How To Build An NFT Following Starting From Zero
The NFT marketing strategy we used to build & sellout our NFT Project
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How To Build An NFT Following With Zero Followers
The NFT marketing strategy we used to launch our NFT collection
MIKE HARRI
UPDATED AUGUST 08, 2022 11:53 AM EST
Hey guys, I’m Mike Harri, the co-founder of blokstreet and Pit Crew NFTs and in today’s video I’m going to share with you how we were able to build a following for our NFT project starting from zero which ultimately led us to selling out our NFT collection when it launched.
As you may know, most people are hoping to make money on the NFTs they buy.
If a project doesn’t have enough demand to sell out their mint, it’s also likely that there won’t be high demand for the collection on the secondary markets.
Which means that the collection will probably end up selling for below mint price.
And those who bought at the mint won’t be making money when they go to re-sell their NFT.
So when NFT buyers are checking out a collection before it launches, they’re trying to judge how much demand the project has and how likely it is to sellout.
And even if it sounds like the project is doing something awesome, most potential buyers will pass on it if they don’t think the project will sell out.
For example, if a project is planning to launch 10,000 NFTs but they only have 500 Twitter followers, potential buyers will see that and think there isn’t nearly enough interest in the project to be able to sell out.
So you run into this problem that’s kinda like when you’re trying to get your first job in an industry but the jobs all require that you already have experience in the industry.
Except the problem is that you can’t get people interested in your project BECAUSE there isn’t much interest in your project.
So what should you do?
The fastest and most cost-effective way that I’ve found to solve this problem is using a two step approach.
The first step is to focus purely on getting the most Twitter followers and Discord users for the least amount of money.
You might think - well duh, Mike of course I want the most followers for the least amount of money.
But not so fast, there’s a tradeoff.
Most of the people you’ll be gaining as followers will be from lower income countries who most likely don’t have the ability to purchase your NFTs.
Now you might be saying “hold on, why would I want to waste my money by marketing to people who can’t afford to buy my NFTs?”
And the reason why is that the value they provide to the project is in their engagement and social proof.
And for every follower you pay to get in the US or UK, you can get 30 for the same price in countries like India, Nigeria, and the Philippines.
And they’re real people, english speaking, and who are interested in NFTs.
Then once we build up a few thousand Twitter followers and Discord members we switch our focus to targeting buyers who have the income to be able to buy our NFTs, which I’ll cover in a minute.
But first, let me cover the 2 main ways we used to get maximum followers for minimum money:
The first was using paid influencers.
When it comes to influencers, you don’t want to use just anyone - even if they have a huge following.
Currently 99% of people in the world still don’t own their first NFT.
Many people still don’t understand NFTs or they think it’s just overpriced monkey pictures and scams.
Those people will get with us eventually, just like the internet nay-sayers in 1995. But right now trying to market your NFTs to those people is a major uphill battle.
You’ll have a much easier time if you focus on marketing your NFTs to people who already buy NFTs - or are at least interested in NFTs.
So that pretty much just leaves you with having to use “NFT influencers”.
There are two main categories of NFT influencers.
The first is those who either don’t do promotions or they are extremely selective about which projects they promote.
These are the influencers who are very concerned with maintaining the trust that they’ve built with their audience.
While getting an influencer like this to promote your project would be great, it’s going to be nearly impossible to convince them to promote a new, unheard of, NFT project.
The second category of influencers should probably just be called promoters.
These are usually anonymous accounts and you’ll have no problem getting them to promote your project as long as you pay their fee.
The obvious problem here is that these promoters don’t have a high level of trust with their audience because they promote new projects constantly.
Another problem with many of these promoter accounts is that most of the followers are bots or inactive accounts.
What I like to do is to go through a few recent tweets from the influencer and look at who is retweeting their posts.
Do they look like real accounts? Do they look like people who are into NFTs? How many of them have NFT profile pics? What's in their bio?
This can give me an indication of the quality of their engaged followers.
Most of the time you’ll find that it’s not very good as far as an audience of people who are going to potentially buy your NFTs.
However, with these types of accounts, you’re not paying Kim Kardashian prices.
Often the cost of a promotion tweet might only be $100 bucks.
And it’s usually very negotiable.
So if the NFTs you’re selling will cost $100, you only need to find one or two buyers to break even on the cost.
And like I said, my main goal of working with promoters like this wasn’t to try to find future buyers, it was to build up our following on Twitter and Discord, so that later on when I marketed to more qualified potential buyers, they wouldn’t just write off the project for having no followers.
The best way that I found to grow your initial following on Twitter and Discord at the same time is to have these promoters post an NFT giveaway.
For someone to enter the giveaway, they need to like and retweet the post, which increases the amount of reach you get, which is the number of people who see your post.
Then they need to follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.
Some of these giveaways would get us over 500 new followers in a day.
So giveaways were one way we were building up our twitter and discord audience numbers…
But the second method we used I like even better than using influencers and that is using paid ads.
We used Facebook and Instagram ads which I found to be a lot more predictable and consistent than influencers.
As we all know, Facebook has an insane amount of data on their users.
If you’re somebody who is interested in NFTs, Facebook knows that.
Recently Facebook removed all interest targeting options that relate to cryptocurrency, which makes things a bit harder when you’re starting from scratch.
Shameless plug: if you work with us to market and launch your NFT project we already have a ton of data built up from targeting NFT buyers, so we already have proven audiences that we can market to and we leverage that data to get your ad campaigns working quickly.
But if you’re on your own and starting with no data, here’s what I’d recommend…
Make sure your ad copy uses the words NFTs. Facebook's algorithm is analyzing your ads and your landing page to try to understand what it is that you’re marketing to serve your ads to the right people.
So give the algorithm all the help you can by making sure it knows your ad is about NFTs.
Target Gary Vaynerchuk as an interest.
Usually works pretty well.
Use video ads to start getting data quickly.
You can get a lot of views cheaply on videos, then you can create custom audiences based off of people who watched at least 25% or 50% or 75% of your ad.
Then you can create lookalike audiences based on those custom audiences.
You’ll also be able to choose which countries to target.
For building up Discord members for as cheap as possible, we use worldwide targeting.
For this type of ad, our call to action would be an invite link to our Discord server.
We were able to get clicks on our ads for 3 cents when running them worldwide.
Not all the clicks convert into new Discord members, but still, it’s a very cheap way to build up Discord members.
Once we had built up a few thousands members in Twitter and Discord we switched to targeting countries with higher incomes who would be more likely to be able to afford our NFTs.
So this would be countries like the US, UK, Canada, Australia and there are many more you can include as well.
Mainly I’m looking for countries that have pretty high incomes, pretty large population sizes, and are english speaking or at least have a decent amount of English speakers.
So we were using these methods to grow our audience, but as our mint date was approaching, I was worried we may not have a big enough audience to be able to sell out our NFT collection...
And it was a valid concern, because leading into our launch we stumbled across a free traffic source that was responsible for selling 6 figures worth of NFTs at our launch.
And without that traffic, our project probably would not have sold out.
If you want to learn what that traffic source was and how you can tap into it, check out this next video.
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