Best Practices Before Launching Your NFT Project

While you are no doubt excited to get started, there are a few things that you need to do before you even announce your NFT project. These steps will help to ensure that your NFT launch has the best foundation to build upon and will mean less work for you in the long run. 

Researching Your Target Audience

Before designing your first NFT project, it’s important to identify your target audience. Whether you’re creating a project designed to help fund tree-planting initiatives or building a community for like-minded people to congregate, knowing how to reach your intended audience is something you will need to know how to do. 

 Start by deconstructing your clientele. Recognizing that different people will be drawn in different ways to your project will help you to best target different demographics. Consider as many factors as possible when composing your marketing strategy. Knowing as many factors about your client as possible will help you better target ads and announcements. 

Let’s say you’re starting an NFT project to raise funds for homeless LGBTQ+ youth. Let’s quickly walk through the basic steps to identify the targeted audience. When you begin doing your research, you will want to take into consideration as many data points as possible, but for this example, we will only break down three demographics to help identify our theoretical audience: age, gender, and geographical location. 

Age

Given that you are looking for individuals with disposable income who are also supporters of the LGBTQ+ community, your ideal candidate will most likely fall between the ages of 25-35. This is about the age where people have established a career and fall within the range of Millennials and Gen Z, who are far more supportive of the community than older generations. 

Gender 

While both men and women support the LGBTQ+ community, women support the community in higher numbers than men. Pew research has found that while 57% of men support the community, 66% of women support same-sex relationships. While men are more likely to invest in NFTs than women, female investors are a growing market in the industry and are more likely to invest in similar causes. 

Geographical Location 

Canada, Iceland, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway are the countries with the highest-ranking support for the LGBTQ+ community. While most of the European countries fall pretty low on the NFT interest level, Canada ranks 18th in countries most likely to invest in NFTs, just below the US (16th) and New Zealand (17th). 

Breaking down this information, you can now confidently identify your target demographic. For this example project, the group who will most likely be interested in supporting your project is Canadian women who fall between the ages of 25-35. With this information, you can begin targeting your ideal demographic with much more certainty and start designing a project that will appeal to your audience before beginning to build your community.

Designing Your NFT Project

This is easily one of the most important steps in ensuring the success of your mint: the NFT itself. Taking the time to study Popular NFT Artists and NFT Applications will help to set you up for success before your launch. In addition to market research and applications, there are a few things that you can do to help make sure your project stands out. 

Create a Compelling Story 

This can come in many different forms. Whether you intend on creating a universe with your new NFT projects or if you’re telling your life story in a compelling way people can relate to, providing people something to relate and attach to will help encourage investors to stick around long after they first invest. 

Utility and Features 

What does your NFT do? Does it unlock a community? Give you access to real-life perks? Or does it unlock a digital scavenger hunt that sends your investors on an adventure to find more clues to unlock a tangled web of intrigue? There are endless possibilities for your project to be more than just an image on a screen. Giving your investors something more will keep them interested and encourage them to share your project with other potential investors. 

Be Creative

While NFTs are a new and developing market, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t already hundreds of projects that you will be competing with. Creating a truly unique and eye-catching NFT could be the difference between a minting success story and a failure. Standing out from the crowd can be difficult, but taking the time to make sure that your project is the one that catches people’s eye could be a game changer. 

Building a NFT Community

“I think that’s something that people maybe don’t understand with NFTs. This is not some magic bullet where suddenly you’re just going to start selling stuff. If you do not have a sort of, like,  built-in audience and you have not built a community around your work…then it’s going to be very hard to sell stuff.” –

Digital Artist and NFT Advocate Mike Winkelmann AKA Beeple 

Now that you have your target demographic and your project in the works, it’s time to build your community. Whether you are a digital artist, musician, or programmer, you must begin building a solid pool of supporters before you even attempt to launch your project. Most NFT supporters flock to a handful of platforms, and it’s recommended that you start a community on at least one of these platforms. Later, we will discuss some Tips & Tricks to Build Your Community.

Twitter 

With 396.5 million users and approximately 206 million active users daily, Twitter is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Establishing a Twitter account for your artwork and prospective NFTs is crucial in developing your community. The NFT community is incredibly active on the platform, and utilizing hashtags makes it easy for your work to reach the correct audience. Creating a Twitter should be your very first step when developing your project. It’s never too early to start advertising your work!

Discord

A place for you to chat, host community meetings, and get immediate feedback from supporters of your project. While not all NFTs have their Discord, it is highly recommended that once you start developing a following, you should invest time in building a place where your community members can converse and trade. This makes your job much easier in the long term and fosters camaraderie amongst your supporters, guaranteeing long-term support for your work and future projects. 

Reddit 

If you’re looking for a place to research and advertise your project, Reddit is the place to be. Several NFT communities have developed a massive following on their platform. While it might be difficult initially, posting regularly on pages like r/NFT and r/NFTsMarketplace will help spread the word about your project.   

While other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, and even Tumblr have NFT communities starting to develop, managing social media accounts takes time and energy.  If you are an individual attempting to grow from the ground up, setting up and managing a Twitter might be all you can handle at the moment, and that’s ok! Focus on quality over quantity of posts to ensure anyone who views your page will be impressed with your content. Identify which platforms will best suit your needs and limit your focus until you can comfortably expand your team enough to manage regular posting on more accounts.

Creating A Roadmap for your NFT Project

Now that you have your NFT concept and a supportive community it’s time to build your roadmap. What is a roadmap? Essentially, a roadmap is a way of outlining your project’s aspirations concisely and laying them out in a set of achievable milestones. This will provide investors with important dates, an idea of your plans for the project moving forward, and an idea of how far along in development you actually are. While there is no set way to lay out your roadmap, there are a couple of things to keep in mind as you develop yours. 

Be Realistic and Set Reasonable Deadlines

While you might like to accomplish your goals as quickly as possible, setting your deadlines too close together without providing yourself a reasonable amount of time can put unneeded stress on you. Not to mention, if you find yourself unable to meet your goals and are forced to push back your release date, your investors might lose faith in your ability to meet their expectations. Give yourself time to develop, strategize, and properly roll out each step on your roadmap. This will ensure that you are seen as reliable and improve investor confidence.

Make Your Roadmap Easy to Follow 

Your roadmap is something that you can direct your supporters to for quick answers to questions they might have about upcoming dates and progress on your project. Keep it clean and to the point, and don’t add unnecessary steps. Think of it as if you were giving directions to the grocery store. You don’t need to tell them every street they’re going to pass on the way to their destination. Just tell them which roads to turn on! Simply giving dates and milestones will give you wiggle room to change things along the way and give you the creative freedom you need! 

Be Prepared for Setbacks

Despite our best efforts, things tend to go wrong at the worst possible moments. There will always be setbacks when you are attempting to launch any new product or business, the important thing is that you don’t allow them to stop your progress. If you end up running into an issue, make sure you communicate this with your community and attempt to rectify the situation as quickly as possible.

Make it Visually Appealing

Since you intend on sharing your roadmap with your investors and community, it must be not only clear and concise but visually appealing as well. Look at examples of roadmaps done by other NFT artists, and build yours in a way that represents your brand. This could be as simple as using a brand color palette or including project progress images. Small things like this will make your roadmap look more professional. 

A strong roadmap is crucial for ensuring that your time is spent wisely, while also providing clear goals for your NFT. This, along with a strong community and well thought out, interesting project will help to ensure that your mint is a success. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.