Are you an aspiring artist piqued with curiosity? Do you have a body of work that you would like to digitize? Are you just getting started and want a competitive advantage? Then you’re in luck. This article is for aspiring artists or anyone that wishes to create non-fungible tokens or NFTs. It is the ultimate guide on how to market NFT art in 2022.
I am a product designer that’s plunged headfirst into the world of NFTs and blockchain, so you don’t have to. I’ve worked with various industrial, corporate complexes gaining experience and exposure to how products are conjured up and launched in markets. Through my lens, perspectives, and personal involvements, I share tips and tricks on how to market NFT art in 2022 and beyond.
If you’re an artist or creative working individually or with a small team, then this is perfect for you. I’ll cover what it takes to market NFT art. I’ll even cover topics that will help you understand the industry and what you’re facing as you penetrate the market. Plus, as a bonus, there will be tips and tricks to help you along the way.
This is not a sell it fast makes cyber cash and dash explanation. You’ve got the wrong guy and the wrong website. This is a deep dive into the topics you need to know to be successful as an independent artist online or offline. Bing bong, here we go.
Table of Contents
NFTs are business, so is art
First and foremost, to understand how to market NFT art, you’ll need to know that this is business. Therefore understanding the very basics is probably a good start. You don’t need to form a corporation to begin creating NFTs. You can simply make them for fun, but the key concepts that drive markets should be understood.
You can spend years going to school or at least a few hours to watch some videos on the subject. A general understanding is usually a good idea. The more you learn, the more you earn.
For an additional crash course, I’d recommend reading The Ten-Day MBA. This will give you perspective inside the minds of top business leaders, their thinking, approaches, and how business people can validate ideas quickly.
Learning about supply and demand will help you think about creating things you want. If the market’s saturated with profile picture projects, you probably don’t need to make another unless you can come up with something unique.
Taking things a step further by understanding product design and the product design process will give you a firm grasp on how to view your artworks in your business of art. Inspired is a little dry and written from more of a product development process but still highly informative.
In summary, Business 101 will give you a crash course on why people go into business. You don’t need to be a business person, but if you want to take this seriously for the long term, then it’s probably best to think of it that way. The law of supply and demand will help break down the markets’ concepts and how they work. It will help guide you on what to create. Knowing the product design process will provide insight into how products are formed and help when thinking about your NFT art.
What are NFTs, FTs, and SFTs?
If you’re here, then I assume you know something about what an NFT is, but there are now technically four types of tokens, so I’ll go over them briefly:
- NFT (non-fungible token) is not as easily exchangeable for those unaware. NFTs can’t be easily replaced because it’s typically something unique.
- FT (fungible token) is an easily exchangeable item easily replaced by a mutually identical item.
- SFT (semi-fungible token) contains fungible and non-fungible tokens; SFTs are tradable for other identical SFTs.
- Utility NFT (utility non-fungible token) is an NFT with practical applications in business settings and contexts, i.e., domain names.
How to make NFT art
To market NFT art, we need to know how to make NFTs. The simplest way is to create a digital artwork or use an existing digitized one. With that, you’ll upload it to a marketplace like OpenSea and mint a token that can be listed and exchanged. That is the most straightforward, simple path that I can describe.
Now, it’s not as simple as that. You’ve seen all sorts of NFT collections and probably have a billion ideas. Like how to generate ten thousand unique artworks or create interesting in-game items that can be used as a weapon or skin in your favorite first-person shooter. The unfiltered approach is as such.
To make NFT, you need to think about what you’re doing. Why do you want to make an NFT? Is there something interesting about the work you’re currently doing, or do you have an exciting idea? The purpose for this is because you want to give a collector a reason to collect your artwork, even if it is purely aesthetic and for the sole purpose of acquisition.
