The Opepen open edition NFT art collection skyrocketed in popularity recently. Many web3 projects even minted their own version of the collection. 

NFT marketplaces also hopped on the trend and created collections “for the culture.” Rarible and OpenSea even changed their Twitter handles to RariPepen and OpepenSea to show further support to the collection.

Leveraging trends like these guarantee improved engagement and growth in the short-term for NFT marketplaces. But they don’t help with retention in the long-term as they don’t provide ongoing value.

So, how can NFT marketplaces effectively market themselves? And what are the things they should focus on before they establish their marketing strategies? 

In this article, we share some of the tried and tested NFT marketplace marketing strategies and everything you need to prepare to execute those effectively. Let’s dive in.

What is NFT Marketplace Marketing?

NFT marketplace marketing involves the use of web2 and web3 marketing strategies to attract and retain creators, collectors, and traders to sustainably grow the platform and foster a loyal and engaged community. 

Let’s look at a few of these strategies. 

Post Regularly on Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms host billions of active users, offering a powerful means to instantly connect with a large audience. This opens the doors to the possibility of your content going viral and boosting your website traffic and search engine rankings. 

For these reasons, NFT marketplaces and other web3 projects regularly leverage social media to boost their digital marketing efforts. 

OpenSea’s recent tweet is a great example of social media marketing done right. It amassed massive engagement by capitalizing on the trend sparked by the Opepen NFT project.

It’s also a valuable tool for crisis management — you can use social media to promptly communicate with your community in the event of unforeseen issues like OpenSea did. 

When the platform’s users fell victim to a phishing attack,  it took to Twitter to outline the actions their team was taking. This left users feeling reassured about the safety of their digital assets and helped earn back their trust. 

Send Regular Emails to Your Followers 

While social media marketing allows you to engage with large audiences directly, it doesn’t allow for personalization. This is where email marketing comes in. 

With email marketing, you can segment your audience into different segments and send them different emails based on their preferences.

This targeted messaging is more effective than a one-size-fits-all social media post and leads to higher conversions and engagement due to the personalization aspect. 

Build an Engaged Community 

Building a strong community is crucial for the growth and success of your NFT marketplace. By cultivating a strong community, you can maintain sustained interest and engagement in your platform and spread word about it. 

There are different strategies you can use to build a community; Rarible conducts AMA sessions before an NFT launch or posts tweets that spark a discussion to keep their followers engaged. 

LooksRare and Blur, on the other hand, conduct raffles and airdrops regularly. Both strategies serve as mechanisms to engage, incentivize, and reward users, and help build a loyal community. 

Another way to improve the engagement and loyalty of your customers is through quests. While other quest-building platforms direct users away from your platform and increase the Time to Value (TTV), Raleon’s Embedded Quests allow users to realize the perks your platform offers from the get go 

This feature allows you to onboard users and retain them by personalizing quests  according to their persona. 

Collaborate With Brands and Artists

Partnering with established artists and brands exposes your marketplace to a wider range of audience and attracts new users to your platform, increasing your reach and visibility. 

This strategy also gives you a credibility boost if the brands and artists you collaborate with are well-known in the industry as users start associating your brand with their reputation. 

Nifty Gateway’s collaboration with Samsung US is a great example of partnerships done right as it will benefit both parties. Both brands will work together to create a smart TV that will contain a platform for exploring, purchasing, and trading digital artworks and collectibles. 

Millions of Samsung users get access to 6,000 different digital art pieces from prominent artists like Beeple and Pak, and Nifty gets an opportunity to broaden their audience base and improve conversions. 

8 Things That Guarantee the Best NFT Marketplace Strategy

Creating memes and sending out “Good Morning” tweets can definitely build some social media engagement. But they aren’t enough to constitute a comprehensive marketplace strategy. 

To develop a robust marketing plan for your own NFT marketplace, you must consider these eight crucial elements.

Understand Your Audience 

Even the most popular marketplaces often fail to garner decent engagement when they post generic content and provide a subpar user experience. That’s because it may not be relevant to their audience.

Solanart is one such marketplace. The Solana NFT marketplace has more than 200k followers on Twitter. But their tweets don’t attract much engagement as they don’t post high-quality educational content or news about feature updates, collaborations, giveaways, and new NFT drops their followers might be excited about. 

Contrast this with Magic Eden’s content. Despite launching a few months after Solanart, the platform has attracted twice the number of followers on Twitter. 

They studied their target audience thoroughly and understood what type of content resonates well with them. 

Magic Eden does its fair share of “good morning” tweets. But it also posts updates and announcements to maintain followers’ interest in the platform and get them to use the platform.

Now, the more important question: how do you understand your target audience better?

Raleon’s web3 analytics helps with this. It provides unique insights into user behavior by combining off-chain data from your ad campaigns, websites and social media platforms and on-chain data, and on-chain data from your web3 platform. 

This data helps you understand whether they’re a degen or a maxi who supports a particular cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum. And you can use these insights to create content that appeals to these personas. 

Conduct a Competitor Analysis

Conducting a competitor analysis is a crucial component of crafting a successful marketing strategy for your NFT marketplace. 

