business it conducts. As humans, we tend to follow the crowd because we want to fit in.
Human beings are compelled to take an interest in something when we notice that others are interested in it. That is what social proof is all about. Social proof is particularly effective in the context of influencer marketing. With influencer marketing, the effectiveness of social proof can be increased. Just as they would trust a friend’s opinion over a stranger’s, followers will put more faith in influencers’ thoughts than they will in the promises of a brand.
It hasn’t always been easy for businesses to reach their target audience with their message to sell their products on social media. This problem is efficiently addressed by influencer marketing, which puts a company’s message in front of its customers on a platform they utilize regularly. Since the people an organization is seeking to reach are the same ones who follow influencers in that organization’s field, influencer marketing is considerably superior to traditional social media marketing. People will be more receptive to their brand than they would otherwise because influencer marketing feels so natural and does not feel like advertising.
5) Use cross-promotion tactics
Project developers frequently work together and provide special promotions, like giveaways, to followers of both projects. This enables two parties to interact with their respective communities and create more social media buzz for an upcoming NFT release or to promote an existing NFT collection. Companies should encourage people to engage by liking, commenting, and sharing these posts. Given the dedication that collectors usually have to a single NFT, working together on a new project can significantly improve participation.
6) Incentivise referrals
Giving early adopters or project advocates exclusive rewards is a great way for businesses to increase brand recognition. Recently, incentives for referring people to social networks like Discord have been included in initiatives. Pre-sale access, which enables investors to buy and mint an NFT before the general sale, is one of these incentives. As a result, purchasers can secure a position in the market and avoid price decreases due to competition.
7) Use email marketing
Prospects can be expertly led through the buying process with the use of email marketing. Emails can be used to offer intriguing material, welcome new users, tell a company’s audience about NFTs, and create a buzz about their upcoming drop. One of the many free email services available to businesses for the creation of email lists and automated workflows is Mixmax.
There are good reasons why email marketing has been around for so long. In terms of being the most direct and efficient means for businesses to interact with prospects, nurture them, and turn them into customers, it regularly surpasses all other marketing channels. Email marketing encourages consumer loyalty while promoting a business’s goods and services. Additionally, it helps companies to update their email list subscribers about specials, new items, and other services. However, informing their audience about the benefits of their brand or keeping them interested while doing so can also be a softer sell. Additionally, it might be anything in between.
Newsletters and order confirmations are just two examples of how emails are crucial to the development and operation of a business. Email marketing is still very much in use today, despite the popularity of social media as a tool for businesses to promote their brands and goods. So let’s examine some benefits of employing an email marketing plan.
Benefits of effective email marketing
Firstly, email marketing can produce more conversions. Sending an email marketing campaign to subscribers before the start of a sale or promotion can help a business increase sales. Other email marketing techniques that have been demonstrated to boost conversion rates include sending a discount or special offer via birthday/anniversary, welcome, or re-engagement emails. Businesses can also send abandoned cart emails when a customer leaves their shopping cart on a website run by the business.
Email marketing can also raise consumer awareness of a brand. Email is fantastic because it makes it possible for companies to speak to customers directly. In fact, email marketing offers brands the best of one-on-one communication.
Nowadays, people don’t just let anyone access their mailbox. A person’s inbox is a carefully managed space where users go to find news from their favorite newspapers and brands. A brand will stay top-of-mind if it can show up in someone’s email inbox. A customised marketing email has more of an impact than a social media post because the business cannot be certain that its message was seen on social media. Scalability is one of the main advantages of email marketing. Emails can be sent in an inexpensive way to a considerable number of recipients (compared to other marketing channels). Finally, they can foster more brand loyalty.
Every phase of the buyer’s journey, including lead nurturing, conversion, onboarding, and retention, can be fueled by email marketing. In fact, email marketing is powerful tool for fostering community. This is especially true if a business can produce unique, newsworthy content that subscribers eagerly look forward to each week.
Conclusion
The potential applications for NFTs are essentially endless. NFT fever does not seem to be abating anytime soon, especially since prominent businesses and celebrities continue to develop and market cutting-edge NFTs. NFT sellers and developers need a plan to stand out from the competition as cryptocurrencies, digital assets, and NFTs become more widely used. With the proper marketing plan, companies may successfully advertise their NFTs and stand out from the competition.