How to Promote Your NFTs the Right Way

Learning how to promote your NFTs is crucial in a world where Non-Fungible Tokens are one of the most exciting innovations in cryptocurrency. The NFT has swept across the globe, with countless industries now finding their own uses for these unique tokens.

Of course, launching any new innovation without proper promotion means missing out on endless opportunities. Failing to advertise your NFTs in the right environments could mean you miss out on the momentum of the NFT industry.

Today, I’m going to introduce you to the basics of promoting NFTs the right way.

Kim Cooper
Director of Marketing, Amazon Alexa

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Why NFT Promotion Is Important

As demand for NFTs continues to grow, there are an increasing number of companies getting involved with the concept. If you want to join the revolution and earn your share of the community, you need to pull the right attention to your NFT as quickly as possible.

Think of your NFT as just another piece of art. If you wanted to improve your reputation as an artist, increase your chances of selling prints, and attract gallery owners, you’d need to promote your art. In the same way, advertising your NFTs helps you to attract the people who will help you grow.

Nyan the flying cat with a pop-tart body is an example of an NFT that sold for ​​$600,000 with proper promotion:

The promotion of NFTs is actually more important in a lot of ways than advertising almost any other product. Like most cryptocurrencies or investment options, the value of your NFT depends on how many people are talking about it and investing in it. Generating buzz is how you transform your NFT from just another piece of digital art into a full-blown money-making machine.

With proper promotion you:

  • Build hype for your NFTs, which increases demand
  • Use higher demand to request higher prices for your tokens
  • Strengthen your image as an NFT artist

New to NFT marketing? Check out:
NFT Marketing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

Is There a Wrong Way to Promote NFTs?

Advertising NFTs is a little trickier than marketing most products or services. As a cousin of cryptocurrency, the NFT is still a very new and complex concept.

Though these tokens are all the rage for celebrities, brands, musicians, and sports teams these days, we still don’t have a set of distinct guidelines for how we’re supposed to promote and sell them.

Currently, we’re seeing a lot of unsolicited “hawking” and “shilling” going on through social media. Because NFTs are the new “hot” thing, marketers are taking full advantage – which means overly obvious promotion might rub your already exhausted target audience the wrong way.

It’s also quite difficult right now to make sure you’re actually targeting the right people – customers with NFT wallets who can actually engage with your brand, or genuine fans who really want to show their appreciation of you in a valuable way. There’s even a risk you could fall into a scam with your NFT promotion and grab the attention of malicious individuals.

There are a lot of scams going on right now that can end up damaging you and your brand.

Learn more about NFT marketing agencies:
NFT Marketing Agencies: Best Way to Promote Your NFT Project

4 Ways to Promote Your NFTs for Success

Now that you know what NFTs are, and why it’s so important to promote them correctly, we can begin to look at effective promotional methods.

1) Work with Influencers

The first thing I’d recommend when promoting NFTs is working with influencers. Although this might sound obvious, it’s something a lot of people forget about when interacting with new concepts, like cryptocurrency.

Working with influencers makes a lot of sense, because they’re perfect at leveraging the momentum of a hot new trend.

I’m personally getting a lot of Instagram and Twitter messages right now from people looking to me to help promote their NFTs. Ideally, I’d recommend against taking this route if you want to work with an influencer.

When you hit someone up with a message on social media, you’re asking them what they can do for you. However, if you want to build a successful relationship, your focus should be on what you can do for each other. What are you offering your influencer?

This is relationship building 101. Look at what the influencer is interested in. Examine their social media pages and consider what you can do to generate value for them. Once you’ve got an idea of what you can do for your influencer, don’t bombard them with a wall of text. Keep it short, practical and to the point. You should have everything laid out within about four sentences or so.

Related Content: 9 Influencer Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023

2) Create Valuable White Lists

Being smart with white lists is crucial for NFT promotion. Essentially, with an NFT, what you can do is whitelist your close friends, family members, influencers, and people in your team wherever their ETH or wallet addresses are. Once you whitelist these people, they can pick up your NFTs before the mining craze starts, which helps to prevent a number of problems.

What’s great about this strategy is you can reach out to a wide range of people across communities, Discord (more on this in the next section), and so on. Let them know you have a new NFT available and you’re willing to add them to your white list. You can even offer a gift of an NFT for people who might be open to promoting the project. The moderators you connect with here are much more likely to want to help promote your project if you get them involved in the early stages.

As a bonus, if you can collaborate and add value to the community, you’re whitelisting for your NFT. You should be an active member of the community already so that it’s much easier to reach out and take advantage of an existing relationship. It takes a little while, but if you can start building connections a couple months before you launch your NFT, that relationship capital will pay off when the time comes to launch.

