Being a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is a demanding job. It takes dedication, hard work, organization skills, attention-to-detail, creativity, strategic excellence—and more. Successful CMOs understand that certain habits help them stay on top of their game.
In this blog post, we will explore six common habits of the most successful CMOs.
In order to prove value within an organization, an effective CMO needs to be focused on driving ROI — whether through converting leads into sales and revenue or increasing customer loyalty. Driving ROI includes defining brand strategy and implementing tactics such as personalization, segmentation, cross-channel optimization, multi-variate testing, etc. Successful CMOs focus on developing and executing marketing campaigns that have business impact.
Strong relationship building skills are crucial for any chief marketing officer. As a marketing leader you need to bring people along effectively in your vision for the company’s future direction. Good leaders know how to motivate their team members, foster collaboration, connect cross-functionally, delegate tasks efficiently, and build relationships with stakeholders.
While building relationships is essential for any executive in business, it’s especially true for marketing officers. As a CMO, it’s crucial to stay up-to-date on current trends. By actively building a strong network, CMOs can connect with industry peers, partners, prospects and customers at conferences and on social media. Creating these connections helps a marketing leader keep up with emerging trends, generate new ideas for marketing initiatives and stay ahead of the competition.
An effective CMO also knows that customer centricity is crucial to success. They actively work to help customers succeed and seek feedback on what works and what doesn’t. It’s important to connect with customers on a regular basis through personal discussions, social listening, surveys, web analytics and studying metrics so that you can get an accurate read on how they perceive your company’s product or service offering. Listening to their feedback allows you to make changes accordingly and ensure that your marketing efforts are targeted towards their needs and interests.
Successful marketing leaders today also look into new ways to connect with customers on an emotional level through content marketing initiatives. Content is one of the most effective ways that brands engage with customers online. But not all content is created equal! The key is creating content that connects with your target audience. Great CMOs assess opportunities like executive branding and employee advocacy to scale personalized interactions.
Time management is key for any executive who wants to succeed in their career because it allows them to prioritize tasks effectively and maximize their productivity levels throughout the day. Successful CMOs have a clear plan with specific objectives. They know how to manage time and stay organized so they can meet deadlines without sacrificing quality or becoming overwhelmed by responsibilities. Setting goals enables you to prioritize your time and tasks effectively. Additionally, as a leader you must have measurable goals which enable you to determine what needs your time.
Data analysis is one of the most important skills a CMO needs to have. It helps them understand how their campaigns are performing, identify areas of improvement, and measure ROI. Being able to interpret data is essential for any marketing executive. Successful CMOs are constantly looking for ways to leverage data in order to improve their campaigns. It allows them to make informed decisions based on facts rather than guesswork or intuition.
In addition to managing data and relationships, successful chief marketing officers manage resources efficiently. They have a sense of how to keep campaigns and projects running smoothly without going over budget or wasting time on unnecessary tasks. This means they take the time to evaluate budgets, timelines, personnel allocations, etc. They also keep an eye out for new opportunities that may arise due to market changes or customer behavior trends.
In conclusion, being a successful Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is no easy task. It requires hard work, discipline and dedication as well as the ability to juggle multiple tasks at once. Successful CMOs leverage a myriad of skills to stay on top of ever increasing and endlessly shifting strategic imperatives. From knowing the latest digital marketing trends to keeping up on new technologies, strategies and evolving markets, CMOs must stay curious and agile. These daily habits will give any CMO the edge they need to become successful in this ever-changing digital landscape.
It can be difficult to stay on top of the latest trends and technologies. That’s why it is essential for any business leader to have a good support system. Our team is here to help you stay ahead of the game. Discover how we can work together to get more done. Schedule a strategy session.
We can learn invaluable lessons on marketing and messaging from the Little Miss trend.
You’ve probably seen 2,848,799 versions of the “Little Miss” meme over the last week.
Uh, yeah. Same.
If you have no idea what I’m referring to, let me explain. “Little Miss” is a recent super-viral trend where content creators post illustrations of cute characters from an old children’s book series. They re-share the characters with really niche titles… like:
The trend spread at light speed this week, finding extra traction and prevalence in the creative community.
