Marketers understand the value in implementing new technology like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to launch campaigns, especially to pull in younger audiences. But there are also risks to venturing out in uncharted waters. They have to know what they’re doing, and with NFTs the game plan isn’t well-known.
NFTs using blockchain technology have caught fire in the last year, inspiring big brands like Taco Bell and Burger King.
Luxury brand Balmain recently teamed up with Mattel’s iconic Barbie to promote a new clothing line and to auction off Balmain x Barbie NFTs.
The tech partner behind these NFTs is L.A.-based studio MintNFT, and their founder and CEO James Sun recently shared his playbook for marketers looking to get in on these digital collectibles.
Sun has experience in software engineering, CRM implementation and data-driven marketing at such companies as Intel and Deloitte. He outlined four strategies that every marketer should develop when they put together an NFT brand initiative.
According to Sun, marketers need to firm up their goals, develop the right creative look and decide on the right technology for their NFT drop. They also need to think about any longer-term plans for the life of their NFTs, and shore those up ahead of time.
Determine goals for your brand’s NFT campaign
“Marketers have to think about goals first,” said Sun. “Do they expect the NFT to drive revenue? Are they bringing market awareness to a new audience?”
The goals for the NFT initiative also have to be tied to what the brand knows about their customers. Marketers have to be precise about the audience they intend to reach and make sure the technology fits the customers they intend to serve.
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For instance, if the campaign is tied to a gaming environment like Roblox, will their customers follow them there, or will they lose some or most of their audience?
Marketers need to weigh this audience engagement and experience against goals they think will be a benefit from their NFT, like impressing consumers with the “cool factor” of using new technology.
Create a message around the NFT and make it visual
“Next, what is that creative branding and messaging for the campaign going to look like?” Sun asked. “Because NFTs are visual by nature, what kind of campaign will it be?”
NFTs can help introduce a new logo, or a new product launch, said Sun.
In the case of the Balmain x Barbie Limited Edition, the NFTs incorporated visual elements from high fashion and the iconic toy line. This made the NFT campaign playful, especially in its use of pink clothing items, both in the characters depicted in the NFTs, and modeled in the clothing line for actual items that customers could buy.
Partnerships are an important element in the campaign message, and it doesn’t just have to be two brands like Balmain and Mattel. Marketers can also consider teaming up with nonprofits or individual artists to add another dimension to the campaign. Last year, San Francisco’s Aquarium of the Bay launched NFTs that attracted bidders interested in supporting sea life and the environment, for instance.
Select the right technology partner
Marketers need to select a blockchain partner that is easy for customers to use, especially since adoption of NFTs is still gaining.
“What I saw when NFTs were gaining popularity in the art community and cryptocurrencies was an interesting use case for large brands,” Sun explained. “They had the ability to get to the masses, and NFTs had a very interesting property called ownership. However you define ownership, your name and wallet are attached to that piece of blockchain forever.”
He added, “Most of the Internet doesn’t provide that today. This makes NFTs a cool tool for brands.”
With this in mind, marketers need to select a brand-friendly partner.
“You have to find a platform that is very brand-friendly and also is easy for the brand’s customers to use and engage with,” Sun said.
Decide what happens after the NFT debuts
Make sure you decide what happens after the NFT, but make up your mind ahead of time through careful planning.
“Decide what happens in terms of customers using the NFT,” said Sun. “Is this for a loyalty program? Is it a metaverse play?”
The next engagement could be another NFT, or it could live on in a virtual environment.
“You could use the technology by adding an interesting utility when it goes into Fortnite,” Sun suggested. For instance, the owner of the NFT could show it off with an extra power in the game. It could make a player fly, as an example.
“The NFT scene is so nascent – some brands dipped their toes in, and some succeeded and some didn’t,” Sun said. “I believe that a holistic way is looking at the NFT, and, before creative is finalized, consider what the NFT and the brand will do after the launch.”
He added, “Launching NFT campaigns through collaborations with artists and other brands has the potential to engage consumers in a deeper, stickier way. It gives them a sense of ownership of the brand and can turn all these fans into more mature customers of the brand.”
About The Author
Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
You ask the head of marketing how the team is doing and get a giant thumbs up. 👍
“Our MQLs are up!”
“Website conversion rates are at an all-time high!”
“Email click rates have never been this good!”
But when you ask the head of sales the same question, you get the response that echoes across sales desks worldwide — the leads from marketing suck.
