Author: Will Gallahue

Categories
Web 3

The Comprehensive NFT Marketing Launch Guide

Will Gallahue NFTs

Photo credit: My own NFT collection covering my Lake Tahoe trip

Launching an NFT project requires a combination of creativity, coding, marketing and attention to detail and when it all comes together, you can create successful collections that provide value to both you and the end purchaser.

Our ultimate NFT launch guide will help you plan a project from start to finish or help you get to the next step if you’re stuck. If DIY isn’t an option for you because of time, programming or creative constraints there are a number of boutique firms online that can help manage all aspects of design and launch.

What You Need to Get Started

  • Project idea
    • Goal
    • Incentives for holders
  • Art direction
    • Concept
    • Layering
  • Programming Resources
    • Generation
    • Storage
  • Cryptocurrency
    • Distribution (Ethereum vs Solana vs Matic)
    • Opensea
  • Marketing Resources
    • Discord server (launch and admin)
    • Website creation
    • Social media buildout
    • Promotion

Project Idea

Project Goal

I’ve seen a lot of projects where it’s clear the organizers skipped straight to the art and launch process without really thinking through the project value proposition. NFT projects can and should be so much more than just artwork. There should be a goal for the project and what you want to accomplish.

Incentives for Holders

One way to differentiate your project from other NFT collections is to have an incentive in place for whomever holds your token. It could be access to an exclusive members portal, real world benefits or any other designations.

Art Direction

Concept

This is actually the hardest part because your creative concept will ultimately define every part of the project in some way or another. There is infinite possibility so consider what’s not out already out there vs doing another pixel character line where you have limited differentiation.

Layering 

Whatever you decided to choose, the most important part is making it scalable. Whether you plan to do 1,000 tokens or 100,000 … you have to make the creation process scalable because you can’t reasonably do this by hand.

NFT artwork is structured in layers using Photoshop or Illustrator with layers for each element that will go into the final image. These layers will be different background colors, attributes and features that when generated should make a cohesive image and you can set rarity for each in the minting process.

Programming Resources

Artwork Generation

There are a number of scripts that can take your layered documents and automatically generate your entire series of NFTs. Using these scripts is fairly simple and requires some light programming knowledge to test and use.

Storage

Once your artwork is generated, you can store your art either on or off chain.  Ideally you’ll want to store on chain as it will make launch easier but if you decide to store off chain, you’ll want to make sure that in case of a failure or hack you won’t lose everything.

Cryptocurrency

Distribution

One of the most important factors is what cryptocurrency you’ll want to use for your tokens. Ethereum had been the preferred crypto for NFTs but high gas fees (transaction costs) meant that smaller projects were often untradeable because the transaction cost was more than the value of the token. Recently more projects have been aligning with Solana or Matic as they have the same advantages of Ethereum with significantly lower transaction costs.

If you plan to launch with Ethereum, it should be for limited runs or for very highly visible, highly touted projects. If you’re doing a series of 10,000 and have never launched before, then you’ll want to look at Matic or Solana as it will be more attractive to buyers.

Opensea

Their market is the easiest place to distribute and manage your project. You’ll be able to host, catalog and see real time transactions for your project through their marketplace and that’s where you’ll find all of your buyers.

Marketing Resources

Discord

Discord servers are the backbone of any successful project. They allow you to cultivate your community, stay in constant contact and let them know critical updates. If you don’t have time to manage and moderate your server, you’ll want to hire an experienced moderator to make sure your community is well managed and informed.

Website

The second component you’ll want to build is a site that talks through the project, allows minting and serves as a portal for your social media accounts and discord server. A site that names project participants will also lend credibility to the project vs using anonymous names.

Social Media Buildout

As part of the overall marketing asset buildout, you’ll want to make sure the project is visible on Twitter and Instagram. Aside from posting updates, you’ll want to sponsor posts targeting the community to help build visibility and gain traction.

Promotion

Most projects enlist known entities in the cryptocurrency space to promote and advocate for their projects. These can be individuals or collectives that have a strong sway in the community and can quickly generate traction. However creators need to be sure they choose the right promoter

Final Word

NFT projects can be an amazing distribution vehicle for brands and creators and the time to begin developing a NFT strategy is now.

