NFT Influencer Marketing 101 | Ep. 47

Ty Smith0:04

What is up guys, welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Podcast. I am Ty Smith, with me is Liz. Today we are covering everything you need to know about NFT influencer marketing. So we're going to go through why influencer marketing is important for NFT brands, how to properly vet NFT influencers, what it takes to cut through the noise and get influencers to actually answer you, and then tips to make sure your NFT influencer marketing campaign is actually successful.

Ty Smith0:04

What is up, guys? Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Podcast. I am Ty Smith, with me is Liz. Today we are covering everything you need to know about NFT influencer marketing. So we're going to go through why influencer marketing is important for NFT brands, how to properly vet NFT influencers, what it takes to cut through the noise and get influencers actually answer you, and then tips to make sure your NFT influencer marketing campaign is actually successful.

Ty Smith0:05

What is up guys? Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Podcast. I am Ty Smith, with me is Liz.

Ty Smith0:08

Today we are covering everything you need to know about NFT influencer marketing. So we're going to go through why influencer marketing is important for NFT brands, how to properly vet NFT influencers, what it takes to cut through the noise and get influencers to actually answer you, and then tips to make sure your NFT influencer marketing campaign is actually successful.

Ty Smith0:21

Before we dive into it, quick shout out to NFTlately.com. NFT Lately is the number one NFT newsletter covering NFT news, upcoming drops, hot releases, and more, delivered to your inbox twice a week. So check them out at NFTlately.com.

Ty Smith0:30

All right, Liz, let's get into it. So you are kind of an expert on this subject. You are both an influencer in your own right, as well as the Director of Social Media here at Coinbound. So let's dive right into why influencer marketing is vital for NFT companies.

Liz1:04

Yeah, absolutely.

Ty Smith1:06

I'll kick it off with just the amplification factor of influencer marketing. No surprise, influencers are influencers because they have a large audience. And then when we utilize them as part of our marketing campaign, we can take advantage of that audience.

Liz1:14

Yeah, amplification is super important because you can have tons of amazing content, but if you don't have anyone else talking about it and no way to reach other audiences, it's going to be really hard for that organically to rise to the top, especially in today's social media realm. A lot of it is pay-to-play. Building an organic page, even outside of ads, is really, really difficult. And so if you can have someone who's trusted and has a trusted audience talk about your project, your token, your NFT, you're going to get so many more eyes on that. And especially, it's not just any influencer either. You want to identify that audience and make sure it's a good fit for your project because if you ask someone who isn't actually passionate about it or their audience doesn't have any interest in it, it's going to be a total dud.

Ty Smith2:14

Yeah, definitely. And no one likes to pay for marketing. In an ideal world, marketing is free. You've built up your channel successfully that you can just kind of post a tweet or something.

Liz2:20

Everyone wants to be Tesla.

Ty Smith2:20

Yeah, exactly. But not everyone's product can drive itself, so...

Liz2:24

Yeah, Teslas drive themselves in multiple ways, marketing standpoint included.

Ty Smith2:27

The shortcut, unfortunately, is paying for marketing. You pay an influencer and you get an audience on either your existing content or what you're working on. Because most NFT companies, let's be real, the NFT, crypto in general, works on such a ridiculously accelerated timeline in general that we see it all the time. People come to our agency and they're like, 'All right, we need something out yesterday.' NFTs are that to a factor of two almost because not only is it part of the crypto trend, but it's part of its own trend that you really need something out quickly and you don't have the time to always cultivate your own audience and things like that. If you already have your own audience, fantastic. But for the rest of us, you have to leverage influencers to capitalize on their audience because they essentially are audience leaders.

Liz3:20

Exactly.

Ty Smith3:20

Another interesting aspect, and this isn't directly related to influencers alone, but Twitter influencers, which is where the majority of NFT influencers are these days. Twitter does an awesome job of amplifying NFT-related content by itself. So if you follow the topic of NFTs, you get so much NFT content. But it usually has to come from an account that has at least somewhat of a following already. So it is sort of like a double approach there.

Liz3:37

Right, there has to be some level of authority. It can't just be random Joe Schmo. In any topic on Twitter, the people who really are showing up for that community are going to be rewarded, and people whose communities also in turn show up for them. I think that those people really have cracked the code.

Ty Smith4:13

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I've noticed that just from my own account. Just anytime I tweet about NFT stuff, it gets significant attention. One, because it's hot, and two, because Twitter is so good at amplifying NFT content.

Liz4:19

Yeah, and even because the way Twitter works, it's scanning the words. It's not even just relying on hashtags. And so it's really interesting how they aggregate that content.

