NFTs are reshaping the internet and taking a closer look at digital assets and content such as blog posts, images, videos, audio files, and more. As a result, businesses all over the world are diving into the NFT space in order to gain an early adopter advantage and capitalize on what is quickly becoming a long-term trend that is here to stay.
NFTs are being used for everything from monetization to novel forms of marketing, and everything in between. In this post, I’ll discuss five different ways you can use NFTs to increase brand awareness.
What exactly are NFTs?
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are one-of-a-kind digital items or assets that can be traded on specialized platforms such as OpenSea and other NFT marketplaces powered by crypto exchanges. They’re similar to crypto-collectibles, but instead of just owning them for their novelty value, you can use them to do things in the real world or the metaverse.
Non-fungible describes a token’s quality of being unique and impossible to replace, similar to an irreplaceable work of art or your home’s furniture, which is also unique in other ways.
Consider a digital image asset.
Because of their uniqueness, NFTs are ideal for tracking and accounting for digital assets, but they are also ideal for representing any type of asset ownership, both physical and digital.
How do NFTs function?
NFTs are digital assets that exist in the Ethereum blockchain as smart contracts and can be used to represent real-world assets such as cars or art. Through minting, they record ownership information for an asset as well as other metadata on the blockchain. This blockchain is a tamper-proof decentralized electronic ledger that cannot be altered after it has been recorded.
The uniqueID and other metadata of a token are used to keep track of who owns an NFT. These bits and pieces of information are unique to each token, making them one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable. Smart contracts are used to assign ownership, manage token transferability, and add NFTs to the Ethereum blockchain when they are minted.
When an NFT’s owner sells their NFT, they use a private key to authorize the transaction, and ownership is transferred once the private key’s authenticity is verified in the blockchain. This avoids the need for trust between the two parties involved, as well as the need for a central authority or another third party to verify the legitimacy of each claim.
How to Use NFTs to Increase Brand Awareness
Firms are increasingly relying on NFTs because they can represent anything from digital sketches and photos to podcasts, videos, and any other form of creative work.
Furthermore, the underlying smart contracts can be used in a variety of other ways, providing tokens with unique features and characteristics that add value.
As a result, new brand storytelling and audience interaction methods, such as the ones listed below, have emerged, allowing businesses to use NFTs to increase brand awareness.
1. Event tokenization: Admission tokens
Gary Vaynerchuk is a businessman, author, public speaker, and influencer from Belarus. He has been experimenting with NFTs in order to increase awareness of his personal brand. He’s done it in a unique way by tokenizing events, i.e., by minting NFTs that also serve as admission tokens for various workshops and conventions he organizes.
Using tokens for event admission is a simple way for anyone to use NFTs to increase the number of people who interact with his brand.
Assume you own a marketing agency and want to increase brand awareness. One way to accomplish this is to hold regular workshops, courses, meetups, or any other type of event that your prospective clients might enjoy.
Then you create a series of NFTs (which could be any type of digital asset such as images, audio recordings, video, etc.), possibly collectible, and add a condition to the contract granting the owner access to that event.
Those interested can purchase the NFT to gain access to the event while also acquiring a piece of unique digital art or something more related to your specific industry.
2. Use NFTs to capture key moments in your brand’s history
Some brands have a rich and exciting brand history that they can preserve as a digital image, video, audio file, and so on. You can then mint those assets as one-of-a-kind NFTs and sell them to your brand’s fans and customers.
This is a new type of storytelling that has a significant impact on brand awareness because users walk away with a piece of your brand’s history; additionally, it has the potential to generate revenue for your business.
Similar to what Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey did with his first tweet, which he sold as an NFT for nearly $3 million. Aside from the monetary value, this transaction made headlines around the world, attracting attention from all angles.
3. Convert physical goods into NFTs
Create digital versions of your brand’s individual products and mint them as NFTs as another way to spread the word through NFTs. These digital assets can then be sold as avatar clothing in online games or distributed in various ways across the internet.
You can also try minting new products that you haven’t yet marketed to get a feel for the market and understand how they’ll perform in the real world.
Many large corporations, including Nike, Gucci, and Coca-Cola, have conducted successful experiments with this NFT use case. Gucci and Nike’s products are ideal for this type of strategy, whereas Coca-Cola chose to mint branded apparel instead of minting soft drinks.
Users typically purchase these NFTs with Ethereum or another cryptocurrency and display them in virtual environments where they meet and interact.
4. Set up NFT contests and giveaways
NFTs are quickly becoming a thing, and many people see them as a way to diversify investments, which explains their popularity. This allows you to attract large crowds to your brand by giving away unique and collectible NFTs for free or as part of a contest in which users must interact with your brand in some way.
You could, for example, use these NFTs to grant the owner access to a convention or event where your brand will be present, or you could use the tokes to provide one-on-one Q&A sessions with brand representatives, customer service reps, or even partner influencers.
5. Collaborating with NFT artists to develop branded digital collectibles
Strategic alliances are a tried-and-true method of increasing brand recognition. Working with prominent NFT creators and auction sites that already have a large following will help you spread the word about NFTs much faster. Because this is a relatively new development, it is critical to act quickly in order to establish stronger connections that will benefit your business.
Many businesses have begun to employ this strategy, which is similar to influencer marketing in many ways. Some NFT artists are so well-known that almost everything they post goes viral. An NFT sneaker designed by artist FEWOCiOUS for the RTFKT shoe brand, for example, earned $3 million despite the fact that the brand was relatively new and unknown.
What is the future of non-traditional marketing technologies (NFTs)?
NFTs enable brands and marketers with great content or products to create one-of-a-kind experiences on NFT-enabled platforms. Furthermore, they provide the ideal gateway for brands to take their marketing to the emerging metaverses in a simple and scalable manner.
Because of the uniqueness of each token and the ease with which ownership can be verified, NFTs can be used in conjunction with existing marketing strategies, making them more effective and personalized. Furthermore, minting NFTs is a completely new way of repurposing content, with limitless possibilities.
Building brand awareness is just one of the many marketing advantages that NFTs provide. Other applications include creating consistent messages across multiple platforms, incentivizing sales, and developing a valuable online presence.
In conclusion
NFTs are a relatively new type of digital collectible that can be used for marketing, and they have a promising future. There’s no denying that they have the potential to become a critical component of advertising in the near future.
You can capitalize on the current trend by tokenizing events, collaborating with NFT artists, organizing NFT contests, and, in general, following the advice in this post.
Remember that these are just five of the numerous ways to use NFTs in marketing. Aside from brand awareness, NFTs provide a plethora of new and exciting opportunities thanks to the power of smart contracts. If you’re astute, you’re already considering how to incorporate this into your business.
Learn more from NFT and read How to Sell an NFT in 9 Steps.
