digital marketing

How Marketing Agencies can start using NFTs

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What is an NFT?
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. NFTs are digital assets representing ownership of a unique item, such as a piece of art, a collectible, or a virtual real estate property. NFTs are stored on a blockchain (e.g., Ethereum, Solana, or Polygon), a decentralized, distributed ledger that securely and transparently tracks transactions. One of the critical characteristics of NFTs is that they are non-fungible, meaning they cannot be exchanged for other assets on a one-to-one basis. In other words, each NFT is unique, and the market determines its value. This contrasts with traditional, or “fungible,” assets such as the US Dollar, where one unit is interchangeable with another unit of the same value.

In recent years, NFTs have gained significant attention, particularly in digital art, collectibles, gaming, and metaverse projects. They have been used to sell everything from digital artwork and music to virtual real estate and even tweets. NFTs are also increasingly used in ticketing, memberships, and as proof of ownership or authenticity for digital and physical assets.

Examples of NFTs

  • Digital Art: The sale of digital art remains one of the most prominent use cases for NFTs. Artists continue to create and sell digital artworks as NFTs, allowing collectors to own a unique digital version. For instance, Beeple’s “The First 5000 Days” sold for over $69 million at a Christie’s auction in March 2021, a sale that continues to resonate in the NFT art world.
  • Virtual Real Estate: NFTs are being used to represent ownership of virtual real estate in growing metaverse platforms. For example, in “Decentraland” and “The Sandbox,” users can buy, sell, and develop virtual plots of land. Significant brands also establish their presence in these virtual worlds, creating new marketing opportunities.
  • Music: Musicians leverage NFTs to sell unique, digital versions of their music, such as exclusive tracks or remixes. Platforms like Royal allow fans to invest in an artist’s music by purchasing NFTs that provide a share of streaming royalties.
  • Collectibles: NFTs have revolutionized the market by offering digital versions of trading cards, in-game items, and more. Projects like “NBA Top Shot” allow fans to own and trade highlights of their favorite players, while blockchain games like “Axie Infinity” offer collectible creatures that can be bred, battled, and traded.
  • Tweets: Although the initial hype around tweets as NFTs has waned, tokenizing social media content remains an intriguing aspect of the NFT landscape. The sale of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for nearly $3 million in 2021 exemplified this trend.
  • Videos and Other Media: NFTs have expanded into representing ownership of various media forms, including video clips, podcasts, and ebooks. Creators can mint their content as NFTs, offering fans exclusive access or ownership rights. In 2024, platforms like Glass have emerged, allowing video creators to monetize their content directly through NFTs.
  • Physical Products: Companies increasingly use NFTs to authenticate and sell limited-edition physical products, such as art prints, fashion items, or luxury goods. For example, brands like Nike have begun integrating NFTs with physical products to verify authenticity and create digital twins of their items.

How Can Marketing Agencies Use NFTs?

  • Creating and Selling NFTs
    Digital marketing agencies can create and sell their NFTs as standalone products or as a more extensive marketing campaign. This diversifies the agency’s revenue streams and taps into the growing demand for NFTs as digital collectibles or utilities within larger ecosystems like the metaverse.Benefits:

    • Diversify Revenue Streams: NFTs offer agencies a new product type for their clients.
    • Showcase Creativity and Expertise: Successfully creating and selling NFTs highlights the agency’s technical knowledge and innovation in the digital realm.
    • Build Stronger Customer Relationships: Offering unique and exclusive NFTs can foster community and loyalty around the agency’s products.
  • Using NFTs to Promote and Sell Physical Products
    Agencies can use NFTs to promote and sell physical products, such as limited-edition merchandise or art prints. The NFT can serve as proof of authenticity and as a collectible item in its own right.Benefits:

    • Diversify Revenue Streams: Agencies can capitalize on the demand for NFTs while promoting physical products.
    • Build Stronger Customer Relationships: NFTs can create a sense of exclusivity and community, fostering loyalty and engagement.
  • Using NFTs to Drive Engagement and Build Brand Awareness
    Agencies can use NFTs to drive engagement and brand awareness by creating and distributing NFTs that resonate with their client’s target audience.Strategies:

    • Exclusive Content: To encourage engagement, create NFTs with exclusive content, such as limited-edition digital art, music tracks, or virtual experiences.
    • Contests and Sweepstakes: Use NFTs as prizes in contests or sweepstakes to build anticipation and engagement. For example, offering an NFT that grants VIP access to an event can generate excitement among a brand’s fanbase.
  • NFT Consulting and Strategy Services
    Digital marketing agencies can offer consulting and strategy services to help their clients understand and leverage the potential of NFTs. This includes assisting clients in creating and selling their NFTs or advising on integrating NFTs into a broader marketing strategy.Services:

    • Creation and Sale of NFTs: Guiding clients from concept development to technical implementation and market launch.
    • Strategic Use of NFTs: Advising how to incorporate NFTs into broader marketing campaigns to drive engagement and build brand awareness.
    • Training and Education: Providing clients with training on the technical aspects of NFTs and the broader opportunities and challenges associated with using blockchain technology.