If you’re in this boat, you’re not alone. The issue of “leads from marketing suck” is a common situation in most organizations. In a HubSpot survey, only 9.1% of salespeople said leads they received from marketing were of very high quality.
Why do sales teams hate marketing-generated leads? And how can marketers help their sales peers fall in love with their leads?
Let’s dive into the answers to these questions. Then, I’ll give you my secret lead gen kung-fu to ensure your sales team loves their marketing leads.
Marketers Must Take Ownership
“I’ve hit the lead goal. If sales can’t close them, it’s their problem.”
How many times have you heard one of your marketers say something like this? When your teams are heavily siloed, it’s not hard to see how they get to this mindset — after all, if your marketing metrics look strong, they’ve done their part, right?
Not necessarily.
The job of a marketer is not to drive traffic or even leads. The job of the marketer is to create messaging and offers that lead to revenue. Marketing is not a 100-meter sprint — it’s a relay race. The marketing team runs the first leg and hands the baton to sales to sprint to the finish.
To make leads valuable beyond the vanity metric of watching your MQLs tick up, you need to segment and nurture them. Screen the leads to see if they meet the parameters of your ideal customer profile. If yes, nurture them to find out how close their intent is to a sale. Only then should you pass the leads to sales.
Lead Quality Control is a Bitter Pill that Works
Tighter quality control might reduce your overall MQLs. Still,it will ensure only the relevant leads go to sales, which is a win for your team and your organization.
This shift will require a mindset shift for your marketing team: instead of living and dying by the sheer number of MQLs, you need to create a collaborative culture between sales and marketing. Reinforce that “strong” marketing metrics that result in poor leads going to sales aren’t really strong at all.
When you foster this culture of collaboration and accountability, it will be easier for the marketing team to receive feedback from sales about lead quality without getting defensive.
Remember, the sales team is only holding marketing accountable so the entire organization can achieve the right results. It’s not sales vs marketing — it’s sales and marketing working together to get a great result. Nothing more, nothing less.
We’ve identified the problem and where we need to go. So, how you do you get there?
Fix #1: Focus On High ROI Marketing Activities First
What is more valuable to you:
One more blog post for a few more views?
One great review that prospective buyers strongly relate to?
Hopefully, you’ll choose the latter. After all, talking to customers and getting a solid testimonial can help your sales team close leads today. Current customers talking about their previous issues, the other solutions they tried, why they chose you, and the results you helped them achieve is marketing gold.
On the other hand, even the best blog content will take months to gain enough traction to impact your revenue.
Still, many marketers who say they want to prioritize customer reviews focus all their efforts on blog content and other “top of the funnel” (Awareness, Acquisition, and Activation) efforts.
The bottom half of the growth marketing funnel (Retention, Reputation, and Revenue) often gets ignored, even though it’s where you’ll find some of the highest ROI activities.
Most marketers know retaining a customer is easier than acquiring a new one. But knowing this and working with sales on retention and account expansion are two different things.
When you start focusing on retention, upselling, and expansion, your entire organization will feel it, from sales to customer success. These happier customers will increase your average account value and drive awareness through strong word of mouth, giving you one heck of a win/win.
Winning the Retention, Reputation, and Referral game also helps feed your Awareness, Acquisition, and Activation activities:
Increasing customer retention means more dollars stay within your organization to help achieve revenue goals and fund lead gen initiatives.
A fully functioning referral system lowers your customer acquisition cost (CAC) because these leads are already warm coming in the door.
Case studies and reviews are powerful marketing assets for lead gen and nurture activities as they demonstrate how you’ve solved identical issues for other companies.
Remember that the bottom half of your marketing and sales funnel is just as important as the top half. After all, there’s no point pouring leads into a leaky funnel. Instead, you want to build a frictionless, powerful growth engine that brings in the right leads, nurtures them into customers, and then delights those customers to the point that they can’t help but rave about you.
So, build a strong foundation and start from the bottom up. You’ll find a better return on your investment.
Fix #2: Join Sales Calls to Better Understand Your Target Audience
You can’t market well what you don’t know how to sell.
Your sales team speaks directly to customers, understands their pain points, and knows the language they use to talk about those pains. Your marketing team needs this information to craft the perfect marketing messaging your target audience will identify with.
When marketers join sales calls or speak to existing customers, they get firsthand introductions to these pain points. Often, marketers realize that customers’ pain points and reservations are very different from those they address in their messaging.
Once you understand your ideal customers’ objections, anxieties, and pressing questions, you can create content and messaging to remove some of these reservations before the sales call. This effort removes a barrier for your sales team, resulting in more SQLs.