After scrolling past the umpteenth version (most with pretty solid engagement!) I started to wonder… Why in the world is this working?
Here are 3 lessons in my analysis of this trend:
How does this apply to you? Glad you asked. I’ve come up with 8 actionable tips for you.
The most effective “Little Miss” memes are the most niche… The ones that prove that there’s someone else out there like you. As humans and consumers, we crave connection – we want someone else to validate what makes us “weird.”
“Little Miss” memes provide an opportunity for users to select from a list of possible identities. That’s the reason most comments say “OMG, Number #3 is ME.” In the vast cocktail party that is the internet, we’re all just looking for something to help us relate and connect. Most of the Little Miss comments were users tagging their friends, saying “THIS!” or “omg, #4 attacked!”
People love to define who they are and what they are not.
See also the Enneagram and Buzzfeed quizzes.
It’s human nature. We want to feel seen, known, and understood.
How can you connect?
Look for the habits and interests you and your ideal client have in common. Share them.
Add a “Does this sound familiar?” section to your services page, outlining things your client might need, want, feel, or desire.
Example: “You want a gorgeous, aesthetic home. You’ve got great taste, but putting it all together feels like a challenge you can never make time for…”
Enabling your customer to self-identify within the context of your brand is a marketing win.
Don’t be afraid to share the things about you that make you unique in your space….. the things that make you a little weird. Chances are, your customer might be drawn to those exact qualities.
Your differences = your superpower
You’re a human rainbow in a neutral world.
You were an architect, but now do graphic design.
You could care less about wedding photography; you shoot so they never forget what love looks like.
Lean into your difference. The more you tell out your weird, the more you’ll find your power and your people.
Why do you love what you love?
Stop telling people you like coffee. Go deeper with storytelling. Add detail so people can connect with you on a more niche level. You don’t love coffee – you love making coffee every day, then letting it slowly die on your desk while you forget it ever existed. (Me, too!)
Provide specific examples of how your ideal clients might be feeling, in your messaging. Use heart centered branding in your website copy. Share details about the things they struggle with, the questions they have, and their aspirations for the future.
You’ll create an “Omg, that’s ME, how did you KNOW?” response when you use highly targeted examples.
You need to totally get your customer. This takes research!
How can you anticipate your customer’s needs? Give voice to your customer’s thoughts or concerns? Provide a personalized purchase experience that truly caters to your customer’s needs?
How can you surprise and delight in every touchpoint of your customer journey?
Ex: Our “What’s Your Brand Cocktail?” quiz – where you’ll discover whether your brand is more like a Margarita, Gin & Tonic, Manhattan, or French 75 has been taken over 50,000 times, generating over 49k opt-ins to our email list
Don’t be afraid to be authentic. Honesty takes courage. Yet interestingly, some of the most popular Little Miss memes were the “toxic” ones capturing questionable habits and personality traits. Secretly, we LOVE it when others are willing to be honest with us… It builds trust. And trust is a key milestone in your customer journey.
Don’t hide behind your brand. People connect with people. People buy from people most easily. The more professional your surroundings, the more personal you can be. Share a funny story in your newsletter. Send a few clients a quick, encouraging voice message. Show up as yourself. Remember, your clients are looking for a reason to connect with you.
Agree or disagree? Drop me a comment below.
We have a world-class team of content creators, copywriters, creatives, data scientists, and developers at Reactionpower. We are passionate about helping clients get more done. We are many voices, one team. Together we elevate each others’ thinking and talents. We’re fast, smart, and fearlessly human. We bring our passion and partner with you side-by-side. We win with authenticity and love what we do.
If your business is growing fast and you’re looking to maximize the impact of your digital marketing activities by getting the job done right the first time, schedule a free strategy session.
Are you looking for cost-effective marketing strategies that can give your business a competitive edge?
If you’re like most Chief Marketing Officers, finding ways to maximize value while minimizing costs can take up a lot of time. Lucky for you, I’ve compiled a list of 10 effective marketing strategies you can use to reach your target audience while keeping your marketing budget in check!
A key part of creating effective digital marketing campaigns is the ability to define your target market. Without defined audiences, campaigns will likely miss their mark, or worse, bomb into an abyss of irrelevant ads and marketing messages that send clients running for the hills.
