Hot take | 5 Free Ways to Grow Your Brand Audience with Web3
What's the trend?
Why are global brand giants like Nike and Starbucks getting into web3?
Sure, it might be because younger consumers show an appetite to buy digital products, but the true answer is more fundamental. Global brands are building in web3 for one major reason: data.
Interacting with consumers in web3 introduces a whole new kind of CRM with a richness of data not available to brands in web2. Marketers can see a connected wallet’s complete web3 activity, including interactions with other brands, interactions with other consumers, spending levels, and more.
As a result, the latest trend among global brands in web3 is not to sell NFTs, but to give them away for free – with a focus on building a large tokenized community rather than immediate revenue. When you sell NFTs, naturally you’ll convert fewer than if they are free. The more NFTs you distribute, the more wallets you connect. The most wallets, the bigger your addressable audience and the more you know about them.
Building your web3 audience with free NFTs is a low-cost, low-risk way to develop an engaged and incentivized community. You do not need to deliver as much value on Day One as you would with a high-price NFTs, but instead build up the value proposition over time as you learn more about your consumer.
The most common way to do this is with a free ‘membership’ token distributed to existing users, allowlisted communities, or even the general public. Nike is minting free .SWOOSH ID (~300k so far in beta) for users to co-create and engage in its emerging web3 ecosystem, while Starbucks minted free ‘earnable’ Stamps to users who complete brand engagement ‘journeys’. In both cases, these global brands are onboarding their existing users to web3 and/or attracting web3 native users into their ecosystems, and enriching their consumer datasets at the same time.
This is the next evolution of consumer web3. No more quick and dirty cashgrabs. Instead, brands will focus on building their web3 dataset, seeding their web3 community, and growing consumer value over time in order to increase lifetime value and evangelism.
Build your web3 audience with free NFTs
Here are proven ways you can capitalize on this growing trend:
So what questions can you ask the data?
🤔 What percentage of existing customers converted to our free NFT? How many of those wallets have any prior web3 activity? How many are brand new to crypto? What’s different about these customers compared to those who did not convert?
🤔 Of the new users to your brand, what’s their prior web3 activity? How do these users differ from your existing customers who converted?
🤔 Of those with prior web3 activity, what third-party collections and platforms have they interacted with, how often, how recently, and how much was spent? What are the other most popular NFTs your community owns?
What happens next? Ok, your free NFT strategy worked, and you now have a large and active web3 community clamoring for more. This is when it gets exciting:
🎁 Token-gated experiences: Brands can offer value to web3 audiences by gating content, merchandise, events, and more behind ‘token-gates’. These are webpages or mobile apps that require a user to prove ownership of a specific NFT in order to access or interact. This is an immediate way to make a free NFT valuable to the owner.
🎁 Token-based personalization: More than just an access token, where all NFTs within a collection carry effectively the same value, brands can also detect that someone owns a certain trait, number, or set of tokens, and then deliver a personalized experience around that.
🎁 Token-based collaborations: Web3 interoperability makes brand collaborations and community cross-pollinating extremely easy and effective. Brands can offer token-gated value not only to their own NFT audience, but others as well. This is an effective way to reward holders, create buzz and grow community.
How can Mojito help?
Web3 is moving past its experimental phase into its early adopter phase, and innovative brands are already staking out their territory and setting the bar high. This means the time to start building your own web3 community was yesterday.
Mojito has powered free NFT drops for the Milwaukee Bucks, Liverpool FC, Sotheby’s, CAA, Lyrical Lemonade and more. Get caught up quick and build a foundation for future campaigns with low-risk, low-cost free NFT activations powered by Mojito.
Signup for news, trends and analysis on tap. Join 2,000+ brand leaders going deeper into web3
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Who’s hungry for zero-party cookies?
Welcome to the future of personalized consumer data.
Camilla McFarland isn't just a crypto OG who's been making moves onchain since 2013; she's also an advisor and member of Mojito's founding team, who's long been at the forefront of brand innovation in web3.
What better person to wax onchain poetic on the future of brands in web3 at one of the industry's largest global gatherings: EthCC?
Following her talk last year on Big Brands & Web3: NFTs and the consumer brand revolution, Camilla took the stage this week in Brussels to drop some more alpha on brands making moves onchain in a new talk, Zero-Party Cookies: the future of personalized consumer data.
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Use Case: Richie Hawtin & Proof-of-Attendance NFTs
Breaking down a different future for drops.
For techno icon Richie Hawtin, drops are about more than just bass.
As one of the most acclaimed artists in electronic music history, the Ontario, Canada-bred musician has long had an affinity for leveraging futuristic technologies to make processes more efficient and engaging.
“Music and technology have absolutely always been intertwined for me,” Hawtin said in a 2022 interview.
From soundtracking Prada fashion shows with mind-bending audio-visuals to creating his own mixer (and tech-indebted sake brand), Hawtin has always pushed the bar.
Since 2022, his journey as a musical technologist has included a growing affinity for web3 — more specifically, Proof-of-Attendance NFTs.
How to Rewire Your Brain (and Brand Strategy) using Web3
From web3 data to web3 wallets - the only constant is change.
In technology, as in life, this one always hits. Whether it’s AI-powered smart pillows, a fully NFC-chipped wardrobe, or an entire generation spending their allowance on avatars, the future of engaging consumers is no longer about maybe leveraging next-generation technology — it’s a must.
Nonetheless, it’s not always easy to keep up when so much change is in the air. Sometimes, it even requires us to completely rewire our brains to make room for what we must understand to thrive as a brand. Rather than turn this into a game of Operation, let’s continue.