No matter what you’re doing, graphic design, hand-drawn illustrations, paintings, photography, or audio thought must go into the work. Because there are so many approaches, and I don’t know what you want to do, here is a breakdown of what’s possible. NFTs 101:
- https://danewesolko.com/history-of-nfts/
- https://danewesolko.com/what-are-nfts/
- https://danewesolko.com/types-of-nfts/
- https://danewesolko.com/nft-use-cases/
- https://danewesolko.com/nft-ecosystem/
- https://danewesolko.com/utility-nfts-are-they-whats-next/
Once knowing what’s possible, you can then put pen to paper and develop a direction. If you’re a visual artist, a program like Photoshop may be more native to you. At the same time, an animator might like After Effects. While even still, a musician may only produce MP3s.
One of the critical aspects of creating an NFT is being unique and differentiating yourself from others. Find inspiration and uniqueness in your message. From there, you build upon your narrative. To make an NFT, you can use all sorts of approaches. Find the one that works best for you.
To make NFT art, you need to figure out your approach. You need to determine your target market also. From there, identify the tools and techniques you want to implement your ideas and bake in some form of additional value, if nothing more than pure aesthetics.
How to market NFT art
The real meat and potatoes of this article are around marketing and market-making. How to market NFT art solely relies on your ability or your team’s ability to get to market first and attach ideas to a word in your customer’s minds. If you want to get a good idea of what I mean, I suggest reading the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
In this book, the authors look at marketing for what it is and use those immutable laws to position yourself for success.
Beyond being informed, a demographic to target, and some cool NFT art, all of your time and money should go to marking and promotion. The companies with the biggest pocketbooks and first to a market tend to be the ones we remember the most. If you’re bootstrapping your art business, I completely understand where you’re coming from, as I’m doing the same thing.
I got a lot of value from the following video when trying to figure out how to market NFT art.
Build a community
An NFT community is like an affiliate marketers email list, one of quality and engaged members. Meaning you don’t need the most followers. It’s essential to build genuine relationships. A favorite book of mine, How to Win Friends and Influence Others, is an excellent read on treating people the way you want to be treated.
When building your community, there are several places you can go to connect. Most of the action happens online in server rooms or on social media. Twitter is huge for NFT art. So are Telegram and Discord.
Select the best venues to promote yourself and reach your audience. There are tons. Don’t have to join all of them. Know what purpose each channel plays in your larger plan. Build a strategy for each one. How you interact with your fans on Instagram will be different from how you interact with professionals on LinkedIn. The way you interact also boils down to the content you create.
Create hype and spread the word
I’ve learned to leverage industry leaders’ ideas for those out there their own. Gary Vaynerchuk is a big-time marketer who gives excellent information to young budding entrepreneurs. One of his methods mentions documenting your process and uploading as often as possible. He also suggests using long-form content and chopping it up into digestible bits.
Check out this PDF on the topic:
Also, here’s a quick YouTube video:
The reason I bring this up is you’re going to need to get in front of your customers as often as possible in a memorable way. By narrowing your focus and driving in on that idea, you can begin to form a body of marketing material that you can regularly use to promote. This is why I mention planning ahead of time. To market NFT art, a marketing plan keeps you true to your north star.
Pick a marketplace to market NFT art
Check each of the marketplaces and compare their terms of service and fees. Look at the market volume and liquidity. What good is it to list an NFT on a stale or inactive marketplace? Then again, a highly active market could make it harder to produce sales. Do your due diligence.
Ask yourself how the user experience is? Was it easy to understand? Can you quickly list items? Is it clear where to get help? Is the interface familiar, or is it strange?
Finally, does the platform offer any perks for artists when it comes to marketplaces? Some might provide featured space, while others may help with promotion on social accounts.
A foundation to market NFT art
If you look at your NFT art as a business, you can see that it requires attention. Part of connecting with your community is outreach. But, there needs to be a place for people to end up. Creating a website is probably one of the best things you can do when marketing NFT art.
In building your website, try to align your brand image and vision with your online assets. A website acts as a launchpad. It helps with awareness, lead generation, SEO, and more.