When you have defined your target customers, you can develop targeted messaging and create digital marketing campaigns that are much more effective. Customers will be more likely to engage with your campaign if they feel that it is relevant to them, and you will be able to see better results in terms of leads and sales.
One of the best ways to determine how to reach your target audience is to conduct market research. There are four common types of market research techniques: surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer observation. You can ask your target audience questions about their interests, media consumption habits, and purchasing habits… or simply observe them. Some of my favorite free online market research tools for customer observation are Google Trends and WordSift. With Google Trends you can get a sense of the level of interest in a particular product or service — as well as how that interest fluctuates over time and across regions. WordSift allows you to generate visual word clouds from any body of text and see the frequency with which your target audience uses certain words.
Your brand makes you memorable and preferable to your target audience. You need to create an overarching brand strategy that not only looks at the big picture but also examines the smaller details. Consistency is key. Communicate cross-functionally to make sure your brand is reflected in all of your marketing materials.
You can’t reach a target audience with messaging that isn’t focused or relevant to the target audience. You may have the best content and design in the world, but if it doesn’t resonate with your audience, it likely won’t yield the results you’re looking for.
As you put together your target list of customers, it is important to consider various factors such as age, gender, interests, location, passions, aspirations, and pain points. By understanding your target customers on this level, you can develop messages that are focused and targeted to them specifically.
It’s particularly important to understand the customer journey when developing targeted messaging. The customer journey is the path that a customer takes from awareness to purchase. By understanding the customer journey, you can develop targeted messages that speak to the needs of customers at each stage of the journey.
For example, if you are targeting customers who are in the awareness stage, your messaging should focus on educating them about your product or service. If you are targeting customers who are in the consideration stage, your messaging should focus on the features and benefits of your product or service. And if you are targeting customers who are in the decision stage, your messaging should focus on why your product or service is the best choice.
By understanding the customer journey, you can develop targeted messaging that will be most effective in each stage. By taking the time to consider the factors at each stage of the customer journey, you can develop messaging that is much more effective. Customers will be more likely to engage with your campaign if they feel that it is relevant to them, and you will be able to see better results in terms of leads and sales.
As we mentioned before, your target audience won’t engage with content that isn’t relevant to them. Develop content that is interesting and informative, and that speaks to the specific interests of your target audience.
Bannerbear will help you autogenerate social media visuals, dynamic email images and more to scale your marketing with relevant content.
Social media is a cost-effective way to reach a large number of people with targeted messaging. Do your research to determine which social channels your target audience is most active on, and focus your efforts there. If you want to manage your social media presence in a simple, effective way, check out Crowdfire.
Remember, the social channels have increasingly become pay to play. You can easily craft engaging ads including banners and video ads with Creatopy.
Blogging is a popular marketing strategy to draw in clients organically on the web and deliver high-quality insights.
You can use blogging to manage your online identity and build trust. Depending on your audience you can share a mix of basic and proficient insight to establish yourself as an expert and share specific solutions for your audience. It’s a waste of time to develop lots of fascinating content for your audience if your posts can’t reach them. This is why you need to apply Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics to your blog posts. Work in relevant keywords into your text, test titles that catch the attention of users, and focus on content that adds value to your audience.
With consistency, blogging can drive long-term results too. Not only can blogging helps drive traffic to your website through link building, but with the right strategy your content can convert leads.
Whether it’s your email, SMS, Webforms, onboarding conversion communication, or personalized referrals, find opportunities to tailor experiences or communication based on all the information you have about your persona.
Typeform is great for building personalized, frictionless forms that engage your audience like a conversation. You can use it to get clearer insights, and a few smiles, too.
A targeted landing page is a standalone web page that is designed for a specific audience or campaign. Creating a targeted landing page allows you to control the message and design, and track conversions from your target audience. Building and optimizing landing pages can be a time consuming endeavor.
Swipe pages, and Ucraft are my top 3 choices for building high-converting landing pages in minutes.
These are just a few of the many different ways you can market to a target audience. The most important thing to remember is to focus on creating targeted, relevant content that resonates with your audience. By taking the time to develop a sound marketing strategy, you’ll see the results you’re looking for.