Ty Smith4:25

Yeah. Next factor that's important for influencer marketing is trust and authority. People trust influencers. You can spend a whole podcast episode, even a textbook, explaining the psychology of why that is. But people trust influencers more than they would someone without a following. So that's not only is it a fast way to amplify your message, it's also to build some trust and authority. You can even break up the trust and authority into two separate things, but it is a fast way to build trust in your product because essentially you've either paid someone or they've done it organically to essentially put their name on it, and they probably have a name that's trusted amongst their audience.

Liz5:13

Exactly. And again, making sure that it ties back to the actual audience interest and that they have some kind of stake in that. And when an influencer can show their stake in that, the audience wants a stake in that too. They want to participate as much as possible in that influencer's life. And so if they can join something that the influencer or celebrity has joined, that's so impactful.

Ty Smith5:28

Yeah. And similarly, the authority factor, if you can find someone who's not only an influencer with a large audience but an authority on the subject matter of what you're promoting, that's like your goal.

Liz5:35

Oh yeah, 1000%. And I mean, an influencer too, you obviously have people who have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers, verified, etc. But there's so much worth too in some of these micro-influencers that have a couple thousand followers, but they have incredible engagement. It's not just about the followers because if you want 100,000 followers, you can go buy that if you really want. But to have an actually engaged audience that is finding value out of the content that you create, that's what you want to look for and make sure that people are typically engaged with most of their content.

Ty Smith6:23

Which is a nice segue into the next part I want to discuss, which is how to vet NFT influencers. In general, with vetting influencers, you just explained it perfectly is that followers is such a vanity metric that really means nothing. It's so easy to spoof these days that engagement is really the kind of the golden number that we're looking at when we're evaluating influencer partners. So if you see 100,000 followers on Twitter and you're getting one or two likes on something, that's a sign that something's up. It could be a number of reasons, but it doesn't make for a good influencer partner for your company.

Liz7:09

No, because you want the people that you're working with to have a very engaged audience. You can pay tons of money into something and possibly not see that return. Now, maybe the product wasn't also very good, to be honest, and also maybe the audience just wasn't aligned with that. And so those are things people have to take into consideration too. But a lot of times it is, is the influencer real? And especially in crypto world, there's so many scams. There's so many scams. And so you have to make sure that you're not just sending money to some influencer if they say that's who they are and the username is something that is close to what the other real person's username might be. So just be really careful too. If you want to work with someone, make sure that they DM you from their actual account, and there's other ways that you can verify that because you can definitely lose a lot to people who aren't actually real.

Ty Smith8:09

Yeah, which is another thing I want to touch on, which is the verifying of the account. Because it's one thing to work with an influencer that you think looks great, it's another to make sure that you're actually talking to that person. Because anyone who's been in the crypto industry long enough has seen or hopefully not, but most likely has experienced being scammed by a fake influencer. So we always, when we're onboarding influencers, we have a really robust process for it. The kind of truncated version though is contacting people from multiple accounts. Most Twitter accounts also have a YouTube account and vice versa, or Instagram or something like that, or an email address that's public somewhere. So contact them from multiple places, confirm Ethereum addresses if you're paying them in Ethereum or whatever crypto. And then a third point is to simplify that entire process and have someone do it for you is work with an agency. Because an agency like us, this is what we do. We just vet influencers, work with influencers, manage campaigns with influencers all day long, that you can really save a ton of time and money in the case of being scammed by working with an agency.

Liz9:19

Yeah, I totally agree. It's just really rampant, especially now, especially as everything's hitting the green. There's a lot of people looking to capitalize off of that, so always be aware that that's a possibility.

Ty Smith9:28

Yeah. So let's go into some ways to cut through the noise and actually get through to influencers because that's not always as easy as it might sound. It sounds like, 'Oh, I'm just going to DM someone and they're going to get back to me.' If you're in a bull market and it's a good influencer, that's not going to happen. So my best way of explaining it is this. We've been devoting a lot of resources to building up my own Twitter account. And as my account has grown, now to I think it's like 13,000 followers, I've been getting just destroyed on DMs. And 13,000 followers is nothing compared to what a lot of these influencers have. Just destroyed on DMs all day, every day, with people asking us to promote their NFT project or something like that. So you can do that, that is a good way to contact someone directly and again verify that it is who it is. But if you don't utilize these tips, you're never going to be read or responded to. So first tip: short. Short is very good. Stop sending people essays about your project in the first message. Send them a quick bullet point. If you can't give them the elevator pitch in like one or two sentences, you need to work on your internal marketing. You're not ready to work with influencers yet. Influencers don't massage your branding and messaging. An agency can, an internal marketing team can, an influencer won't. So get it short. Two, if you're interested in partnering with them on a paid basis, make that very clear up front. Because when you send me a DM and it says, 'Hey, we'd love to collab,' I mean, I'm not doing paid stuff anyway, but most influencers are. They want to know if they're being paid for this or if you're just kind of taking up their time and you're going to send them like one free NFT and think that they're going to blow it out of the water because of that. So be really clear about what you're offering to them. And three, if you are working with them, send them a free NFT, I think.

