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The ultimate guide on how to promote your NFT art in 2021

If you’re here then you’re a creator like myself looking to figure out how to promote your NFT art. Recently joining the community, I’m super excited by the process and prospect of creating work for an audience eager to look. It can be really difficult to stand out in a crowded space. As an attempt to build a marketing plan for my website and NFT art I came up with this ultimate guide as a way to share what I’ve learned with you.

NFT basics.

There are so many talented artists popping up each day. It can be really hard if you don’t know how to stand out. As an artist nothing is more rewarding than knowing someone appreciated your work. The only way they can appreciate it is to get your work in front of them. But, if you don’t know anything about marketing you may not even know where to begin.

The NFT community is one of the coolest I have ever been a part of. I have no clue what’s really going on behind the scenes but I do know that everyone I’ve encountered has been really chill and willing to help. Here are some of the best tips, ideas and approaches I found on how to promote your NFT art. Let’s explore.

Be Unique

Clearly you wouldn’t be doing this if you weren’t creating something uniquely your own, right? 

Art is a self expression and an exploration of feelings and techniques. Whether an artist makes a statement about their work, or not, at the time of creation feeling and energy are released. Each piece tells a story. That story builds a larger narrative.

This is probably the biggest factor in success. You can have a phenomenal marketing plan and execute on it well but if your work is shit and a rip off of someone else’s people will see. People will take note and you will not reach the levels you wish. This is what’s great about the NFT community. They keep you honest. That’s not to say that you can’t get inspired from others. There’s nothing wrong with sampling. But stealing, don’t.

In order to differentiate yourself from others, tell a story. Have a strong and interesting idea. What do you want to create? What topics do you want to explore? Are you down from a breakup? Excited by crypto and innovation? Angry with political leaders? These are all places to find inspiration and uniqueness in your message. From there you can build upon your narrative. 

An aspect often overlooked is your technical implementation. How did you go about creating? What methods and or techniques were used? Is information clearly documented and available for others to view in an easy to understand way? Share part of your process and show others how you take a unique approach to creating NFT artwork.

The way you package and present your artwork ties heavily to how you brand your projects and or company. It’s how people recognize you from others. When you are presenting your work be sure to show others why they should buy it. Give them a glimpse into how often you create, the size of your collections, the stories and subject matter behind them. Allow them to be a part of the whole experience. That’s what makes it so personal. That’s what makes it art.

Identify your audience

One of the harder parts of the marketing process is determining your audience. This can be really tricky when trying to figure out how to promote your NFT art. It’s simple though. In product design we use a deliverable called a user persona to help shape our ideas. A user persona is a representation of our target user or segments. It’s a way to remain empathetic to their needs.

The same holds true for your NFT artwork or any other products you might be marketing. You have to identify your target audience or segments to figure out who will be interested in your work. The right message to the wrong group equals the wrong results. To better understand who might be interested in your work and what your target audience might look like start by listing your general interests.

For myself I am interested in a variety of topics ranging from product design, crypto, cars and more. I created a spreadsheet to come up with ideas and listed out all the things that get me going. Had to take Ariana Grande off that list since she’s married now. Anyway, you get the point. Spend a little time thinking about yourself. Gather some ideas. 

I’ll stop here. If any of what I said sounds overwhelming it can be and that’s ok. Just absorb for now and come back for specifics later. A tip I learned a long time ago is just remember where you put the answer and how to find it. 😉

Now you can build customer profiles. Customer profiles are like personas I mentioned earlier. They’re tools that let Marketers look at different elements to determine where the market might be, what it might look like, motivators and reasons to buy. It’s a lot of information and can cover a broad range of things. Some of the higher level topics used to build customer profiles are geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral.

Geographic

Geographic information refers to local, state, region, nation or climate. Think of the different platforms and environments as geographical information online as well as the crypto community in your current and surrounding areas.

Demographic 

Demographic information typically covers age, race, religion, gender, income, family, occupation, education and marital status. It’s literally your ideal customer. You can use demographic information to build profiles on businesses. If you’re trying to market your products to large companies you may consider customer pool, employee count, products and or revenue. 

Psychographic

Psychographic information relates to the attitudes, beliefs and emotions associated with a target market. An example could be status. The reason someone would buy is because there’s a perception or appearance of money. The psychographic information associated with your target market is what influences sales. It can also help determine your position in the market.

Behavioral

Behavioral information is associated with the reasons consumers purchase. In business typically these things are brand and customer loyalty, product cost, frequency of use and specific time frames when consumers buy.

In knowing your audience you can start to find ways to connect and build a community.

Build a community

The key is community. One of quality and engaged members. Meaning you don’t need the most followers or the largest email list. You want to work towards cultivating a tribe of people that are interested in you and your work as much as you’re interested in them and theirs. It’s important to build real relationships. People are willing to help if you’re legit as opposed to catching a dollar.

