Introduction
During the last months of 2021, NFTs took the world by storm.
Former first lady Melania Trump jumped into the NFT marketing fray in December. The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon both interviewed the year’s hottest NFT artist, Beeple, on his show, and bought into the Bored Ape Yacht Club in November.
NFTs went from fringe digital art to mainstream culture. Some of the biggest names in business—Gucci, the NBA, Visa, AmEx, and Coca-Cola, just to name a few—got in on the NFT craze, too.
All this may have you wondering just how you can use NFTs to scale your own business. We’re answering that very question today with four key ways that utilizing NFTs in your marketing strategy can help your business grow.
First, though, we’ll take a look at why NFTs can be a boost for any business, large or small, online or off.
3 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Consider NFTs
Before we delve into specific NFT marketing strategies you can use, let’s examine the three reasons why you should consider adding NFT marketing to your digital marketing plans.
NFTs Form a Direct Connection With the Audience
In the next section, we’ll explore just how NFTs help you connect with your target audience. For now, we’ll just state the general idea that owning something as unique as an NFT provides your audience with a way to form a deep relationship with your brand that other items don’t.
NFTs Can Be Anything Digital
You don’t have to restrict yourself to a static image like the Bored Apes or CryptoPunk collection. And it doesn’t have to be anything as elaborate as Beeple’s “Everydays” mosaic, either.
You can use any or all of the following as your brand’s NFTs:
- JPEGs
- VR artwork
- GIFs
- 3D animations
- Video clips
- Dynamic NFTs that change over time
Because NFTs are adaptable, your company can select the form(s) that best reflect your brand’s identity and the desires of your target audience.
NFTs Eliminate the Headaches of Traditional Marketing Items
Since NFTs are strictly digital items, you no longer have to worry about many of the issues associated with traditional marketing with promotional or discounted items.
There’s no inventory to stock or ship.
There aren’t the usual customer service hassles—”I didn’t receive my freebie” or “I was supposed to get the green one and got the blue one, instead”—that come with physical products.
Since all NFT transactions take place on a secure blockchain, usually within a specialized NFT marketplace, you don’t need to worry about the security of your audience’s data, either. Or handling the transactions at all. It’s even easier than using ebooks and PDFs.
In short, NFTs could be the digital marketing solution of your dreams.
Now, let’s look at how to use those dreamy NFTs to take your business to the next level and beyond.
4 NFT Marketing Strategies Proven to Work
There are four NFT marketing strategies that seem to be working no matter who uses them.
They are:
- Collecting
- Collaborating
- Charity
- Creating
These strategies all result in Connecting with your audience and Captivating new audience members.
Let’s look at each one in detail.
Collecting NFTs as a Marketing Strategy
We’ve mentioned how Visa got into the NFT world in 2021. And we’ve also mentioned one of the most successful NFT collections ever, the CryptoPunks (read our blog article on NFT collections here).
Visa purchased their CryptoPunk in August. They did it as a learning exercise, a dabble in the NFT world, if you will.
By joining the NFT community, Visa showed that they aligned their values with the other CryptoPunk investors. It also validated those investors’ investments in the digital art collection to have a financial powerhouse like Visa join their flock.
That one act by Visa upped both the brand’s and the FinTech world of CryptoPunk owners’ street cred. A whole new crowd took note of an older, established, “unhip” brand.
Some audiences can be harder to reach and harder to connect with than others. If that describes your audience—and you will find them among an NFT collection’s community—becoming a collector could up your street cred with them, too, just like it did with Visa.
Collaborating on NFTs as a Marketing Strategy
Digital content tends to be ephemeral and fleeting.
Blog posts are often outdated in weeks, podcasts in days, and social media posts in hours. Videos are almost immediately forgotten as the next one plays. PDFs and ebooks go to download folders where they die lonely, forgotten deaths.
And everybody’s got one or more of the above, churning them out day after day, week after week.
NFTs are scarce, limited editions. And they are permanent.
American Express realized the value of NFTs in a collaboration with R&B and soul musician SZA. They offered 14 musical NFTs of one of her performances to cardholders only.
Talk about living up to their old slogan, “Membership has its privileges”!
Again, the project raised AmEx out of the depths of the Boomer generation and made them relevant to newer, younger, hipper audiences. There’s no telling how many young people applied for membership for the chance to snag an SZA NFT.
Collaborating with an NFT creator can help you connect with a whole new audience of buyers you might have only dreamed of before.
Charity and NFT Marketing
In July 2021, Coca-Cola went all-in on a charity NFT project to help support one of their long-time favorite charities, Special Olympics International. They raised over $575,000 with their loot boxes. The video below describes the project.
Likewise, the artist FFP, the genius behind the Fast Food Punks collection, garnered almost $600,000 for Ronald McDonald House Charities in an NFT charity auction in August 2021.
What does this mean for your business? If you are a non-profit or for-profit with a charitable connection, it could mean everything in terms of connecting with a new, younger audience.
It could also mean everything for the charitable cause you choose to support. Imagine raising hundreds of thousands of dollars at the same time you elevate concerns and educate an entirely new, inexperienced audience about them.
Creating NFTs as a Marketing Strategy
When Wendy’s entered the Food Fights game-within-a-game in the Fortnite metaverse, the lines between advertising and entertainment were blurred forever.
Fortnite isn’t just played by a vast number of 12-to-24-year-olds. Fortnite is a source of entertainment for them as well, with videos of gameplay reaching as many as a half-million views.
When Wendy’s entered the Food Fights game on the side of Team Pizza, their goal was to destroy Team Burgers’ beef freezers. Why? Because Wendy’s only sells fresh, never frozen patties.
The video of Wendy’s team obliterating as many beef freezers as they could find was watched by over 250,000 fans. That’s a quarter-million young people that will forever have “fresh, not frozen” burned into their brains without Wendy’s spending a dime on advertising.
In this video that Wendy’s made, they describe the action so you don’t have to watch 9 hours of it.
Coke had to hire artists to create the loot in the Special Olympics loot boxes, becoming an NFT creator in the process.
This step into “creator” mode is another way to connect with new audiences. Gamers, artists, musicians, and writers—all tough audiences to relate to—can see your brand as “one of us,” a fellow creative spirit in a dull, colorless business world.
Putting your brand into the digital metaverse in the form of an NFT can help you reach audiences that aren’t so easily “sold.”
Summary
Using NFTs as a marketing strategy to scale your business to new heights may seem risky. Too trendy. Faddish, even.
However, as we’ve seen in this article, bigger and bigger brands are getting into the act. And doing so with great success.
If you’d like to discuss how your business can use those trendy, faddish NFTs for its own growth, contact us at Crowdcreate. We do NFT marketing. We know just how to use them and how to help you use them to your best advantage, too.
Let’s grow together.
