NFT Marketing Guide | How to Promote your NFT When You’re Not An Influencer

Believe it or not, the rise of the Non-Fungible Tokens gave birth to a new type of marketing – NFT marketing. And in some aspects, it’s nothing new, yet in others, it’s something completely different.  

Think of it like this: from an outside perspective, NFTs look like nothing but a bubble with hyperinflated prices. Most of them have no intrinsic value and no real utility.  

Yet, that’s the case for many products in the mainstream markets, not just artwork.  

However, in a free market, value is determined by supply and demand, which makes the whole economy run efficiently.  

And like in most products, a carefully crafted strategy, brand identity, and communication can gather an entire community around an NFT collection, which will start putting value to it. 

An NFT is…

An NFT is a cryptocurrency token unique in value that is not interchangeable with any other NFT, even if it belongs to the same collection. 

In essence, NFTs are unique assets that can consist of works of art, ownership titles, and of course, collectibles. But the true value of non-fungible tokens comes from the ability to store the data regarding ownership over an asset, so their potential goes far beyond a picture on a blockchain. In the online games world, it’s not rare for a game to close down, reset, or make a change leading to users losing their hard-earned (sometimes even bought) items. And problems as such can be easily prevented through NFTs. 

But aside from games, Decentraland has shown the crypto world that real estate can be tokenized just as well. Yes, Decentraland is a virtual world, but it is only a matter of time before some clever real estate developers and agents will realize they can create NFTs for the property they’re selling. And thanks to how much smart contracts have evolved, you can even include in them the data from the purchasing contract.  

Speaking of smart contracts, although in the beginning, Ethereum’s ERC721 token standard was the main type of smart contract used in creating NFTs, now more and more networks support their creation and the transaction. Some of the most popular alternatives are Solana, Polygon, and Crypto.com.

Top 5 NFT marketplace platforms

The creation and distribution of the NFT collection are more straightforward than ever, thanks to the NFT marketplace platforms.

Not only can you get right to selling your NFTs from the start, but many marketplaces even allow lazy minting. That means that you don’t have to write a single line of code but simply upload your NFTs and pay the transaction fees (minting included) the first time you sell them.

However, although the most popular platforms have the most traffic and activity, not all of them may suit your plan. So, it’s important to check which one of those hot marketplaces best suits your project’s needs.

OpenSea

OpenSea is the leading NFT marketplace offering a listing of over 20 million assets. Besides art NFTs, OpenSea offers a wide variety of utility, VR, and music NFTs, even domain names.

From Bored Apes to Decentraland parcels, almost any NFT is available there. The platform currently integrates 3 chains: Ethereum, Polygon, and Klaytn. However, you can only lazy mint collections on Ethereum and Polygon.

Connecting to OpenSea is quite user-friendly as well. There isn’t a complex sign-up process but a simple connection with your wallet to read the token attribution. There are 13 wallets supported, including Metamask, Coinbase Wallet, Wallet Connect, and Fortmatic.

Crypto.com

At base, Crypto.com is a payment, trading, and financial services company that offers a cryptocurrency trading mobile app and web application built on top of its own decentralized, open-source blockchain.
The platform has grown exponentially and is now one of the market’s top competitors, even as an NFT marketplace.

The Crypto.com DeFi Wallet supports Crypto.org Chain NFTs on the Crypto.org Chain, as well as ERC721 and ERC1155 NFTs on the Ethereum network. However, the Crypto.com NFT platform is quite exclusive. First, you have to create a dedicated account, verify your identity, then submit an application.
After the application, if you become an approved creator, you’ll be notified by email.

Yet, Crypto.com does not guarantee a response to your application, as they will only respond to successful candidates.

Axie Marketplace 

Axie Marketplace is the platform where players and investors buy/sell any NFT related to the Axie Infinity video game.  

The game, as well as the NFT marketplace, runs on Ethereum. And although Axie Infinity is an account-based platform, access to the Axie Infinity Marketplace is also facilitated through other applications and platforms, such as MetaMask and Binance.  

The NFTs do have certain utility in the game, making them easier to sell, yet you can’t just go on the Axie Marketplace and decide to sell your own personalized collection. The whole marketplace is centered around the game, so customization goes as far as the environment’s parameters allow. 

