So you’ve created your first NFT and would love to showcase your business across the globe?
The trick about marketing or selling NFTs is that NFTs are unlike any tangible product. They’re collections of pixels, stored on the blockchain, a digital ledger, rather than physical assets you can interact with.
People buy NFTs because of their conceptual values, mostly their scarcity. That’s why you’ll need to use conceptual skills to sell your tokens. Tactics include inspiring messages, visual storytelling, and an emphasis on social sharing that communicates your brand values and backs up your narrative. You’ve got to tap into viewers’ emotions and desires to make them want to buy your digital assets.
At Coinbound, we conducted in-depth research to see why some NFTs were more popular than others and how top-grossing digital artists sold their NFTs for millions of dollars.
Here’s what we found.
Fundamentals of NFT Marketing
Start with the end.
To achieve your desired results, work backwards:
- Who is your targeted buyer?
- Why would they buy from you?
- Which actions would you like them to take (e.g., To purchase, tag you, promote you etc.)?
- Where are these buyers (e.g., Reddit, Quora, Instagram, Facebook, etc.)?
- How are you remarkable?
- What’s your marketing and PR strategy?
When we interviewed Troy Sandidge, an award-winning B2B digital marketing strategist, he suggested you also ask yourself these questions: “What are your revenue goals? How can you reach your goals? Do you have the resources and skills to achieve them? What are your assets and liabilities? How would first you, then the NFT community, rank yourself on the booming NFT landscape? Where can you improve to become an NFT celebrity?” Now, develop an action plan that’s reinforced by simple, actionable, and relevant KPIs to track and measure your performance. For example: “I’m going to target 10 new customers per month by April.”
Demonstrate that your NFT has these values.
According to Binance, irresistible NFTs have these six features:
- Utility: What’s the functional value of your NFT? Play-to-earn NFTs are good examples of useful digital NFTs, as are NFTs that can be swapped for tangible prizes.
- Rarity: Your NFT should be thoroughly unique. Third-party platform rarity.tools helps you assess its originality.
- Community size: To convince investors you have the capacity to grow, generate a scintillating website, references, an active social media presence, and so forth.
- Potential: Show that your NFT can generate long-term community attention. Highlight its capacity to withstand trends.
- Provenance: Provenance relates to your credibility on the NFT stage and the NFT’s backstory. Prospective buyers will check your background and the authenticity of your NFT.
- Intrinsic value: Desirable NFTs offer intangible benefits, such as social connections, scarcity, nostalgia, or social causes.
Use value-based marketing to show investors that your NFT contains those six appealing features.
Think differently
As humans, we think in terms of mental models — namely frameworks or beliefs of how business should work or Art should be produced. Disruptors, in Steve Jobs’ famous words, are “the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules.”
In the NFT world, they’re also the artists whose productions stop viewers in their tracks and stimulate them to promote your NFTs.
How can we generate groundbreaking NFTs?
Cryptovert suggests you ask yourself the following:
- What is the NFT industry struggling with?
- What does it lack?
- What can I do to solve these problems?
Addressing these issues leads to true differentiation.
Improve your skills
According to NFT Times, the crux to successful NFT promotion lies in improving your skills.
Top habits include:
- Understanding digital art, including basic technical aspects.
- Familiarizing yourself with crypto and the blockchain economy, for practices that include communicating with your community, following blockchain protocols and avoiding scams.
- Keeping on top of NFT industry trends to see what sells.
- Checking out news and literature on the wider business community for transferring successful ideas to your NFT world.
Regularly improving these qualities converts your marketing into pull marketing, where buyers flock to you instead of you pushing your brand to others. This type of marketing is 68% more effective than push marketing.
Keep on top of NFT trends
It’s important to know what’s selling in your market, so you can promote your NFT business accordingly. For example, when analyzing 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs bought between June 23, 2017, and April 27, 2021, Nadini and her colleagues found that although crypto artworks dominate the market at 74%, they accounted for just 10% of all sales.
The researchers also found that buyers prefer images to videos, text, animated GIFs, and audio and that it’s NFT specialists with standardized prices who are the most successful. In short, consult market trends such as these to find what collectors want and to promote your business accordingly.
Match your marketplace to your NFT
NFTs span six categories, so you’ll want to choose the right marketplace to promote your digital token. Top platforms include:
- OpenSea for domains, trading cards, sports, and art collectibles.
- Rarible for everything that’s crypto.
- NBA TopShot for NBA collectibles.
- MythMarket for trading cards.
- SuperRare for rare digital artwork.
- Foundation for trading digital art.
- KnownOrigin for rare digital art collectibles.
- Enjin for trading blockchain assets.
- MakersPlace for selling digital creations.
SingleGrain recommends listing your NFTs on more than one marketplace to boost your chances of selling them.
The Community Connection
Build your NFT community
Experiment with an array of social media platforms, but use channels that give you the most potential
Popular NFT platforms include:
- Discord with its voice capabilities
- Telegram with its various NFT groups
- Quora
- BitcoinTalk with its NFT forums and chats
- Twitter that has the NFT early adopters
Add Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and Medium for more followers.
Become a master storyteller
The challenge with NFT is that there’s nothing to grip onto. It’s all digital pixels. Take one of the earliest NFTs that, incidentally, I had the privilege to cover. It was a digital dress that sold for $10,000. Critics doubted that people would buy a garment they could never physically wear. NFTs, such as these, succeed in attracting attention through storytelling techniques and visual descriptors that manufacture and heighten intangible benefits. (In the case of the dress, it was its shimmery, hyperreal appeal).