Fix #3: Create Collateral That Closes Deals
One-pagers, landing pages, PDFs, decks — sales collateral could be anything that helps increase the chance of closing a deal. Let me share an example from Lean Labs.
Our webinar page has a CTA form that allows visitors to talk to our team. Instead of a simple “get in touch” form, we created a drop-down segmentation based on the user’s challenge and need. This step helps the reader feel seen, gives them hope that they’ll receive real value from the interaction, and provides unique content to users based on their selection.
So, if they select I need help with crushing it on HubSpot, they’ll get a landing page with HubSpot-specific content (including a video) and a meeting scheduler.
Speaking directly to your audience’s needs and pain points through these steps dramatically increases the chances of them booking a call. Why? Because instead of trusting that a generic “expert” will be able to help them with their highly specific problem, they can see through our content and our form design that Lean Labs can solve their most pressing pain point.
Fix #4: Focus On Reviews and Create an Impact Loop
A lot of people think good marketing is expensive. You know what’s even more expensive? Bad marketing.
To get the best ROI on your marketing efforts, you need to create a marketing machine that pays for itself. When you create this machine, you need to think about two loops: the growth loop and the impact loop.
Growth loop — Awareness ➡ Acquisition ➡ Activation ➡ Revenue ➡ Awareness: This is where most marketers start.
Impact loop — Results ➡ Reviews ➡ Retention ➡ Referrals ➡ Results: This is where great marketers start.
Most marketers start with their growth loop and then hope that traction feeds into their impact loop. However, the reality is that starting with your impact loop is going to be far more likely to set your marketing engine up for success.
Let me share a client story to show you what this looks like in real life.
Client Story: 4X Website Leads In A Single Quarter
We partnered with a health tech startup looking to grow their website leads. One way to grow website leads is to boost organic traffic, of course, but any organic play is going to take time. If you’re playing the SEO game alone, quadrupling conversions can take up to a year or longer.
But we did it in a single quarter. Here’s how.
We realized that the startup’s demos were converting lower than industry standards. A little more digging showed us why: our client was new enough to the market that the average person didn’t trust them enough yet to want to invest in checking out a demo. So, what did we do?
We prioritized the last part of the funnel: reputation.
We ran a 5-star reputation campaign to collect reviews. Once we had the reviews we needed, we showcased them at critical parts of the website and then made sure those same reviews were posted and shown on other third-party review platforms.
Remember that reputation plays are vital, and they’re one of the plays startups often neglect at best and ignore at worst. What others say about your business is ten times more important than what you say about yourself.
By providing customer validation at critical points in the buyer journey, we were able to 4X the website leads in a single quarter!
So, when you talk to customers, always look for opportunities to drive review/referral conversations and use them in marketing collateral throughout the buyer journey.
Fix #5: Launch Phantom Offers for Higher Quality Leads
You may be reading this post thinking, okay, my lead magnets and offers might be way off the mark, but how will I get the budget to create a new one that might not even work?
It’s an age-old issue: marketing teams invest way too much time and resources into creating lead magnets that fail to generate quality leads.
One way to improve your chances of success, remain nimble, and stay aligned with your audience without breaking the bank is to create phantom offers, i.e., gauge the audience interest in your lead magnet before you create them.
For example, if you want to create a “World Security Report” for Chief Security Officers, don’t do all the research and complete the report as Step One. Instead, tease the offer to your audience before you spend time making it. Put an offer on your site asking visitors to join the waitlist for this report. Then wait and see how that phantom offer converts.
This is precisely what we did for a report by Allied Universal that ended up generating 80 conversions before its release.
The best thing about a phantom offer is that it’s a win/win scenario:
Best case: You get conversions even before you create your lead magnet.
Worst case: You save resources by not creating a lead magnet no one wants.
Remember, You’re On The Same Team
We’ve talked a lot about the reasons your marketing leads might suck. However, remember that it’s not all on marketers, either. At the end of the day, marketing and sales professionals are on the same team. They are not in competition with each other. They are allies working together toward a common goal.
Smaller companies — or anyone under $10M in net new revenue — shouldn’t even separate sales and marketing into different departments. These teams need to be so in sync with one another that your best bet is to align them into a single growth team, one cohesive front with a single goal: profitable customer acquisition.
Interested in learning more about the growth marketing mindset? Check out the Lean Labs Growth Playbook that’s helped 25+ B2B SaaS marketing teams plan, budget, and accelerate growth.
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