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Apr, 2022Apr 27, 2022
How to Use NFTs to Boost Your Brand
The digital marketing landscape is becoming more and more competitive as businesses are increasingly investing in digital assets and adopting digital strategies to promote their brands.
As the competition to stand out online continues to grow, companies large and small are turning to Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to stay ahead of the curve.
When it comes to using NFTs to boost your branding, the possibilities are endless. Though NFTs were not originally created for advertising purposes, they turned out to be an incredibly versatile marketing tool.
Businesses can use NFTs to create unique brand experiences, promote brand awareness, encourage customer interaction, build a buzz around their brand and new product launches, and so much more.
Global brands like Nike and Coca-Cola are among the many companies using NFTs as a marketing strategy. However, many emerging, largely unknown, companies have also been wildly successful in using NFTs to boost their brands, sometimes overnight.
Read on to discover 5 effective ways you can use NFTs to boost your branding.
How do NFTs Work?
Before we dive into NFT marketing tactics, let’s first answer the question - what are NFTs and how do they work?
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are unique digital assets that are created, sold, and traded using blockchain technology. NFTs can exist as any variety of digital asset forms, including digital images, audio files, videos, and more.
But NFTs aren't just for visuals artists: almost anything can be turned into an asset, making it an incredible resource for marketing yourself or your brand. Creativity with NFT is endless, and finally, you can now give value to your digital product of any form, from visuals to audio, digital real estate and so on.
When something is “non-fungible”, it means it is one-of-a-kind and can’t be replaced, much like a rare collector’s item or an antique family heirloom.
NFTs are created on a blockchain platform through the process of minting. When an NFT is minted, it receives its own unique ID and distinct metadata.
Every NFT has a unique ID and distinct metadata that differentiates it from every other NFT in existence.
Newly minted NFTs can also be given smart contracts, allowing them to be assigned ownership and traded or sold on a blockchain marketplace.
How to Use NFTs to Boost Your Branding
Since NFTs are a relatively new tool for digital marketing, innovative ways of using them for branding are popping up week after week.
This insight details just 5 of the many ways businesses are using NFTs to boost their brand, it includes:
- Turning physical products into NFTs
- Partnering with NFT artists to create branded digital collectibles
- Tokenizing events: admission tokens
- Organizing NFT contests and giveaways
- Licensing
#1 - Turning physical products into NFTs
One of the most common and straightforward ways of using NFTs to promote your brand is to turn your company’s physical products into NFTs.
The process is simple. It involves creating a digital version of your brand’s product and then minting it as an NFT. You can then distribute your newly minted NFT in a variety of creative ways to your target audience.
As a practical example, imagine a clothing brand employing this strategy. One approach might involve turning one of their fashion pieces into an NFT and selling it as an avatar or in-app purchase for an online gaming service.
NIKE recently made headlines for jumping into the NFT space when it acquired RTFKT – a virtual shoe company that makes NFTs and sneakers for the metaverse. NIKE described its investment in the RTFKT brand as an effort to extend NIKE’s digital footprint and capabilities.
With its acquisition of RTFKT, NIKE plans to drop a line of digital sneaker and branded fashion collectibles for apps and online gaming services.
After the announcement, NIKE and RTFKT saw a huge surge in media coverage and a rise in their stock prices. Both brands trended on twitter for days and their remains a high level of anticipation for what comes next as a result of the acquisition.
#2 - Partnering with NFT artists and influencers
Partnering with NFT artists is another highly effective method of using NFTs to boost your branding. It’s a lot like using social media influencers to market your products and services.
The idea here is to find and partner with NFT artists who have a large following, ideally one that consists of your target customer. There are a growing number of wildly popular NFT artists who go viral every time they publish a new NFT.
You can partner with these popular NFT artists and use any number of auctioning sites to promote your brand and services. The benefit here is two-fold. One, you drive revenue through the auction and sale of your NFTs. Secondly, you can feed off the popularity of your NFT partner to spread the word about your company and attract customers.
#3 - Tokenizing events: admission tokens
By using NFTs as admission tickets, you can offer unique experiences to your customer base that will help them remember your brand well-after the event ends.
This strategy involves selling your company’s minted NFTs as tickets of admission to your company’s various events.
For example, a business could sell NFTs as tickets to a webinar they are hosting. The added value here is huge, since attendees will walk away from the webinar with a one-of-a-kind digital collectible that symbolizes your brand.
#4 - Organize NFT contests and giveaways
The fourth and final strategy on our list is organizing contests and giveaways with NFTs as prizes. This works well because NFTs are trending worldwide and have generated a lot of interest from everyday people who don’t even know exactly what NFTs are. But, they’d love to have one.
This strategy involves minting a NFT that represents your brand, and holding a contest that requires contestants to interact with your company somehow in order to win the NFT.
As with every tactic on our list, the details of the contest are completely up to you and could take any number of forms. One example would be to require contestants to upload a photo or video to social media of them using your product in a creative way and tagging your company in their post.
#5 - Licensing
One mistake we often see is when brands try to go directly on NFT with the scope of making some easy money without having a proper market strategy able to give value: NFT is all about creating a community with values for members. But how can we do this?
One of the many tactics could be licensed to help others generate NFT utility and increase NFTs’ sales and their value. Buyers will have the opportunity to make a percentage of all their licensed items, for example on a "print-on-demand" sales strategy.
Once a member buys an NFT, then he/she will license it back to UP (at no cost) and put it in your own “e-commerce” platform. The brand will build a marketplace within its NFT platform.
The NTF artwork will be licensed for a sort of “Print On Demand” e-commerce activity. The profits from the license revenue will be divided between the brand and the NFT owners.
NFT is all about creating a dual profit-sharing economy; this will help you or your brand have a captive audience and amplify the potential NFT sales by creating values for the community.
Using NFTs to Boost Brand Awareness is the Future of Digital Marketing
NFTs are gaining more and more traction within the social psyche. Their popularity and market value are expected to surge in the coming years, making them ripe for emerging marketing strategies.
You can use NFTs to boost your branding by turning physical products into NFTs, partnering with NFT artists, using NFTs as event tickets and contest prizes, licensing your virtual assets and any other method you can imagine: the sky is your limit.
The important thing is to get in on the action now to reap the full benefits of being an early adopter of NFT branding strategy.
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