KnownOrigin

KnownOrigin is one of the fastest-growing Ethereum NFT marketplaces out there. You can simply connect to the platform through one of the wallet browser extensions accepted by the website.  

Currently, the most recommended option is MetaMask.   

It’s important to notice that KnownOrigin is an art-focused NFT marketplace, so you can start buying NFTs as soon as you connect your wallet to the platform.   

Yet selling is a bit more complicated.  

To upload and sell NFTs there, you have to create an artist account. To do that, after creating a profile and verifying your social media, you must submit an Artist account application in order to get your account enabled.  

Once enabled, you can upload and sell art without a problem in the primary market. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that KnownOrigin requires that the art be your own, and you mustn’t upload it on any other marketplace. 

SuperRare

SupeRare is another Ethereum digital art marketplace where artists can sell their collections.
The platform integrates with the Metamask, Fortmatic, and Wallet Connect extensions, yet you have to create an account associated with the wallet address manually.

Also, you must submit an artist profile before you can upload and sell NFTs.
And like KnownOrigin, SuperRare also requires you not to upload your art on other marketplaces.

What is NFT marketing and how to approach it?

As mentioned in the beginning, NFT marketing is not that different from regular marketing, yet it has some particularities that can bite you if not taken into consideration. At the end of the day, you’re trying to sell something hardly tangible to an audience that must see value to your project in order to make a purchase.  

But nowadays, thanks to the internet and the way crypto works, you don’t have to be a renowned world-class artist to sell NFTs.   

So, in the next section, we’ll propose a plan for adapting your crypto marketing strategy to increase your NFT project’s success.

Choose the right NFT platform 

An NFT marketplace is ultimately a middleman. Yet, we have to recognize the interest the crypto community pays to them. Furthermore, they facilitate the creation, distribution, and transaction of NFTs.
And as you’ve seen by now, they can differ from one another quite a lot. Some are very easy to access, and some are rather exclusive.

For example, OpenSea is the easiest to access but a lot of junk flows in the marketplace and is a lot harder to surface.

On the other side, Crypto.com is known to work with celebrities launching NFTs and keeping the NFT inflow under control. So it can be easier to be discovered organically.

KnownOrigin and SuperRare are somewhere in the middle. It’s significantly easier to create an artist account on them. However, you may have to apply on several identical marketplaces and wait for the first approval, as they are known to leave requests pending for quite some time.

And there are ecosystem-centered marketplaces like Axie Infinity that trade useful NFTs but are limited in diversity. The Axie Marketplace is certainly not the place to sell your own art collection.

Once you decide on the platform, the next step is to understand the users’ dynamic. Simply said, look at how the community works and what it wants. Find out what sells, what gets reactions, and what is trending.

Create a profile and a brand

No matter the NFT marketplace platform, make sure to complete your profile and add the necessary information that shows commitment.  

In terms of branding, you’ll need to:  

• Come up with an original, unitary creator name;  
• Create a logo and a banner; 
• Create an enticing description;  
• Describe the NFT roadmap if it’s the case;  
• Add links to your social media profiles and website. 

It’s essential to establish a defined identity as a creator so that potential buyers can associate the NFTs with a real person or a team.   

The better the identity, the lower the chance of being considered a hit-and-run scammer.  

Structure your collection wisely

First and foremost, the collection must have a unitary theme. Although the NFTs will differ from one another, they must have one predominant element that gathers them.  

Check how Yuga Labs’ Bored Apes and Mutant Apes are structured for reference.  

Furthermore, creating a description or a story around your NFTs will pay off in the long run.  

Last but not least, put in the time to name the NFTs and write in their proprieties accordingly. And if you can offer unlockable traits that can be accessed through your own website, it’s even better.  

Raise the floor price

If you’re looking to get into the NFT market, it’s important to realize that few people buy NFTs because they like them. Like most crypto enthusiasts, the buyers purchase NFTs to make a profit.  

In the beginning, nobody could know if a collection would get popular or not. Yet, you can apply the raising floor price strategy to incentivize early purchases.   

Write in the collection’s description that you’re going to raise the base price as time passes. Establish 3 to 5 stages and point out the exact dates when you will increase the prices.  