We have a world-class team of content creators, copywriters, creatives, data scientists, and developers at Reactionpower. We are passionate about helping clients get more done. We are many voices, one team. Together we elevate each others’ thinking and talents. We’re fast, smart, and fearlessly human. We bring our passion and partner with you side-by-side. We win with authenticity and love what we do.
If your business is growing fast and you’re looking to maximize the impact of your digital marketing activities by getting the job done right the first time, schedule a free strategy session.
How can you build a predictable, profitable marketing strategy in a macro environment that’s changing rapidly?
The “growth at all costs” marketing era has shifted to a focus on efficiency and revenue.
While the present feels precarious and the future feels uncertain, there are still ways to ensure your company prospers. Marketing leaders can provide strategic insights that are essential for companies looking to achieve growth in revenue.
Here are a few tips on how to achieve profitable growth even as the market shifts:
Marketing is the lifeblood of business. Some businesses cut back on marketing when times are tough, but this can be a mistake. Marketing is an investment that will help you reach your target audience, build your brand, and generate sales. Spending a little bit extra on key marketing initiatives during a market shift could make all the difference. Marketing enables you to share how they can solve crucial problems, generate leads and turn prospects into customers. If you have no customers, you have no revenue, no profit, and no business
When customers are tightening their belts, they’re more likely to gravitate towards businesses that offer value and quality. If you can focus on your company’s core offerings, you’ll be in a better position to compete.
There’s no need to stick to the same old marketing methods during a recession. Be creative and think outside the box. There are plenty of cost-effective marketing strategies you can use to reach your target audience. Are you going to put more emphasis on customer services or invest in information technology? Is it time to reduce your staff and start outsourcing certain tasks? These types of questions can really make a big difference in your marketing strategy and how you reach your target audience.
By focusing on the core offerings and getting creative with marketing strategies, marketing leaders can help businesses reach their target audiences and generate strong, recurring revenue regardless of the market conditions.
We have a world-class team of content creators, copywriters, creatives, data scientists, and developers at Reactionpower.
If your business is growing fast and you’re looking to maximize the impact of your digital marketing activities by getting the job done right the first time, schedule a free strategy session.
It came as a pleasant surprise when Senate passed the bill establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday.
What may come as no surprise is that digital marketing is significant in the marketplace, even after the pandemic.
79% of people still shop online. 82% of customers want to shop from brands that are aligned with their values, according to the Harris Poll research commissioned by Google.
Thus, digital marketing is proving to be the most cost-effective way to share your values as you reach new potential customers, and I genuinely believe that no company does it better than Reactionpower.
Reactionpower is a digital marketing agency passionate about transforming businesses for this digital age with high-quality services that drive results. The company delivers services such as digital marketing strategy and execution, social media marketing, paid media, content marketing, executive branding, online reputation management, and more.
The team at Reactionpower is passionate about uncovering transformative business models that boost racial equity, diverse representation, and digital transformation.
The company is committed to making digital marketing more inclusive.
Juneteenth is a good time to honor the contributions that black people make to the American economy. It’s a great time to take steps toward building a stronger economic future for Black communities.
In the U.S. today, Black, Latinx, and Asian Americans make up more than 37% of the population and represent nearly $4 trillion worth of consumer buying power. Yet many minority groups’ paths to purchase are unknown. In fact, many brands are still not doing enough to be more inclusive. Also, it’s clear that now there’s a voracious need for global solutions that take into account our diverse, expansive human tribe. Additionally, customers across all generations—from Baby Boomers to Gen Z — are demanding more brand commitment to sustainability and social justice. Juneteenth is a special reminder of that.
Within this context, digital marketing has its own unique set of responsibilities.
The pandemic showed us our connected humanity.
Today the demand for creative solutions is higher than ever. So is the unbounded demand to over-deliver value to customers. Leaders at the top companies want proven professionals that help them see beyond the limited prism of their own experiences.
As a global digital marketing executive, I have developed and managed high-value client relationships and partnerships with professionals from world-class enterprises like Google, Samsung, Apple, AT&T, IBM, Intel, Accenture, Target, and TjMaxx. I believe a company can take an unusual business approach in offering digital marketing services that are actually an advantage in the workforce and build a better world.