By analyzing other NFT marketplaces, you can gain valuable insights into their strengths and weaknesses and understand their unique selling proposition. This helps you devise a competitive marketing strategy that differentiates your marketplace from the competition. 

Map the User Journey

User journey refers to every step a potential user takes from discovering the platform to becoming a regular customer. 

Understanding and mapping this journey helps you identify friction points and come up with ways to improve customer experience, which plays a critical role in the success of your platform. 

To get started, define key touchpoints, from initial discovery and consideration to purchase and retention, and obtain feedback in each stage to study the pain points customers face. 

Blur did this very well. Its Discord community pointed out that the bidding process was slow and suggested a way to fix it. So, it released a new feature update that enabled their followers to place bids faster on their platform. 

This earned the platform a positive reputation, as one of the users who requested the feature tweeted about it. 

Improve Creator Experience

An NFT marketplace must cater to collectors and the artists creating the collections. If platforms favor one side over the other, it leaves users nothing to engage with. 

So, it’s important to participate in relevant online forums to understand the experiences, needs, and pain points of creators.  

OpenSea failed to do this. They lowered royalty payouts to artists to obtain a greater market share in the marketplace space. 

Naturally, artists weren’t happy with this update as they wouldn’t get a fair share of profit from the primary and secondary NFT sales and took to Twitter to voice their opinion. 

Matthew Sanders (M. Shadows), the NFT artist who created the Deathbats collection, expressed their displeasure in a tweet thread and pointed out that the platform was pandering only to NFT collectors. 

In the same thread, they also recommended Coinbase’s NFT platform, which resulted in free publicity for the OpenSea competitor. 

Study Market Trends

While it’s essential not to follow trends blindly, it’s also not wise to ignore them completely as they have the potential to capture a large following in a short time. 

So, you need to stay abreast of the latest trends and developments in the NFT space and emerging blockchain technologies. This way, you’ll be able to leverage trends effectively and improve your growth. 

GigaMart leverages this strategy regularly and makes memes related to the latest trends to keep their audience engaged. 

Choose Your Marketing Channels

Now that you’ve understood your target audience and the kind of content they expect from your platform, you need to choose your marketing channels. 

While it’s tempting to put out content on all social media platforms to keep up with other brands, maintaining a presence everywhere wastes your budget and resources, and reduces the efficacy of your marketing. 

So, start with three channels that your audience are present on and engage with the most, and gradually expand to other platforms if and when necessary. 

OpenSea is a popular marketplace with a large budget and caters to the degen and casual users, it maintains a presence on all popular social media platforms including TikTok. It even publishes blogs and sends updates via email. 

GigaMart, on the other hand, is relatively new and is catered only towards degens. So, it only has a Twitter and Discord page and hasn’t branched out on other platforms like OpenSea has.

Set a Budget

Setting a budget helps you allocate resources effectively and ensures you don’t overspend on your marketing efforts as it forces you to prioritize your marketing channels and activities. 

It also ensures that your marketing efforts are aligned with your business goals and provides a mechanism for measuring success. However, creating a budget is difficult, so we’ve listed a few tips to help:

• Understand your sales funnel: Knowing how your customers move through the sales funnel can help you decide where to spend your money. For instance, if you want to improve your brand awareness, you might invest more in top-of-funnel activities like content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
• Consider your customers: Understanding where your customers spend their time and what marketing channels they respond to helps you prioritize certain strategies over the others. If your followers are gamers, they’re bound to spend more time on Reddit, Discord,  and Twitter, so you can start building communities on these platforms. 
• Research industry benchmarks: If you’re just starting out, take a look at what similar companies are spending on marketing and what strategies they’re using. Doing this will give you a sense of what’s standard in your industry and helps you allocate your budget accordingly. 

Create a Marketing Stack

A suitable marketing stack allows for the integration of various marketing technologies that can help streamline processes, and enhance the effectiveness of marketing efforts. So, it plays a vital role in successfully marketing your NFT marketplace.

For example, it’s not possible to create a clear picture of the customer journey as it involves both on-chain and off-chain activities. 

So, even if you use tools like Google Analytics and on-chain analytics tools like Dune, Etherscan, and Nansen, you won’t be able to match the on-chain activities of a wallet to its off-chain activity as web3 identities are pseudonymous. 

In other words, you can’t figure out if a wallet that signed up to your blockchain platform came from your Twitter campaign or Telegram community. This is where Raleon comes in. 

Raleon’s attribution engine effectively links wallet activities to their corresponding off-chain actions, providing a comprehensive view of user behavior. If a user operates multiple wallets, Raleon’s resolution engine accurately traces them back to the individual user without infringing on their privacy. 

This helps develop detailed user personas, deliver personalized messages to your users, and improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. 

Amplify Your Marketing Efforts with Raleon

In the rapidly evolving NFT marketplace, a well-thought-out marketing strategy is key to standing out and achieving sustainable growth. 

By posting relevant content for the right audience, studying market trends, conducting competitor analysis, and leveraging the right marketing channels, you can create a robust marketing plan that resonates with both creators and collectors. 
Tools like Raleon can further enhance your marketing efforts by providing valuable insights into user behavior, enabling personalized engagement and improved user experience. Try out Raleon for yourself to see how it can drive meaningful results for your NFT marketplace.