One of my favorite books on this subject is How to Win Friends and Influence Others. Great read on how not to be a douche and actually treat people the way you want to be treated. 

When setting out to build your community there are a number of places you can go to in order to connect. Most of the action is happening online in server rooms or on social media. Twitter is huge for NFT art. So are Telegram and Discord. To get a leg up you can establish accounts on any or all of the following platforms.

Popular Platforms

Make sure to select the best venues to promote yourself and reach your audience. There are tons. You don’t have to join all of them. If you know what purpose each channel plays in your larger marketing plan you can build a strategy for each one. The way you interact with your fans on Instagram is going to be different from the way you interact with professionals on LinkedIn.

Determine your market

Being unique, finding an audience and building a community are only the first steps. The next thing to do is examine the market. You’ll want to take a look at the platforms that you can mint on. There are quite a few of them.  

Before you start minting, check each of the marketplaces and compare their terms of service as well as fees. You’ll also want to 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. Either way do your due diligence. Transaction fees vary for each and range from 2.5% to as high 15%. That can get costly over time. Also, keep gas fees in mind.

Be sure to ask yourself how the user experiences is? Was it easy to understand? Can you easily list items? If you run into trouble is it clear where to get help? Is the interface familiar? Does it resemble an e-commerce marketplace or is it strange? 

Believe it or not these are things we try to account for as product or user experience designers but companies don’t always consider them.

Finally, when it comes to marketplaces, does the platform offer any perks for artists? This could be something cool and worth considering. Some might provide featured space while others may help with promotion on social accounts. Have a look and reach out to them if you have questions regarding how to get involved in any of their programs.

NFT Marketplaces (not an exhaustive list)

Next, understand your TAM or total addressable market. There might be millions of active users but not all those users are going to be your customers. TAM is the figure that represents that total market you can actually reach. If we have 2 million users to work with there might only be 1% of them that like abstract digital art. That’s 20,000 potential customers and if only 1% of that 20,000 converts, that’s 200. Meaning 200 potential sales multiplied by price.

It makes a lot of sense to do some upfront planning and ideation before jumping into the action. This could mean sales or no sales. Fed artist or starving artist.

Lay your foundation

Beyond creating really awesome art, having an audience, a community and marketplaces to sell you need a foundation. 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. That’s why creating a website is probably one of the best things you can do when learning how to promote your NFT art. 

Build a website

There are a lot of different ways to build a website. I won’t cover them all here. If that’s something you’d like please leave a comment. At the core there are really easy D.I.Y. approaches and more complex methods. Either way it will cost time or money. I prefer WordPress personally.

In building your website, first and foremost try to be creative. Align your brand image and vision with your online assets. Have fun. Make sure it represents you. A website acts as a launchpad for your other channels. It helps with awareness, lead generation, search engine optimization 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 created to entice sign ups and engagement. There’s a lot of really cool stuff you could do. 

Participate in discussions

Doesn’t take much to figure out that part of building a community is also building relationships which is done 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

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. 

One of the best pieces of advice I got was to create pillar content or longer form material and then find ways to chop that up into digestible bits of information. There’s a ton of great stuff already on this topic. I’ll share them in the resources section at the end. Doesn’t make sense for me to reinvent the wheel here.

Blogs are great because they are an outlet for content that is engaging and informative. 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.

Take action

The hardest part of all of this is taking action. It’s only hard because it can seem really overwhelming. I know when trying to understand all these concepts over the years in my career it was challenging to grasp how all the different parts went together. Not to mention trying to figure out what’s the best stuff to actually do. 

Failure to plan is planning to fail

What I wish I would have learned long ago is how to create a project plan for my endeavors. They don’t have to be complex. They just need to outline the important information. You’ll want to create some form of a project plan for your NFT art project. If you’re doing this alone it can be a great way to build a schedule around the systems you might need to run your NFT business. 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 important to consider the venues that you want to market on. What you need to do for each of these venues is recognize the audiences and how they’re used to engaging with similar kinds of accounts. Depending on what channels you choose you’ll have different approaches.

Create content that engages

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. What this will do is allow you to create a bank of content that you can pull from or even schedule ahead of time. That takes away a lot of the burden in having to remember to post while also frees up the opportunity for instant creativity.

When you’re thinking about content for your marketing plan try to come up with ideas that cover the stages of the buyer’s journey. Those stages are what people go through when considering what to buy, when to buy, how to buy 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 is learning about the space. They might be new and just finding their way. Their knowledge might be limited to a lot of the nuances involved in crypto currency 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 information you found helpful on your way up. The best content you can create is educational and informative.

Show people about you and your processes so they can get to know who you are. Give them insight as to what NFTs are and where they can learn to create them, sell and even buy them. Help them understand the marketplaces and the subtle nuances associated with them. Compare NFTs, list the best selling NFTs and more. Whatever you can do to evangelize for the industry and your work do it.