Conclusion

Web3 and NFT technologies are still evolving rapidly, offering marketing agencies a unique opportunity to differentiate themselves and offer cutting-edge services to their clients. By creating and selling NFTs, promoting physical products with NFTs, using NFTs to drive engagement, and offering NFT consulting and strategy services, agencies can effectively leverage the potential of NFTs. This enables them to incorporate these technologies into their marketing efforts in ways that align with their business goals and resonate with their client’s audiences. As NFTs become more integrated with the metaverse and other Web3 innovations, the potential use cases will only expand, making it crucial for agencies to stay informed and agile in this dynamic space.

Top 5 Tools for Digital Marketing for 2022

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Today, the Internet is saturated with all kinds of marketing tools to help teams effectively streamline their marketing processes. But the constant push to have the newest tools can lead your marketing arsenal to be cluttered and overwhelming. Marketing tools are here to help you, not the other way around. That’s why we wanted to provide you with a list of the best marketing tools online today.

1. Teamwork – Project Management

Teamwork is a top-tier project management software that, as the name suggests, has superior collaboration capabilities. In addition, it has strong organizational features that both you and your clients can take advantage of. While it does take some time to set up, the Teamwork team will provide you with robust support to get everyone acclimated. After that, you have the option of adding clients to Teamwork.
Teamwork facilitates easy collaboration by allowing project managers to set tasks and allowing the whole team to view current status updates on each project. Team members can work synchronously on the same project in real-time. It also integrates with a whole host of other tools, including HubSpot, Grows, and QuickBooks Online.
Teamwork also allows you to create and save templates, which can allow repetitive tasks to become frictionless and helps your team train new team members.

Tasks created by project managers can be subdivided into subtasks, allowing for larger projects to feel less overwhelming and providing clients with clarity on a project’s progress.

2. HubSpot – CRM

HubSpot is on our list because it’s the gold standard CRM for marketing, no matter your goals. With strong scalability, expansive integration with other tools, and variable pricing plans (the main features are free!), HubSpot is a highly effective and valuable tool.

HubSpot’s UI is incredibly accessible as well. After creating a free account and importing your contacts, Hubspot facilitates their categorization by current lead status and makes it easy for you to assign each lead to a member of your team. You can connect your inbox in a few easy steps to begin tracking company insights, deal values, and so on. HubSpot makes it easy to see the whole sales pipeline and allows you to view offline data, such as phone calls. It also has a number of extensions and tools for other Hubs, including Marketing, Sales, and Operations, and if needed, you can scale up to HubSpot’s even more robust premium features.

3. Mailshake – Link Building/Outreach

Mailshake is a great tool for your team to streamline their outreach workflow. Mailshake provides automated cold email outreach that is automatically personalized and automatically sends scheduled follow-ups, greatly simplifying any outreach campaign. It also provides analytic information, including monitoring opens, clicks, and replies to give a detailed picture of engagement. Mailshake also helps you identify the most successful parts of your campaign by tracking conversion rates and provides you with simple tools such as A/B testing to improve the success of your outreach over time.

Mailshake tool

After creating a template in the Mailshake dashboard, you can use their text replacement features to personalize each email. Once you upload a spreadsheet or CSV file that has personal contact information, the template will automatically populate each email with personalized information.

4. Ahrefs – Keyword Research/Rank Tracking

Ahrefs can be a centralized tool for your keyword research and SEO needs. Ahrefs is easy to use, but it’s also chock full of information, making it incredibly useful for tracking keywords. When searching for keywords, Ahrefs provides you with a plethora of valuable information, including traffic potential, search volumes, number of clicks, and ranking difficulty. It also provides information from over 171 countries and ten different search engines, which is especially important if your team is working to market internationally.

Ahrefs also provides you with thousands of suggestions for related keywords and allows you to figure out whether your page can rank for a targeted keyword while also ranking for multiple related keywords.
Ahrefs has a number of other robust tools, including Rank Tracker, which tracks your SEO ranking progress; site Explorer, which allows you to compare your performance with your competitors; and Site Audit, which allows crawling your site for any SEO issues.

5. Surfer – Content Optimization

Surfer is a content optimization tool that is very useful in directing you towards additional keywords. Like us, Surfer utilizes AI technology, or more specifically, Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, to target the most common keywords in highly-ranked posts with your target keyword(s) and then provides NLP-generated suggestions for additional keywords to add.

Surfer also provides you with AI technology to optimize an article and content outlines, including paragraphs, headings, and image counts, based on top-performing pages. You can also audit your content with their content audit tool.

Curating your Team’s Marketing Tool Arsenal

Tools are useful for improving your team’s efficiency and effectiveness, but with the sheer number of tools out there, it’s easy to jump onto the latest marketing tool trend and quickly rack up thousands of dollars in software purchases. So take a look at your current arsenal. Many of the tools we’ve listed here today are robust enough to do the work of several tools at once, so be mindful and conscientious about the tools you choose to purchase.