“There are tricks to the magic,” Stephanie Colley, digital sales manager of Cumulus Media, told us. “Use connectors, namely episodes and feelings that all people connect with. Like love, sorrow, nostalgia, self-esteem and pain.”
Great crypto-storytelling involves tapping into emotions, motivations, and psychology to move prospective investors. Such tactics are particularly important for marketing NFTs.
Build an active social community
People want to feel part of a group, particularly in unsettled times. Harvard’s Business Review suggests that’s how NFTs create value. Create a community through tactics that include individually interacting with your followers, engaging them in conversations that are related (or unrelated) to your brand, responding quickly to their posts and questions, featuring their user-generated content, and highlighting their input. For this to work, you’ll want to genuinely care about your followers.
Foot-in-the-door (FITD)
This is a well-known selling technique. Rather than botching your pitch with one reckless plea to “buy my wonderful NFT”, proceed step-by-step. Ask for something low-friction that’s small and specific — like “follow me here” and provide specifics of the reward. Motivate visitors. Your viewers need to be warmed up to you. That’s especially true for newcomers to the NFT field.
Tease
Too many NFTs drop every day, so you’re likely to get lost in the stream. Stand out from the crowd by releasing a sneak peek, ten or so days in advance of your drop. Little by little, release more details of your drop to hold their attention. Example: Binance’s teaser on tokidoki’s ‘Mystery Box’.
Collect three types of followers
In time, you’ll get three types of followers:
- Buyers who buy your NFTs.
- Advocates who promote your business through word of mouth.
- Elevators who boost your productions through likes, comments, and engagements.
Each of these different types of fans is valuable since each builds brand recognition.
Persuading People to Buy
Here are some top ways to promote your NFTs for free:
Collect NFTs
Entrench your name in the NFT industry by collecting NFT artwork, communicating with digital artists, sharing their events on your social media and tagging them. In short, your conspicuous involvement in the NFT world could push your NFT collection to the top.
Partner with creators
Digital artists partner with other types of artists that include musicians, fashion designers, celebrities and animation studios, to mutually promote each other. Jump in on relevant events, too, such as art shows, music gigs, sports events and so forth. You’re more likely to earn recognition rather than financial profit. But recognition could lead to monetization…
NFT giveaways
Giveaways, popular in the NFT community, are where digital artists give away certain NFT collectibles or physical commodities. Participants have to promote the artist with actions that include following the artist on certain social platforms, tagging friends, promoting the event, and sharing the artist’s posts.
Email marketing
Launch drip email campaigns for every new user, send them welcome emails, inform them about every new sale made on your platform, share details about the next drops, send them educational videos, notify them about different price trends, etc. There are so many ways you can use email marketing for NFT promotion.
AMA (“Ask Me Anything”)
Such informal interviews are usually conducted through YouTube, Telegram or podcasts. Troy Sandidge told us he prefers Twitter.
Rules:
- Announce the “ask me anything” around 10 days in advance and give your viewers a space to post their questions.
- Allocate 30-45 minutes to your Twitter (or Instagram) interview, which should feature 15 or so questions, with the most interesting items first.
- Add a 15-minutes Q&A session.
- Present participants with an NFT gift and thank them for attending.
Related strategies include live streams, polls, comment floods, and question-and-answer sessions.
Become an NFT thought leader
Early entry into this revolutionary NFT field, helps you entrench your dominance. Interest the NFT newbie with informational blogs, videos, posts, articles and the like on known and lesser-known NFT topics such as how to market NFTs.
Tips: Follow Quora, Facebook, Twitter for the best NFT-related keywords, questions and topics. Jump on relevant trending news.
Build brand visibility via content marketing
Generate relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media to promote brand awareness and keep your enterprise top of mind. (In contrast to the last point, these need not necessarily be informational). According to Ty Smith, Founder and CEO at Coinbound, content marketing is one of the most influential crypto-marketing methods, since it gets you quoted on leading media and social influencer sites, propping you up as an expert in your field and cementing your reputation.
Promote your content on relevant social and digital publishing platforms, such as The Verge, Forbes and CryptoPanic.
Trumpet your NFT launch with PR
Distribute press releases through these top PR platforms:
Some of those services add premium packages for wider press distribution.
If you’re willing to pay, you may find the following resources helpful:
- NFT marketplaces. Choose those with the best rates, the busiest communities, and the most benefits.
- NFT newsletters with paid promotions. Most crypto platforms have these newsletters. Check out NFT Calendar’s weekly competition for a weekly chance to win free promotion.
- Instagram promotion. Instagram hosts an Instagram Stories and Instagram Lives event with sponsored NFT artist interviews.
- Crypto-marketing agencies with their network of influencers and resources from media buying to media PR.
- Sponsored articles, where you pay (or hire a ghostwriter) to publish articles on your NFT in popular publications. (You can also pay to be interviewed on relevant podcasts and video channels).
- Web and mobile push notifications, namely pop-up alerts. Top push notification platforms are Amazon SNS, OneSignal, Kumulos, Airship, and Leanplum.
- Hire an SEO agency to get your NFT website ranked higher in search results.
- Run targeted ad placement campaigns (known as PPC) on social platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Pay Google and Bing Ads for banner advertising.
Tying it all up
Essentially, successfully marketing your NFTs comes down to Five C’s. Consider your followers, their feelings and interests. Communicate with the NFT community and share useful informational content. Connect heart-to-heart with authentic and irresistible storytelling (and similar techniques). Create a community with social-sharing and other methods. Finally, consistently improve your skills. Give value to get value. That’s the bottom line.