With websites, you can create landing pages around your drops to help spread the word. If you get into more advanced marketing techniques, even funnels could be designed to entice sign-ups and engagement. There’s a lot of really cool stuff you could do.
Doesn’t take much to figure out that part of building a community is also building relationships through communication and dialogue. Therefore participating in relevant discussions is one of the single most important things you should do, if nothing at all. That’s where you’re able to share your thoughts, learn from others, answer questions, engage with potential buyers, get feedback from the community and add value to others’ lives. It’s not a place to spam, flood or shill your artwork.
Content marketing and blogging will help with the promotion of your brand. It serves as a communication device between you and your community base. It’s a way to keep your fans engaged and aware of what’s going on. There are a lot of different approaches.
Blogs are great because they are an outlet for engaging and informative content. Articles and posts are also a way for people to get to know you better and see what you’re about. You can establish your name as an artist, rank in search engines for NFT related queries, and rise to the top of people’s minds when it comes to crypto art.
The hardest part of all of this is taking action. It’s only hard because it can seem really overwhelming. When trying to understand all the concepts over the years, it was challenging to grasp all the different parts. Not to mention trying to figure out what’s the best to actually do.
I wish I had learned long ago how to create a project plan for my endeavors. They don’t have to be complex; they just need to outline the vital information. You’ll want to make some form of a project plan for your NFT art project. It can be a great way to build a schedule around the systems you might need to run your NFT business if you’re doing this alone. Or, if you have a partner, it’s a great way to make sure everyone is sharing the same vision.
Create a plan for your marketing strategies too. Earlier I mentioned that it’s essential to consider the venues you want to market on. You need to do for each of these venues to recognize the audiences and how they’re used to engaging with similar kinds of accounts.
If you start to put all this in place, you’ll have different types of content and ways you post that content. It’s best to plan out how you’ll do this and try to create templates or time savers. This will allow you to develop a bank of content that you can pull from or even schedule ahead of time.
When you’re thinking about content for your marketing plan, try to develop ideas that cover the stages of the buyer’s journey. Those stages are what people go through when considering what, how, and if they’ll buy again. The four stages of the buyer’s journey are:
- Trigger and Awareness (Learning)
- Consideration (Comparison)
- Conversion (Purchase)
- Delight and Advocate (Praise)
- Trigger and Awareness
During the Trigger and Awareness phase, the customer learns about the space. They might be new and just finding their way. Their knowledge might be limited to many nuances involved in cryptocurrency and NFT art. This is a great time to be a friend and show them. Share what you know. Make it easy for them to understand. Give them the information you found helpful on your way up. The best content you can create is educational and informative.
Once people are aware of your art and your brand, they enter into a phase where they begin to consider making a purchase, or the Consideration phase. At this time, they’ve become more informed but maybe still trying to sort things out. They might be looking for a more personal relationship with you and your work. They also may be looking for deeper information on the space and how to get involved.
When a buyer is ready to make a purchase, they’ve entered the Conversion phase. You’ve become their homie; they trust you and like what you stand for. Your vision is clear to them and made evident by your actions. At this point, they’re ready to part ways with some $ETH. Make sure to reinforce why people should be buying from you. Make sure they understand your approach and that this is an investment. This could also be a time to add some extra value to your NFTs by way of unlock-able content or utility. Both help add an extra layer to why people should buy your digital assets.
What keeps businesses in business are repeat customers and continued sales. Suppose your goal is to make NFT creation a legit income source. In that case, you’ll definitely want collectors to keep collecting your productions. This is why I imagined you’re reading a post on how to promote your NFT art. Therefore create some way to keep engaging with your customers. Find ways to reach out to people who have already bought. Keep getting them involved.
The best content solves some sort of a problem and provides the reader with added value. Many things can be considered added value, so don’t let that hold you back. Pure entertainment can be added value. So can a tutorial on how to create layer masks in Photoshop. Google is great for searching for topics and keyword activity.