Categories
SEO

SEO Spring Cleaning – Refresh Your Site in 2022

Cleaning a surface

Photo credit: The interesting Anton

It’s that time of year again when the seasons change and marketing budgets and expectations for the year have been set. Now that companies are turning their focus to performance, this is a great time to look at your site and more importantly how it’s producing organically. Here’s our guide to spring cleaning your site and making sure your organic presence hits the mark.

Crawl your site

Sites break over time for various reasons and if you haven’t run a crawl in the last few months, this is a perfect time to use Screaming Frog or similar tools to check your site. In addition to finding and fixing broken links, we recommend focusing on the following areas:

  • Sitewide redirects
  • Sitewide canonicals
  • Short H1 tags
  • Short Title tags
  • Missing meta descriptions
  • Buried pages (crawl depth of 6 or greater)
  • Short pages (100 words or less)
  • Low internal links

Once you have your crawl data, build a gameplay to prioritize and tackle everything over time. Sites can be nebulous so a schedule with accountability is a must have. 

Dust off your blog

Blogs work well for content development but for most sites on the web, the last entry is often months if not years ago. If you have a compelling value proposition, industry knowledge or want to address pain points in your market then you should consider creating a content calendar and holding your brand accountable for consistent, quality, content production. 

You’ll have new assets to share in social, Google will see new content and crawl your site more often and more importantly you’ll have new touchpoint for prospects looking for solutions. 

Cull your underperforming content

Similar to pruning a tree or rose bush, your site likely has content that isn’t getting any traffic and is taking link equity and crawl space away from more important pages. We recommend taking a list of current pages then doing an export of Google analytics for pages that received traffic over the last 6 months and comparing the two lists.

For most sites, you’ll see 5-10% of pages haven’t received traffic in the last 6 months and we recommend the following steps when reviewing whether to keep or remove content:

1. Is the content still relevant? A post about a new hire who has since left or a post wishing people a Happy 2017 are likely candidates for removal. Remember these posts take link equity and crawl budget away from your higher performing pages.

2. If it’s still relevant, can it be improved? This is something we consistently do with our corporate blog given the number of guides and how-to articles we create. Often steps need to be redone or a platform will make changes that require us to revisit and rewrite content which gives us the opportunity to make sure we’re up to date and let people know a post has been edited for 2022. 

For content you decide to update and improve on – make sure those changes get communicated to your prospects via social or email updates.

3. If you find content you need to delete, make sure to put redirects in place and crawl the site to make sure everything looks good.

Getting your site cleaned up and performing well is going to pay dividends throughout the year and if your brand is struggling to get your site to perform make this your top priority.

Categories
Paid Media

Preparing for Performance Max Campaigns

Cutting Board

Photo credit: The impeccable Debby Hudson

In October of 2020 Google announced the launch of Performance Max campaigns as the company continued to push for new automated ways to target audiences online. After a year of testing Google then decided earlier this year to not only make them available to all advertisers but to replace existing smart shopping and local campaigns with the new feature.

Advertisers who have been using either campaign types will be happy to know that Performance Max has additional features to help them potentially capture more revenue and higher ROI and if you’re trying to figure out how to get started transitioning your campaign types, here’s what we recommend.

Reassess Your Goals

Let’s talk through both campaign types, why they’re typically run and what will carry over:

Smart Shopping: These campaigns take your existing product feed and using machine learning try to automatically match the product, message and placement to consumers in the shopping/discovery phase. Performance Max campaigns won’t be too different other than offering additional ad inventory placements.

Local Campaigns: These are simple local business campaigns that take your address, a few selling points and assets and automatically generate ads. I really recommend that if you are running them, you meet with a paid search agency/freelancer because there are far better and more granular ways to setup campaigns that will target customers and generate ROI for your business.

Upgrade Window

The best thing about this transition is that Google will be providing a one-click upgrade experience starting in April for existing campaigns. Previously when campaigns were deprecated, they could often run without any edits for a limited time but had to be completely rebuilt in the new campaign type. This takes out a lot of the management headaches and gives advertisers a great starting point going forward.