Tom Bilyeu had an excellent example of a white list to offer with the Impact Theory Founders Key:

I believe the minting for the white listers happened about three days before the actual mining happened. I was able to get my key three days early, then the next day another level of community member got theirs, and so on. This is a great methodical way to drum up interest.

More importantly, you’re doing a favor for the people you’re asking for help from. In return, they’re more committed to helping you promote your project. Since they may already have one of your NFTs, they’ll also be invested in helping it to become a success.

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3) Master Discord

Discord is a free voice, video and text chat app that’s used by tens of millions of people to talk about many things, including art projects. It’s a huge resource for promoting NFTs. I think names like VeeFriends and CyberKongz have done some phenomenal things with their Discord.

Discord home page

Larva Labs, the crypto punks one, is an excellent example too, but you have to have a punk to stay in that one:

Larva Labs

In terms of things like drumming up fanfare and developing opportunities, Discord is a must-have.

VeeFriends is particularly useful because it’s not just a community, it’s a resource full of valuable information and content. Remember, the more value you can offer your community, particularly during the early stages of developing your NFT, the more likely they are to stick around and help you grow.

VeeFriends NFT project home page

The important thing to remember with Discord is it’s not exactly Marketing 101, where you run a bunch of ads and track what’s going on. While that might be an option in the future, the focus right now needs to be on community, more than anything else. You need to leverage the clout and influence of other people, the chatter of people who you can get genuinely excited about what you have to offer.

With Discord, you’re probably going to need to hire some experienced community managers – people who have worked on similar big projects in the past. I’m not talking about one person responsible for handling your whole campaign here – I mean an entire team (5 to 15 people perhaps) dedicated to community development.

Ideally, these people need to be just as passionate about your NFTs as you, so make sure you’re offering them something valuable for their work. Maybe you can get them onto the whitelist, like I mentioned above, or give them one of your tokens. That way, they want to see the community grow.

Aside from your community managers, you’re also going to need a project manager for all this work. They can help you with some of the work involved with generating community success.

If you need a bit of extra guidance, I’d recommend taking a look at what Tom Bilyeu did with his Discord community. He was the founder of Impact Theory and Quest Nutrition (a billion-dollar brand). What he did with his Discord channel was get a lot of people involved with regular conversations and insights. He does weekly town hall meetings with the drop-in audio feature on Discord, so people can actually get direct advice from a popular and successful entrepreneur. Once again, like Gary Vaynerchuk’s Discord, there’s a lot of value here.

Want to see some NFT monetization examples? Check out:
5 Examples of Brands Using NFTs to Monetize Their Work

4) Develop Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse

You’ll also need to explore the benefits of Twitter Spaces. Once again, the main feature here is drop-in audio. Discord and Twitter both have this feature, and they’re both excellent at generating real, meaningful, and real-time engagement as a result.

You’ve got a lot of influencers you can access on Twitter right now, and you can either listen in to what they’re saying or raise your hand for a chance to speak. Participating in these conversations is excellent, for your customers, your community, and you. If you can participate in other spaces, you can also grab the attention of influencers and ask them to help you out with your promotion. Once again, as we mentioned above, remember that you’ll need to offer genuine value to that influencer to convince them to get invested in your NFT.

Speaking of all this audio engagement – don’t underestimate the power of emerging environments like Clubhouse:

Clubhouse home page

Although this space isn’t quite as well-known as Discord or Twitter, it’s becoming a very valuable space for a lot of NFT developers. Many innovators are dropping NFTs on Clubhouse exclusively to begin with.

I don’t know about you, but I remember the early days of NFTs – when Jin Woo did all of those NFT drops on the Clubhouse market. My friend BT, a DJ, did an NFT drop in this environment, too, and it went extremely well for him. It’s definitely worth looking into these new markets and seeing whether they can give you better access to a wide range of potential community members, influencers and partners.

Making the Most of NFT Promotion

Promoting your NFT is a mandatory part of making them successful. However, it’s important to remember that the old-fashioned forms of advertising might not work out for something so fresh and modern. You’ll need to think about how you’re going to create something that works in the long-term to drive community engagement and passion.

Looking to level up your NFT game even further? Book your FREE NFT marketing plan to help make your NFTs a success. 👇

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This topic originally appeared on our Leveling Up YouTube channel, where you can find tons more videos on all things digital marketing, like SEO, content marketing, NFTs, web3, paid media, email marketing, growing your business, and much more! 

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