At Reactionpower, we have a world-class team of content creators, copywriters, creatives, data scientists, and developers. We are passionate about helping clients get more done. We are many voices, one team. Together we elevate each others’ thinking and talents. We’re fast, smart, and fearlessly human. We bring our passion and partner with you side-by-side. We win with authenticity and love what we do.
If your business is growing fast and you’re looking to maximize the impact of your digital marketing activities by getting the job done right the first time, schedule a free strategy session with us.
Automation and artificial intelligence may be changing the nature of work but innovation and people are inseparable in this world. Even if organizations were stripped-down, the most successful systems will always be supplemented by talent.
As we prepare for a future driven by rapid change, leaders are constantly figuring out how to evolve their business, maximize productivity and support their people.
In my work with senior leaders, several trends keep emerging. I believe 3 elements will future-proof your people and continue to be key in the evolving workplace:
In our world, digital dexterity and the ability to deliver results will outweigh tenure and experience. The most high-value work will continue to be cognitive in nature. Employees who apply creativity, critical thinking, and actionable insights to solve complex, ever-evolving problems will thrive.
Here’s how to use your good ‘ol nogging to problem-solve proactively:
Love this outline from Adam Grant on what proactive problem-solving looks like:
Cynicism: We have a problem, but they don’t want to solve it
Pessimism: We have a problem, but we can’t solve it
Optimism: We have a problem, and we can solve it
Responsibility: We have a problem. Can I help solve it?
Initiative: We have a problem. Here’s how I’m solving it
In our rapidly evolving environment, the key to fulfillment will be in finding your purpose and passion, not just working for money. Businesses will also need to have clearly defined values because employees will actively seek opportunities that tie to their values.
Agility will eliminate bureaucracy. Companies that thrive will invest in capabilities that increase collaboration, not middle management. Leaders that nurture speed, agility, and adaptability will continue to thrive. Organizations with layered team structures will become dinosaurs. The new work philosophy will involve designing small, flexible teams in response to fluctuating workloads, intense flurries in response to market shifts, and shrinking time frames.
Remote work has blurred boundaries between work and personal life.
Leaders are scrambling to figure out how to leverage the regular use of artificial intelligence, smart software, and robots. This has sparked the conversation on how to maximize productivity with people and technology ?+?.
Smart machines will soon be our co-workers.
Employees will use avatars, language software, conversational interfaces, and real-time dialect translation to speak with team members across languages and cultures with almost no loss of context or meaning.
Work-life balance will continue to be a challenge. Eventually, technology will assess when people have worked too much and when they need to recharge by monitoring their biorhythms, nutritional requirements, and exercise needs.
Creepy or cool? Curious what you think.
Comment below!
For almost 2 years, businesses of all sizes have made triumphant strides toward the ever-evolving “new normal.”
From embracing the digital shift to working with dispersed employees across the globe, companies have rolled with the metaphorical punches as the worldwide pandemic (and the domino effects in its wake) plagued the world.
Both in life and business, elements are still evolving. We must continue to adapt in order to survive and succeed. The secret to redefining normal is taking action today. How can you make small but substantial changes now to better your brand?
Accept change and take massive action towards delivering exceptional solutions to your customers. Responsive enterprises thrive even in uncertain times through customer-centricity, operational effectiveness, and agility.
Businesses across the board are already taking action on their strategy to dominate the new year. According to our recent customer survey:
47% of brands are reallocating budgets to align with advances in digital technology.
40% of brands are reallocating budgets to improve brand awareness.
39% of brands are reallocated budgets to gather data-driven insights.
No matter how you plan to define “normal” for your business, approach the new year with a strong start.
Here are three actions you can take right now to build up your digital capabilities in 2022 and beyond:
What you do today will impact your tomorrow.
Our team at Reactionpower is here to help you take action, get more done and navigate the changing times.
As a CMO, your top priority is to ensure that your business’s brand resonates with its target market. To do this, you need to have an overarching brand strategy that not only looks at the big picture but also examines the smaller details of what makes up a successful brand. Let’s discuss how to create an overall brand strategy.