What Performance Am I Seeing?

So far clients who have tested Performance Max campaigns have seen incremental improvement which we feel is largely related to improved machine learning and placement. I still recommend that before flipping the switch, brands need to make sure these campaign types still align with their business objectives.

Managing Complexity

If your brand is currently running smart shopping or local campaigns and is trying to figure out next steps, there are a number of great paid search agencies and practitioners that can build, transition and optimize your campaigns for the new format.

Categories
Social Media Web 3

Emerging Ad Platforms You Need to Test in 2022

Photo credit: The delightful Arthur Mazi

Just 5 years ago, if your brand was running campaigns on Google and Facebook/Instagram it was likely you were reaching 95+% of your audience between both platforms.

However we now live in a world where Tiktok got more traffic than Google in 2021 and a society that no longer sees Facebook as cool or hip and instead is turning to a slew of other apps for their time and attention. The transition from legacy platforms is happening so fast that it can be hard to understand and plan around where time/attention is going so here’s where brands need to begin investing in order to make sure they are reaching their audience:

Tiktok

To outsiders it seems like a quirky app featuring dance moves and memes but to users of the platform its turned into so much more. There are now influencers giving advice on anything and everything and diverse video content creators making true works of art. Advertisers have been slow to get on the platform as they try to figure out a messaging and engagement strategy but those that have already invested in the platform are realizing returns. In fact in 2021, more people visited Tiktok than Google and the trend should only continue to play out for 2022.

Snapchat

Teens abandoned Facebook long ago and smart advertisers know that teens have significant sway in the marketplace whether it’s spending their own money or influencing the purchasing decisions of their parents. The platform has gone from disappearing messaging to a host of self created shows that drive engagement and reaction. Brands have been swarming to the platform with their own serial content to try and attract consumers early and develop lifetime brand loyalists. Like Tiktok, the brand has matured from a single use app to a full fledged content creation platform and advertisers need to pay attention to it.

Reddit

If it’s on the internet, there’s likely an entire community talking about it on Reddit. If you rarely visit the site or just check the homepage, you’re missing out on a diverse community that is talking about your product right now. For instance search your brand or what your target market is looking for in a product or service and odds are you’ll come across hundreds of threads with people asking for recommendations for a product that does X to entire communities you never knew existed that serve as a forum for your brand. Finding the communities that matter and serving ads in those communities can drive incredible returns.

Pinterest

By now, most brands have a Pinterest page but many are missing out on Pinterest Ad platform and its powerful capabilities. The platform has always been a hub for product discovery and with detailed targeting options, it can be supercharged into an amplifier for brands and their products looking to get in front of the right people at the right moments. Pinterest knows they will be very high funnel consumers, which is why their ad platform comes with its own pixel to track performance and report on people who saw the product and later purchased through another channel.

NFTs

NFTs are so much more than pictures of cartoon apes. They represent the ability to personalize ownership and engagement with your brand which is why companies from ASICS to McDonald’s and the NBA are producing content to allow their raving fans to display their loyalty. If you have a product and you aren’t at the very least offering a NFT version of it, you should really look into investing in a deployment strategy. Finding your biggest fans, cultivating them and developing target audiences and lookalike campaigns from that data can give you a critical advantage when targeting on other platforms.

Categories
Paid Media SEO

4 ONLINE MARKETING MISTAKES ALMOST EVERY LAW FIRM MAKES

Law Library

Photo credit: The classical Gianmarco

Legal marketing is arguably the most competitive industry online and many firms make basic mistakes that hurt their ability to drive case volume and lower their overall return on ad spend. Having had the opportunity to scale successful lead generation campaigns for firms ranging from three person personal injury practices to 200+ employee firms I thought it would be a good idea to share the basic mistakes that almost every practice makes and how to remedy them. 

Only Running Expensive Paid Search Campaigns

What’s the easiest way to get a case in the next 24 hours? Run a paid search campaign.

