I. Introduction

Our previous articles looked at how to market your NFTs on Social Media, first with overviews of Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, and Discord and then with a platform comparison.

Next up is a detailed look at how you design a campaign to ‘drop’ your collection of NFTs.

If you have the budget available, there are advantages to outsourcing the work of marketing your NFTs to a specialist agency or contractor. Not only will this save you time, but their knowledge and experience may be more likely to yield better outcomes for your NFT sales. You will also learn much faster about the dos and don’ts.

Options include hiring specialist agencies such as NinjaPromo, FireCask, or Crowdcreate. If your pockets aren’t deep enough to hire a full agency, you should have no trouble finding individual contractors who can help you on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. You may also be able to track down good ideas from watching other users on Discord and Telegram.

Alternatively, you could solicit help from the many influencers in the NFT space like OhhShiny and Crypto Baristas. Adding a recognized name can bring with it significantly improved visibility to your NFT marketing.

There are also free platforms beyond the standard social media channels which can help get your NFTs noticed, such as NFT Calendar and Bitcointalk.

II. Step-by-Step

i. Step 1 – Plan

Mike Tyson once said: ‘Everybody has a plan til they get punched in the mouth’. Fortunately, since we’re dealing with NFTs and not boxing, our plans should hold up just fine, so we recommend taking time to make a detailed one so your drop can go off like clockwork.

Audience

The first step of marketing your NFTs is much like marketing anything – you need to identify your target audience. If you have time, it’s worth collecting data and ideas from all available sources (websites, forums, direct interviews, etc.) but it may be the case that you already have a good sense of who you think your NFTs will appeal to.

If you have the available data and knowledge, you might find it useful to create ‘target personas’ to inform your marketing strategy. A target persona is a fictional person created by you to represent a segment of your target market, and creating them can help to conceptualize how your marketing can appeal to your audience.

Platforms

Choosing the right platforms on which to market your NFTs is vital, so you need to understand what demographics the platforms are geared towards. For example, Discord is largely targeted at gaming audiences, so if your NFTs are gaming-related it’s a great platform to market on, but less-so if you are trying to sell abstract digital art, for which a more demographically diverse platform like Reddit may be better suited.

Competitors

It’s also important to see what your competitors are doing to market their NFTs so you can learn from what they do well, avoid what they do badly, and identify opportunities they might be missing so you can fill the gaps with your own marketing.

Tools

Once you’ve identified your target platforms, you may want to consider the available tools which could help you in execution and analytics. Cross-platform social media marketing dashboards such as Hootsuite could save you time and allow you to focus your efforts.

Where possible, integrate your NFT drop into the marketing platform itself, and in all other cases carefully consider your Calls to Action (CTAs) so as to make the buying process as easy as possible for users.

Ownership

One other important aspect of your drop is to be sure that all the content is yours and you have a right to use it. Any NFTs minted on the AtomicHub can be presented for a ‘best endeavors’ whitelisting. This helps because your collection will appear without a nasty advisory strip, saying it has not been verified.

ii. Step 2 – Schedule

Like all things, marketing takes time, so be sure to give yourself a long enough lead-time before your NFT drops. A minimum recommended cycle for promoting an NFT drop would be one month. You should be posting your marketing content regularly during this timeframe, but not over-saturating your channels.

All the major social media platforms offer tools for scheduling content, so you can develop your content strategy well in advance and implement the automatic schedule you decide upon.

• Know your audience: understanding the peak times for web traffic on your platform and within your relevant region or time-zone (if applicable) is key for both successful marketing and the drop itself
• Check past and upcoming drops: try to identify patterns in the timing of other successful NFT drops, consider avoiding schedule clashes with major upcoming drops so as not to be overshadowed by them
• Make sure you know how your drop is going to blend in with (or clash) with major religious or sports festivals / events (e.g. the World Cup, Ramadan, Christmas Day)
• Ensure adequate time for marketing activities both pre-and post-drop (follow-ups are as important as teaser announcements)
• Pre-write all marketing materials to fit into planned schedule: have all the files, images, and text properly named and alphanumerically sorted so they correspond to the sequence of events so as to minimize human errors
• Always check and check again that everything is ready to roll before you roll: mistakes are extremely boring and time-consuming!
• If you are just starting out it’s perhaps best to keep things simple, and then as you get more fluent in making drops you can add the ‘bells & whistles’

iii. Step 3 – Announce

Once you’ve chosen your channels and outlined a schedule, it’s time to announce your drop! 

Your announcement marketing needs to be eye-catching (there is a lot of competition vying for attention) and it needs to resonate with your target audience. Refer to the announcements of previous successful NFTs in your space for inspiration. 

It is a good idea to build up to your announcement with a ‘sneak peak’ of your NFT, or any other form of interactive content to maximize engagement and chatter. If you have any way to make an interesting livestream event – a party, an exhibition, a concert, a skateboard ride around Time Square – any and all of this helps to focus people’s attention and promotes the vision and personality of your drop.

iv. Step 4 – Build

Now that you’ve announced your drop, you need to monitor, maintain, and build the hype around it to ensure it’s successful. Respond to all engagement (positive or negative), and consider novel strategies such as giveaways and livestreams to boost your visibility.

Again, as part of your research efforts, you should study how other people make drops, and learn any specialist terms of your target demographic. Do they use expletives, or lots of emojis, and, if so, what kind? How are you going to present yourself? Are you going to buck the trend, or will you slide in quietly and follow how everyone else does it until you find your feet?

In general, it is absolutely worth remembering the basic rules of Social Media engagement:

• Make friends with people whose work you like, or whose attitude inspires you
• Don’t start (flame) wars you cannot finish!
• Make no assumptions about other people, what they like, or where they are from
• Enjoy making connections and building relationships
• Be clear and accurate about prices
• Never get so disappointed as to not be able to learn from your mistakes (or successes)

Remember, too, that WAX is a global operation. For instance, if you live in Japan, WAX users in Albania and Costa Rica may well be examining your fantastic collection of NFTs and will contact you directly on, say, your Discord channel.

Ideally, you would be part of a network of other similarly inclined WAX users who agree to help each other across different time-zones, if only to say “Hey! This is a great NFT – they’re asleep at the moment, but will reply when they wake up, don’t worry”.

Otherwise, you can look into the world of ‘bots’ and install a 24/7 365-days a year digital receptionist who takes care of all simple enquiries, and keeps browsing prospects interested.

v. Step 5 – Drop

If you’ve done the rest of the work leading up to it, the drop itself should be a smooth operation. Keep your reactions on-message with all your prepared content and be sure to spread it across all of your selected channels.

If you are dropping a whole collection, you might want to consider offering one NFT in a ‘giveaway’. Typically, you would require users to like and share the post and subscribe to your channel, then you pick a winner at random and send the NFT to their wallet address. This can help to boost your visibility.

vi. Step 6 – Follow-Up

Don’t take your foot off the gas after the drop is complete – keep your content strategy running in order to push sales. That means you need to schedule your drops in a cascade so you start the next drop in the middle of the previous drop. That way you are able to say: “Thanks! If you like these NFTs then maybe you will like my next set of NFTs which are…”. Following up is a longer-term process: it should not be seen merely as a single isolated drop – you are building your entire brand in waves.

III. Summary

Each drop is an individual work of art in itself, and in many ways should be seen as a mechanism that you will need to develop and hone as you move forwards. Social media is amazing and is developing all the time, with some platforms coming up, and some going down. Focus on your own content and enjoy what other people do and your drops will become more fluent and intuitive with time.