The first step in creating a comprehensive brand strategy is to define your brand identity. This includes determining who your company is and what it stands for, as well as defining its mission statement and company culture. It’s important to understand that your brand isn’t just about what products or services you offer; it’s about how you want people to perceive your company. Take the time to think about what really makes your brand unique and how you want it portrayed in order to be successful.
Once you have a clear sense of who you are as a company, it’s time to analyze who your target audience is. Understanding who they are and what their needs are can help inform the way you communicate with them and ensure that they feel connected to your product or service. Knowing their age range, interests, location, etc., will help you tailor messages that capture their attention while staying true to your overall branding goals.
The last step in creating an effective overall branding strategy is developing a creative plan for how all of these elements should come together and be communicated through different mediums such as social media, advertising campaigns, website design, etc. It’s important that everything works together harmoniously in order to effectively convey the desired message. That means having consistency across all communication channels so that customers can easily recognize and connect with your message no matter where they encounter it.
In conclusion, creating an effective overall branding strategy requires careful thought and planning from the CMO level down throughout all departments within the organization. By taking the time to clearly define who you are as a company, analyze who your target audience is and develop a creative plan for how these elements should come together across multiple mediums, CMOs can successfully create an effective overall branding strategy that resonates with their desired customer base. This will ultimately lead to increased visibility for their product or service and greater success for their business as a whole.
80% of marketing leaders say the volume of campaigns, requests, and content increased over the last year.
That’s a lot of new work.
We surveyed 259 marketing leaders to understand how they’re overcoming challenges.
Here’s a quick look at the insights we found:
To overcome these challenges and ensure success in 2022, you need 3 key elements:
Your strategy ensures you will measure what matters.
As the marketing leader, you must consider the bigger picture: How does marketing play a role in your company’s success? How can you reach your ideal customer in a competitive field? What is your customer’s experience? What do customers want throughout the entire lifecycle and buying journey? And, can the company meet those buyers’ needs with the maximum return on investment? These questions go beyond marketing efficiency and push the boundaries of marketing innovation to move the needle on sales, customer loyalty, and lifetime customer value.
When everyone understands your larger strategy, they see how their progress can directly impact success, creating an aligned approach to data. Focus ensures you are tracking the most important key performance indicators (KPIs).
You can then structure data efficiently into timely insights to make strategic decisions.
A brilliant strategy can put you on the competitive map, but only solid execution can keep you there. You have to be able to deliver on your intent.
The secret to successful strategy execution is superpowers: a team that helps you get more done while you sleep.
As the marketing leader, you’re the face organization, the brand storyteller, the innovation catalyst, and the implementer of customer-driven growth. You are focused on operational efficiencies with an analytic mindset while creatively conceptualizing how to meet unmet needs in the marketplace and drive the next iteration of growth.
You cannot do it all.
Delegate operational responsibility, so you can focus on more strategic issues.
Make sure everyone has a good idea of the decisions and actions for which they are responsible. Provide information, structure, and motivators. Link performance to rewards.
Work with Reactionpower to do less work and get more done. We match busy business leaders like you with highly efficient professionals who have the skills to keep up with your demands and accelerate your growth.
Leaders thrive when the proper support and resources have been invested to maximize productivity.
Align with the CEO or executive leadership suite on the success metrics and the support available to achieve your mutual vision. Ensure you are resourced appropriately for the anticipated outcomes. The range of job duties and skills required of marketing leaders can be all over the map. Therefore, if not discussed, the expectations can be unclear or unrealistic. This unhealthy dynamic can set marketing executives up to fail.
Assess areas where you can get quick wins.
At Reactionpower, our goal is to help you get more done. We’ll help you crush milestones and show momentum to garner more organizational support. We serve as an extension of your team. You work with the same dedicated people so even complex, ongoing tasks are handled with quality and consistency.
Stop doing manual, operational tasks that drain your energy. Our highly technical skilled workforce enables your team to delegate so you can focus on growth and create success.
This year there’s been a lot of talk about how NFTs can help marketers get a competitive advantage.
Brands like Coca-Cola have already launched successful projects using NFTs. The execution and insights behind these activities show that by adopting new strategies and technologies businesses can differentiate while staying true to their brand values and objectives.