You’ll be able to see if people are interested. Aside from that, some sites allow you to enter topics. They’ll provide visualization or a list with high-level search queries. Finding content topics on sites like Quora is a good idea. People are asking all sorts of questions there. With the upvoting feature, it can be easy to see what posts are getting attention.
When posting to your social media channels using hashtags correctly. Make sure you check the hashtags. Bots sometimes are set to fire when specific hashtags are mentioned. You should also put a hashtag or two in your profile bios.
Being a guest is a great way to get your name out there. Content creators are constantly looking for other artists to promote on their networks. It can be straightforward to reach out to websites or podcasts looking for submissions. Guest posts are fantastic for this too. It offers blog owners free content and promotes your NFT project.
It’s effortless to pitch your content for consideration: just send an email to the address that appears on their website.
Here are some more advanced methods on how to promote your NFT art. All of the methods mentioned earlier and tips are the bedrock for your efforts. They should be done first. If you want to start building on that foundation, then some really great ways to even further reach your audience are listed.
Email has increased significantly in preferred contact methods, especially for younger audiences. Emails and email marketing are great ways to keep your users engaged. They’re also perfect ways to welcome new users to your community, inform them about your NFT projects and send them unique and exciting content.
Press releases are tried and true. Businesses of all shapes and sizes use them to build awareness about their brands, products, services, and product releases. Press releases about your artwork are fantastic ways to reach relevant communities interested in artwork and cryptocurrencies. There are a lot of services out there to help you with this.
What better way to build your brand than with the help of others. Collaborating on projects can be a fantastic idea for promoting your artwork to the community and leveraging the community of those you’re collaborating with. It’s also a great way to use cross-platform tactics allowing you to mint and sell your NFT art on various marketplaces.
One of the hottest topics in the crypto art space is the addition of utility with your digital asset. It has to be my favorite part of the entire process as well. It’s a way to take your product to the next level. You can embed all sorts of cool stuff with your NFT. Therefore there are endless possibilities as to what you can do here. An example is Beeple’s book and what he did to create physical art from the NFT.
A topic for your ethics professor and a technique used in digital marketing. Crowd- marketing is a method of creating another account, so you can provide links to your drop and tell about yourself as if on behalf of someone else. I’ve never done this. I don’t encourage it, but it’s a tactic nonetheless.
Getting featured on a marketplace homepage is the crème de la crème of all advanced tactics. If you can get featured, it will boost your brand’s awareness significantly. It takes a lot of time and effort to get featured, but you can reach out to marketplaces directly. They may have opportunities in a place like getting featured in their newsletter.
Paid advertising and promotion work. If you have a budget for it, paid advertising can give you a boost over the competition. Be sure to set a daily budget. You don’t want to get screwed. Make sure to revise your keywords regularly as well. Sites like Outbrain and Taboola can help you reach NFT specific audiences. Always keep an eye out for scams and fake promos. There are a ton of them. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Most importantly, and in addition to all of this, become a collector. If you want to support the community, give back by buying artwork that you like. When I start making my first sales, I know I’m going on the hunt for new and exciting pieces. Until then, I’ll create, save my $ETH, share my insight and keep helping the community grow.
In concluding how to market NFT art
Wrapping up, we covered that you need to be unique, have a way to stand out, identify an audience, build a community, figure out what part of the market you can address, lay a foundation, have a plan for scale, have a marketing plan, consistently execute on that plan, tweak and adjust as you go along, keep adding value, interact and engage with the community, share and provide insight, nurture your relationships, reach out for help where needed and always stay focused on your goals no matter how hard they might seem.
Tips:
- Ask for help
- Build a team
- Learn often
- Accept failure
- Think big
- Be fearless
Need help with smart contracts or NFT collections?
If you’d like to collaborate on a project or are interested in assistance feel free to reach out.
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