Companies paying close attention to high-profile nonfungible token projects by celebrities, sports teams and companies may have been impressed by the initiatives, but unclear on how NFTs can generate more than just a little extra revenue. While many leaders in the space don’t discount the direct impact to profit a successful NFT launch can have, they’re much more excited by how NFTs can build up a brand’s identity, community and customer loyalty.
So how, specifically, can brands leverage NFTs to better engage customers? There are many ways, several of them detailed below by members of Cointelegraph Innovation Circle.
Give POAPs for event attendance
One of the most exciting ways that brands can use NFTs to engage customers is through proof-of-attendance protocols. A POAP is an NFT given to someone as proof they attended an event, such as a sporting event or music festival. Brands can use POAPs to promote ticket sales, provide rewards and encourage customer loyalty. – Molly Glennon, Ditto
Celebrate the completion of product milestones
Ditch the boring cups, T-shirts and affiliate links. Offer your most engaged customers the opportunity to unlock personalized NFTs as they complete important product milestones. This results in increased product engagement and free marketing — they’ll flaunt their new achievement all over social media. – Dev Sharma, Blockwiz Solutions Limited
Bypass traditional selling models
The NFT JPEG craze is coming to an end. When you’re working to grow a community, offering utility and functionality is the only way to differentiate yourself and provide value. The goal is to utilize decentralized ledgers and the power of social reach to eliminate the need for traditional economic models. Musicians have a great opportunity, for example, to go direct to consumers and cut out middlemen. – John Wingate, BankSocial
Share them across brands as an improvement to current points programs
Looking beyond “digital art,” there is an opportunity to use an NFT’s proof of ownership to build and expand brand loyalty. Improving upon existing points programs, NFTs can be collected, redeemed and transferred without being tied to a traditional user account. They could be shared across multiple brands with minimal integration effort, with the heavy lifting being done by the various blockchains. – Brad Spannbauer, Currency Hub
Maximize customer engagement through digital memorabilia
NFTs are like “digital diamonds”: They are forever (technically speaking, as long as the blockchain is alive). Brands can maximize short-, medium- and long-term engagement with their customers by giving them the ability to treasure their experiences with the brand forever through an NFT (be it art, video, utility or any other memorabilia). This gives a brand’s NFTs unique value. – Tomer Warschauer Nuni, Kryptomon
Convert passive behavior into active behavior
NFTs can be active, so engagement can easily be massively increased by converting passive behavior into active behavior. For example, tickets and store receipts — NFTs for virtually any kind of purchase — can become tickets or passes to the metaverse. And I have a real-life example from my fund: I won the award for the best-performing crypto fund in 2021, and I gave every investor an NFT featuring the award. The possibilities are limitless! – Timothy Enneking, Digital Capital Management
Introduce a digital dimension for products
Brands have the opportunity to introduce a new dimension to their products and create entirely new ways for their customers to engage with the brand through NFTs. Imagine the power of digital “twins” that digitally represent physical items such as clothing. Imagine cultivating a raving fanbase for your brand online through exclusive digital collectibles and online interactions. – Brandon Ginsberg, Palm Tree NFT
Focus on their utility
By focusing on the utility of NFTs, brands can create a more personal and productive experience with their customers. Whether that NFT becomes a key that unlocks exclusive content, a ticket to exclusive events or the representation of physical goods down the road, NFTs allow brands to engage with their customers in an authentic, ongoing way. – Amanda Whitcroft, Panda PR and marketing
Drive revenue for brands and value for customers
NFTs feature myriad consumer-friendly features: they’re simple to buy and tradeable, they appeal to the collector’s mindset, and they foster community. That makes them relatively easy to embrace. NFTs can act as a tool to drive additional revenue for the brand that issues them and value for the consumers who buy them. Prominent examples of companies already leveraging NFTs include Budweiser, Adidas, Nike and FlyFishClub. – Dan Novaes, EARNFT NETWORK
Get the community involved in trade and creation
Brands could use NFTs to increase community engagement by sponsoring NFT giveaways, hosting NFT design hackathons or allowing customers to swap NFTs for products and services. Brands can also create their own NFT collections with some intrinsic value that can be exchanged. – Akash Takyar, LeewayHertz
Embrace the power to engage and talk with fans
To a certain extent, NFTs are the most powerful fan engagement tool that has ever been available to a sports club or a brand. If you focus on sports clubs, as we do, NFTs give clubs the power to engage and talk with a fan and bring them closer to the club they love. Creating smart, long-lasting utility for the fans is key, and sports NFTs will be the biggest trend in 2022. – Tim Mangnall, Capital Block
Deploy them alongside incentivized user behavior
Brands can leverage NFTs with actual utility and value attached. We’ve seen a great deal of interest in recent designs that use NFTs for access control and for decentralized system governance. Deploying NFTs in combination with incentivized user behavior can have a profound impact on customer engagement. – Joe Roets, Dragonchain
This article was published through Cointelegraph Innovation Circle, a vetted organization of senior executives and experts in the blockchain technology industry who are building the future through the power of connections, collaboration and thought leadership. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Cointelegraph.
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