To marketers, NFTs will be vital in providing the following:
Marketers can mint NFTs as digital assets for digital marketing with perpetual and intrinsic value to enhance branding, build loyalty and increase revenue.
How can you create your own NFT and make it available for the world to purchase?
Brands like Adidas, Budweiser, and Twitter have been jumping on the bandwagon to create their own NFT products. For Adidas, that meant you get exclusive clothing and first-in-line access to future products. Adidas made over $22M from their first NFT mint.
The more people want a product, the higher the price can go for resale. So if you have a big following, minting is a great opportunity to make money or provide other value (tax offsets, charitable donations, DAOs, funding).
Community has always been a massively important tool for marketers.
We’re moving to a cookie-less internet, which is going to make it impossible to track and advertise the way we have in the past. NFTs give brands the opportunity to start building community – like the new email list for a decentralized, private web 3.0.
Twitter and Discord are the most popular platforms for NFT communities.
Blockchains’ transparent, decentralized nature, and immutability have valuable applications in preventing ad fraud and securing the ad supply chain. Those same benefits also deliver great value for brands that are dedicated to building strong first-party data strategies since consumers want to be able to opt out of data sharing, and they want transparency into what data is being collected. Brands that can provide the transparency that blockchain offers will win customers’ trust. This will incentivize customers to continue engaging with the brand and sharing data.
NFTs can express the identity, uniqueness, and scarcity of physical and digital objects throughout the digital and the physical world. Whether an NFT represents a copyrighted image, financial instrument, or digital asset, an NFT can be secured, and its custody chronicled within a blockchain.
For example, LoanSnap is opening mortgage underwriting to the masses by assigning NFTs to property loans. They are using a new protocol (BACON) and NFTs to encapture the data about a loan, its underlying asset, and its mortgagee, all to facilitate individuals’ ability to invest in loans
NFTs could grow in importance as the metaverse takes shape. For brands, NFTs can generate brand value and brand love in a number of ways, but as a virtual souvenir, it makes the digital object more personally significant to the customer. The fact that these tokens can follow a user wherever they go in a virtual environment makes NFTs essential to the VR experience.
This is a chance to reimagine virtual experiences and find better ways to do all the things we’ve been trying to do in the real world, including building community among customers, experiencing physical goods virtually, understanding shopper behavior, and creating more personal (AI-powered) services. There are a million directions retailers could go, but those with clear intentions and a desire to enhance the total experience with the metaverse will be able to pull ahead.
One thing marketers should pay attention to is the bad reputation certain blockchain technologies get for using up lots of energy. To update the ledger for each unique token or coin, computers in a decentralized network are put to work generating a new chain. Many blockchain vendors have gotten ahead of this concern by pledging their sustainability practices.
When marketers introduce an NFT promotion or another blockchain strategy, they will want to let consumers know that the technology they are using is environmentally responsible. Consumers will be thinking through the impact of carbon emissions released by the creation of NFTs and other digital tokens.
NFTs are evolving away from being solely valued on hype, but also to the real-world utility they can provide. For instance, If you own a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, you get access to meetups, party access that only token holders can access. When celebrities like Steph Curry own one, this becomes an enticing perk. The easiest thing to think about utility when it comes to your business is customer loyalty. Provide tokens with additional value to your top customers.
Right now NFTs are mainly contextualized as digital art. However, true long-term value comes from blockchain technology and smart contracts. A smart contract is some code that runs on blockchain and enables a secure value exchange. Smart contracts can remove the need for a mediator when two parties want to exchange valuable digital or physical assets such as access to events and other premium content.
Blockchain technology will give the power back to creators. No more stealing content.
For example, think of something as simple as a meme. Memes are some of the most-viewed pieces of content on the web. We usually never credit the creator. People simply take screenshots and reshare with no gain for the creator. With blockchain, we’ll be able to credit all re-shares back to the creator. That could mean potential compensation for the value they’ve created.
The move to web 3.0 means more privacy and less ability to reach customers the way we do now. Platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok will likely cease to exist as we see them now. This cuts back on massive marketing channels that we’ve relied on for years to acquire customers. Instead, we’ll need to look for new opportunities in the blockchain and NFTs.