What’s the most expensive way to get a case in the next 24 hours? Run a paid search campaign.

If you’re reading this and you’ve ever done paid search, especially for ultra-competitive practice areas like personal injury, truck accidents or mesothelioma you know that clicks can cost $150 or more. You also know the uncomfortable truth that most of those clicks are your competitors or people who aren’t serious and while Google can filter out some of that behavior, for the most part the majority of your clicks are wasted. 

For those clicks that are actually genuine, if visitors don’t have a user experience that immediately empathizes, educates and lets them take action they’ll leave and there’s nothing worse than seeing you’ve spent $1500 in a day and didn’t get a single call or form fill (for both the lawyer and the agency that will get a call from said lawyer the next day).

The way to improve visibility and reduce reliance on expensive terms is to think of the decision making process for your client. If someone is in a wreck for instance, a lawyer is actually what they search for well after the accident as their immediate needs center around insurance processes, liability, treatment, rentals etc …

Strategically having visibility on their journey is not only cost effective but gets your name into their minds well before they reach a point of seeking legal assistance.

Ignoring Organic SEO

What we generally hear from firms that rely heavily on paid search for lead volume is that they tried SEO and didn’t get traction or they were quoted a long timeline and heavy investment with no guarantee of page 1 ranking. The second part is true to a degree in that if you’re a brand new site, the odds you’ll rank on page 1 for your main practice term in a short span of time are low.

However SEO is often the best place to generate leads because as we began to discuss in the previous section, there is an entire ecosystem of online activity around even the simplest of cases. 

For instance with the car wreck example above there could be issues around fault, insured/uninsured motorists, diminution of value, medical billing, short term financial woes as a result of injury. Every firm I’ve seen strategically invest in content tailored to specific questions and issues always get results vs those spinning their wheels on expensive paid search campaigns. Would you rather invest in 10 well-written and optimized pieces of evergreen content that will generate pageviews and leads for years or x10 $200 clicks for car accident attorney Dallas? 

In fact when I previously worked on behalf of a firm that handled asbestos litigation, we spent thousands of hours mapping out every possible search area for mesothelioma including symptoms, diagnosis, actual factories/ships/places for exposure and reading through clinical trial data for potential therapies. The result is that we built an extensive content library that gave a full context around the cancer and every element of it and became a powerful lead generation engine that needed relatively little ongoing maintenance.

Falling Flat With Video 

Your firm has probably at one point or another been told you need to be on YouTube and most firms do the exact same thing: build a channel, upload their latest TV ad or radio spot and then watch as they rack up 2-3 views per month.

Most law firms look at YouTube from the lens of reality … people go there to watch cat videos and people playing video games. However the opportunity for law firms is that video for many people is easier to absorb and understand and taking the above example of evergreen content and applying that to video you can start to see where the opportunity exists. There are countless 200k+ view videos from lawyers explaining (without giving legal advice) obstacles, questions and challenges someone might face after a car accident.

When done right (not shot an iPhone as you walk down a loud street downtown) video can be an evergreen medium for connection, links and ultimately get people onto your site and into your queue. Video is the medium of the future and firms are even beginning to look at platforms like Snapchat and TikTok (especially for criminal law).

Downplaying Spanish Search 

The way that firms approach Spanish speakers is still relatively basic. I’ve consulted with many that hired Spanish speaking staff specifically to handle inbound calls and are shocked when they never seem to materialize.

The problem is most firms put it as a footnote for their advertising because they assume the Spanish speaking audience doesn’t need sophisticated messaging – just put Se Habla Espanol somewhere by the phone number and they’ll know what to do next. 

But often the web experience for many of these consumers is 99% in English and that doesn’t do enough to build confidence and not only win the click but win the client. If your firm has invested resources in accommodating Spanish speakers, you need to understand the investment should go beyond people and into the marketing assets themselves.

Basics like a Spanish language landing page and dedicated Spanish language ads are easy additions to existing web assets. Spanish speaking consumers will encounter the same questions and obstacles as their English speaking counterparts so investing in content marketing, often as a first mover in many markets, can pay significant dividends.