Draw in your audience  

Finally, the day you mint your NFT collection, and even before that, you’ve got to make sure that more and more NFT enthusiasts hear about your collection.  

Your collection needs increasing activity to succeed in the NFT market. 

So, in the following section, we’ll describe 6 proven cryptocurrency digital marketing approaches to draw in your audience and generate that activity. 

Proven NFT marketing approaches to draw in your audience

1. Use airdrops to stir up activity  

Many NFT marketplaces will push trending NFTs on the front page, like on social media. The algorithms may vary, but the collections that register many transactions will definitely trend.

And as your NFTs get more activity, more investors can stumble upon them organically while looking on the marketplace platform. Therefore, you have to start by generating those transactions. And through airdrops, you might even find yourself a few people to spread the word about your project.

Of course, in the beginning, on platforms like OpenSea, you may feel tempted to generate transactions by using several MetaMask wallets that you own. You’ll still support the costs of minting and sending the NFTs, but your project may start looking suspicious. You can only go so far with fake transactions before potential buyers start raising questions about the legitimacy of your project.

How so? The transaction history is publicly available for every NFT.

2. Use influencer marketing  

If you start from scratch in terms of audience, it might be a good idea to make use of an established influencer’s audience. Once you set up your brand identity and finish the core of your project, preferably some of the NFTs as well, you can reach out to influencers addressing this topic particularly.  

Preferably, it would be best to get big names to talk about you, but that can get quite expensive. Therefore, you can start by contacting more niched influencers who are more likely to consider reviewing your project live.   

A good example of such an influencer is Hustle Millennial.   

3. Employ social media communication & community building  

To ensure the longevity of your project, you must build a social media audience. To do that, you can start making use of tags for every social media post you publish.

Be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, the following tags should expand your reach to an NFT curious audience: #nft, #nfts, #nftart, #nftartist, #nftcollector, #nftcollectors, #nftcommunity, #nftproject.

However, depending on the network you mint your NFTs on, you should also include contextual tags such as: #polygonnft, #ethnft, #bnbnft, #solnft, #solananft.

In terms of what to post, you can start by describing your project, posting images of your NFTs, and even announcing every time an NFT is sold.

4. Launch Advertising Campaigns  

Generally, advertising NFTs is not that simple, as the big advertising platforms will block your ads.  

However, you can still make use of a crypto ad network like Coinzilla. Through Coinzilla’s Bitcoin ad network, you can place display ad banners on top cryptocurrency websites worldwide and get the word out there while still controlling the costs.  

5. Publish Guest articles   

Besides ads, you can also get the news out there about your article by having reputable websites publish about your project.   

Yes, it can be troublesome to find the website admin and convince him to write about you, but with the Coinzilla Marketplace, you don’t have to worry about that.  

You simply select the website you want to appear on and make an order. As for the article, it will be provided by Coinzilla’s copywriting team.  

6. Set up your SEO  

Last but not least, you need to make use of Google’s organic search results.   

The effort to rank for a generalist keyword like NFT would be incredible and costly. Even more, it’s unnecessary.  

The least you should do is make sure that your website and marketplace collection rank for the brand’s name and collection’s name.  

You simply have to fill in the title forms and description for the marketplace. The platform will allocate the tags afterward.  

As for your website, make sure to take care of the bases: links, titles, h1 tags, h2 tags, and a few keywords in the text.  

If you do that, SEO will pay off really well once your NFTs gain some traction. 

Key takeaways 

• A Non-Fungible Token is a cryptocurrency token that is not fungible. That means that the token is unique in value and is not interchangeable with any other NFT, even if it belongs to the same collection.  
• Some of the most notorious NFT marketplaces are OpenSea, Crypto.com, Axie Marketplace, KnownOrigin, and SuperRare.  
• In order to succeed with your NFT project, you should choose the right NFT platform, create a profile and a brand, structure your collection wisely, raise the floor price, and ultimately draw in your audience.  
• To effectively draw in your audience, you can use airdrops to stir up activity, use influencer marketing, employ social media communication & community building tactics, launch advertising campaigns, publish guest articles, and set up your SEO.