Consideration

Once people are aware of your art and your brand they then 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 may be 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.

This is a great time to really dive into potentially exposing your entire workflow in a time lapse or even come up with another way to let people see you create in a more indepth way. This is also a great phase to produce informational products and guides. This is also a wonderful opportunity to share with others and their work. The crypto art community highly encourages teamwork and collectivity. Promote friends, cool works or even a list of top-selling NFTs.

Conversion

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 obvious 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 unlockable content or utility. Both help to add an extra layer to the reason why people should buy your digital assets.

Delight and Advocate

What keeps businesses in business are repeat customers and continued sales. If your goal is to make NFT creation a legit income source then you’ll definitely want collectors to keep collecting your productions. Which 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. 

Some of the best ways you can do this are through live sessions, AMA’s, giveaways, personalized content, exclusive discounts, social media shoutouts, sketches or creative resources used to develop NFTs and so on.

Finding content inspiration

The best content is content that solves some sort of a problem and provides the reader with added value. A lot of 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 there are sites that allow you to enter topics and they’ll provide a visualization or list that has 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 a lot of attention.

Put it all in place

If you’ve made it this far in reading my article, thank you. If you’re still reading you’re ready to put everything we went over on how to promote your NFT art into place. At this point it’s time to start spreading the word. Share your content across your social media channels. 

Use techniques that others have shared in chopping up long form content into smaller digestible bits. Find ways to consistently post throughout the day. But also find ways to consistently post over the weeks. It’s going to take time to get noticed. You’re going to have to delicately balance the fine line between adding lots of value and promoting your work.

Use sites like Reddit. There are threads such as reddit.com/r/CryptoArt. It’s a great place to paste your links. Add your drop to the NFT Calendar or sites like New Drops. Build buzz on social media around your NFT drop. Try a countdown, cryptic teaser posts or even interviews. Host a giveaway. Create incentives around referrals like community or pre-sale access. Share more than just work. Share how your work is put together or what inspires you. Things time-lapses, fragments and previews of details are great.

Hashtags

When posting to your social media channels use 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. The top hashtags right now are:

  • #nft 
  • #nftart 
  • #nftartist
  • #nfts
  • #nftcollector 
  • #nftcommunity 
  • #cryptoart 
  • #cryptoartist 
  • #nftphotography 
  • #nftanimation 
  • #nftvideo 
  • #digitalart.

Tips on how to promote

I hope all of that helps you gain some traction and increases your project’s awareness. If you want to apply some more tactics, you can use some tips and advanced methods. 

Be a Guest

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 really easy to reach out to websites or podcasts that are looking for submissions. Guest posts are awesome for this too. It offers blog owners free content and allows you to promote your NFT project.

Industry Newsletters

It’s very easy to pitch your content for consideration: just send an email to the address that appears on their website.

Advanced methods

Here are some more advanced methods on how to promote your NFT art. All of the aforementioned methods 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 marketing

Email has increased significantly in preferred methods of contact. Especially for younger audiences. Emails and email marketing are great ways to keep your users engaged. They’re also really good ways to welcome new users to your community, inform them about your NFT projects and send them unique and interesting content.

Use public relations

Press releases are tried and true. Businesses of all shapes and sizes use them to build awareness about their brands, products, services as well as product releases. Press releases about your artwork are awesome ways to reach relevant communities interested in artwork and cryptocurrencies. There are a lot of services out there to help you with this.

Collaborate with others

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 a variety of marketplaces.

Create utility

One of the hottest topics right now 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 out of the NFT.

Crowd-marketing

A topic for your ethics professor and a technique that’s used in digital marketing unfortunately. 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.

Get featured

Getting featured on a marketplace homepage is the crème de la crème of all advanced tactics. If you can get featured it’s going to 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 place like getting featured in their newsletter. Alternatively you can list projects on Rarirty.tools or Howrare.is.

Paid advertising

Paid advertising and promotion works. 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.

Become a collector

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. I know when I start making my first sales 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.

Concluding Thoughts

I hope this article is extremely valuable to you and helps you in creating and promoting your NFT art. It’s my aim to share with you what I’ve learned in my career relating to product design and marketing as well as what I’ve learned along those lines relating to crypto art. As I stated many times the community is extremely helpful and giving. I want to make sure I do my part by doing the same. In this article I covered a lot of high level topics and ideas. If any or all if it is confusing reach out to me. I’ll happily chat and try to help. You can find me mostly on Instagram and Twitter.

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 plan for marketing, consistently execute on that plan, tweak and adjust as you go a long, 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.

I’ve included a list of articles and resources that helped shape some of the content in this post. If you’re looking for more information on any of these topics check them out. 

Articles

Videos

Projects examples:

Resources:


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.

2 Comments

  1. Great article…Looking for a NFT marketing solution..! Check out Infinite block tech.

    • glad you enjoyed it! will take a look at what you mentioned. always looking to learn and grow.


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