Liz11:31

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Ty Smith11:32

I mean, people have been sending me NFTs and it's like awesome. Even people that we have no working relationship with, they send me and I'll check it out for sure. If it's in my wallet, I'm always looking at my wallet. Do that for influencers, whether or not you're working with them, I think it's a good idea, honestly. Kind of air-dropping it to influential people is never going to be a bad use of your NFTs. And then if you are working with them on a paid basis or even organic basis, send them a couple of NFTs. It'll just give them more reason to do a good job for your campaign.

Liz12:14

Yeah, I totally agree. If they're promoting something and don't even have their own stake in it, I don't know, I feel like that's really transparent as to why that's happening.

Ty Smith12:21

Yeah, things happen in indirect ways with marketing, especially with influencers who are really people, not businesses. Like here's a perfect example: Panda Dynasty, who's about to get a free shout-out on this podcast because they sent me NFTs. They didn't pay me anything, but they sent us, sent a bunch of the Coinbound team, NFTs. It was just a nice gesture of them. Influencers talk with each other. People look at their wallets, they see what NFTs are already in their wallets. If it's something that they didn't notice before and it suddenly showed up, they're going to check it out. They want to know if it's valuable, they want to know what it unlocks for them. So I don't know, give it a shot. Send me an NFT. I won't complain. I'll check out your NFT project. It's tysmith.eth. No shame.

Liz13:13

That's amazing.

Ty Smith13:14

Send two, I'll get Liz one too. All right, cool. Anything else you want to add? I don't think I have too much left.

Liz13:18

I think that really covers it, making sure that you can cut through the noise, making sure that they have actual authority. And I really just want to stress the aspect of making sure that it's someone who aligns with your audience because there are some really huge influencers out of there that just do not have anything to do with some projects I see them promoting. And it's really, really obvious that it's not something that they have like a stake in or passion for. I think that when people can really show that they have incentive in it and a stake in it, that's huge to me at least. And maybe that's just because I'm cynical at this point and know the back end of this. But when I want to, if there's someone that I follow or admire and they're trying to sell their audience something, I want them to have a stake in that. I want them to say, 'Hey, I care about this and so should you.' And so just make sure that when you work with people, especially some of these bigger names, just make sure that you have like an actual established relationship there because also it just makes your project and campaign so much more successful. People want to see that emotion, and so have that there. Don't just have them send one tweet and expect that to be like super explosive. That's also not going to work. Oh, that is one thing I totally forgot to touch on is cadence. One tweet or one post on Instagram or one post anywhere is not going to cut it at all. People are going to forget about that in two seconds. You have to post something so many times, especially on Twitter, for that to break through the noise and actually be something that people are bought into. And so if you're working with an influencer, I really recommend to do it for not just a week, not just a few weeks, like have months that you're putting out content together and building that up for success. I think that that's really important to have consistent cadence because if an influencer is really invested in something, aren't they going to talk about it a lot? Like it's not just going to be a one-off thing. So I think that that's the most successful way to do a campaign is to have something continuously out with the person who's representing your product or NFT.

Ty Smith15:39

Yeah, definitely. I think some of our most successful influencer campaigns have been long-term.

Liz15:43

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Ty Smith15:44

For a number of reasons. I mean, the rule of seven applies there, that you see something a number of times and you act on it. There's a lot of kind of psychology factors there.

Liz16:12

Yeah, it's all about the touchpoints because especially now, you're on Twitter, you can see hundreds of tweets a day. On any other social media like TikTok, etc., it just moves so quickly. And so to be able to break through the noise, it's not just having good content, it's also having consistent content and making that partnership really home to their brand.

Ty Smith16:27

Absolutely. I think that's a good place to leave off. All right, let's wrap this up. So follow me on Twitter if you're not already. DM me your NFT questions or your marketing questions. I actually really enjoy answering them.

Liz16:34

Or your NFTs.

Ty Smith16:35

Or your, yeah, I'll take your NFTs also. And maybe we'll discuss them on the next NFT-related episode. If you're into NFTs, join NFT Lately. Jared, who writes the newsletter, is awesome, and the episodes lately have been like awesome. Like that's where I'm getting my NFT news now. So NFTlately.com for that. And if you're going to be at NFT NYC, I will also be there. Please remember to rate, review, and recommend this podcast if you found value, and we will chat soon. Bye, guys.

Liz17:20

Bye.