How Brands Can Use Marketing To Overcome Trust Issues in the NFT Space
Team Streams
June 15th, 2022
Team Streams
June 15th, 2022
Marketing is crucial for any NFT project's success. Marketing is not only used to build awareness around your collection and generate more sales, but it is also used to establish your brand's reputation and build trust.
NFTs have a clear trust problem. There has been lots of speculation about whether NFTs are a fad that will lose their value, and there have been many scams where NFT creators are minting artwork that has been stolen.
Marketing can be the way that your brand overcomes these issues and separates itself from the crowd by having an NFT collection that can be trusted and will hold its value.
Before we look at the marketing strategies you can use to build trust around your NFT project, let's first look at where the trust issues have come from.
How do we know there’s a significant trust issue with NFTs and why does this affect your brand?
Any time that fraud and scams prevail in the NFT ecosystem, it makes headlines.
There have been numerous accounts of users losing significant sums of money in NFT scams and these stories keep honourable participants in the NFT space on the sidelines while simultaneously attracting more bad actors to join in.
For example, there is a YouTube video titled The trouble with NFTs, which has received 7.8 million since it was posted.
That is a lot of negative press around NFTs.
The video is a two-hour-long critique that makes several points about the troubles that surround NFTs. These points are valid although he does overlook all of the positive and legitimate NFT minting and sales that are happening.
OpenSea, one of the larger NFT marketplaces has become overrun with sellers who are spamming the market. It recently acknowledged that more than 80% of NFTs minted for free on its platform “were plagiarised works, fake collections, and spam.”
The obvious problems with trust that NFTs are having means your brand needs to work harder than ever to instil trust in your audience and encourage them to purchase your NFT collections.
Here are some essential tips for getting your NFT marketing right.
If you don't know what an NFT marketplace is, go check out this blog.
Any successful NFT drop first needs to look at the available NFT marketplaces and compare their terms, reputation and fees.
For example, above we mentioned that OpenSea is rife with plagiarised work, which can make it a less trusted platform for your audience.
You need to search for an NFT marketplace that is trusted, simple to use and has intuitive features for both you the seller and creator, as well as the buyer.
An alternative option is to create your own NFT marketplace.
We recently wrote about how crypto brands can use crypto and fiance influencers to help establish trust around their projects. This applies to NFT projects too.
Influencers have a large following who trust their opinions. When an influencer mentions your NFT project, it helps to establish it as legitimate and you can piggyback off the trust that the influencer has already established.
With NFTs, not only can you work with crypto, web 3.0, and finance influencers, but the doors are open to working with any influencer that is relevant to your project.
For example, if you are creating digital art, you can collaborate with art influencers. If you are creating a wearable for a game, you can work with gaming influencers.
You cannot buy trust. There is no way to force a community to believe that your project is trustworthy.
However, you can be authentic and slowly build your reputation with the help of influencers and PR.
Getting media to write about your project increases your legitimacy. You should aim to get coverage in publications both specifically about crypto and in general media.
Good PR helps you gain credibility, both within crypto spaces but also with general audiences. It can help you reach new potential customers and establish you within the crypto community.
The concept of NFTs is still new to many and with so much bad press around NFTs, your brand has to work extra hard to establish trust and credibility around any NFT projects.
Using marketing is one way you can boost your credibility, especially if that marketing involves connecting with other entities (such as influencers or publications) that have established trust in the crypto space.
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