NFTs are the new trend in the blockchain market that is disrupting several industries, especially art. The year 2021 was the year of NFTs as a lot of businesses jumped on the NFT bandwagon, such as Microsoft, Pizza Hut, Nike, NBA, Coca-Cola, Twitter, Visa, and several others.
People are selling JPEGs for thousands of dollars on NFT platforms like OpenSea. An NFT is a unique cryptographic asset. It can’t be copied or interchanged. This makes NFTs extremely useful for industries, such as art and music, where copyright is a concern.
But NFTs are also used for marketing.
How?
Let’s find out…
What Are NFTs?
An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a cryptographic asset that lives on the blockchain. Each NFT is unique and verifiable. It can’t be replicated or interchanged with any other NFT. Since NFTs live on the blockchain, they're traded in cryptocurrencies such as Ether.
Here is an example of NFT by Azuki (one of the top sellers on OpenSea):
NFTs have opened a new door for digital creators. Artists, musicians, designers, videographers, and other types of digital content creators who are a major driving force of the creator economy can monetize and sell their art pieces on NFT platforms.
How Do NFTs and Marketing Go Together?
The way these non-fungible tokens work makes them an effective marketing tactic. Yes, digital marketers can use NFTs — not just for marketing but for exponential growth.
Here are the major ways NFTs can be used to leverage growth marketing:
1. Better Consumer-Brand Relationship
One thing that NFTs do exceptionally well is connect you to your ideal customers directly without any intermediary.
Digital content creators can directly sell their products to the end-users without any platform or third party. Musicians, for example, don’t need production houses. Similarly, photographers don’t need to use marketplaces to list their work.
Communicating directly with your customers in the absence of any third party doesn’t just increase revenue but also helps build a powerful community of your customers.
2. New Marketing Channel
Marketers now have a new marketing channel in the form of NFT platforms. You can use NFTs for brand awareness and advertising. For example, you can use NFTs to share vouchers and gift cards with your customers.
There are numerous ways to use NFT marketplaces for marketing.
The NFL, for example, gave free NFTs with Super Bowl 2022 tickets to its fans. The NFTs are unique to the row and seat of the fans.
The NFL achieved two things with this technique:
- Brand awareness
- Relationship building
Normally people throw away tickets or they aren’t used after the date. NFL personalized the experience of its fans by offering them a unique NFT that will always live on the blockchain. This builds an emotional connection with the brand, which is key to marketing success in 2022 and beyond.
3. Content Marketing
If you are an inbound marketer, you know the importance of digital content and its promotion.
NFTs have opened a whole new avenue of content creation, distribution, and marketing. In the way social networking platforms are used by businesses of all sizes to create and share content with their ideal customers, you can do the same via NFTs on NFT platforms.
Taco Bell created NFTs to engage with its audience on the NFT marketplace:
The purpose isn’t to earn revenue, as Taco Bell stated that all the profits will be donated to its foundation. It created these NFTs to follow the trend and create and publish content where customers are most likely to interact with it.
NFT marketing also lets you monetize content by bypassing the middleman. Think of Netflix, which acts as a content distribution and monetization network. You can bypass such platforms and monetize your content via blockchain platforms where you don’t have to give a certain percentage to the middleman.
So, NFT marketing covers all the stages of content marketing, making it ideal for businesses and marketers.
4. Personalized Marketing
NFTs provide you with an opportunity to take personalization to a new level. Since each NFT is unique, it makes marketing extremely personalized.
Whether you want to issue coupon codes, gift cards, or share an exclusive lead magnet, you can use NFT marketing to make your offering personalized to increase conversions. Research shows that 80 percent of people are more likely to buy a product or service if the company offers them a personalized experience.
NFTs offer you this amazing opportunity to interact with your ideal customers at a one-to-one level.
10 Need-to-Know Facts and Stats About NFTs for Businesses
If you are new to NFT marketing or NFTs in general, there are a lot of interesting facts and statistics that will raise your eyebrows. Here is a list of the facts and stats about NFTs for businesses and marketers:
- Non-fungible tokens are used to prove ownership of a digital asset and these are mostly traded on the Ethereum blockchain.
- NFT trading volume crossed $10.7 billion in the last quarter of 2021.
- The NFT market grew from $41 million in 2018 to $338 million in 2020.
- The country where consumers have the highest interest in the search term “NFT” is China, followed by Malaysia.
- OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace with a monthly trading volume (in Ether only) of $4.69 billion in January 2022.
- There are currently more than 45,000 users in the NFT realm, and the number is swiftly growing.
- The most expensive NFT ever sold is The Merge by Pak, which was sold for a whopping $91.8 million.
- Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults are interested in NFTs and are ready to jump in, while 23 percent of millennials are already collecting NFTs.
- Seventy percent of Americans don’t know what an NFT is, while 74 percent said that they're willing to spend $99 or less on their favorite NFTs.
- More than 50 percent of the NFTs have an average price of $200, making them quite affordable.
Marketers Shouldn’t Ignore NFTs
Non-fungible tokens are much more than investment and trading opportunities. Characteristics like uniqueness, transparency, and ownership make NFTs ideal for marketers.
When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in 2004, nobody knew it would be used by more than 35.6 percent of the world’s population by 2021.
In the case of NFTs, we have seen the trend already. NFT marketplaces and platforms have a much higher penetration rate than Facebook. And as a brand and marketer, you need to follow the trend and use it to reach and connect with your ideal customers, just like businesses started using social media.
It is time to create an NFT marketing strategy for your business and be part of the revolution. Don’t miss the opportunity to be where your customers are.
