$5.5m NFT Marketing Client Case Study

here's exactly how nft project Persona a project I very closely worked on with my team was able to launch one of the most successful nft projects of 2024 and raise over 5.5 million under mint catch the attention of the entire nft space and roll out one of the most successful marketing strategies that I've seen in the space and if this is the first time we meet my name is lon bu and I make these videos to help democratize web three marketing information and help you build your brand and your product in the web 3 space

in the most ethical sustainable and profitable way possible and by the end of this video I'm going to be showing you exactly how is it that you can replicate exactly what is it Persona did into your project learn from the things they did impeccably well and adapt those those to your project now for us to understand how Persona was able to launch the biggest drop of 2024 we first have to start by remembering what is the marketing framework every prospect that could potentially buy your nft project needs to travel through during the marketing period of

your project and that is the eyes to buys framework right here and it says that every buyer needs to go through three distinct stages during the marketing the first stage being curiosity the second stage we have to gain people's interest so the interest stage and then finally this is where we have to optimize this a beautiful three we have to optimize for a conversion a conversion event with our prospects and you want to think that at every stage of the I to buy Journey you are trying to communicate different things to catch people curiosity you

are communicating in a different way than than to get that Curiosity converted into interest and then into conversion and you want to think that during the Curiosity stage this is what I like to refer to as the whisper stage you are Whispering about your project during the interest stage how you create interest is by teasing a little bit more about your brand and finally during the conversion stage this is the final run this is the last Mile in the marathon and this is where you are shouting about your project and one of the biggest mistakes

that I see a lot of Founders do is that they come into the marketing with their project wanting to directly go to stage three the shout they want to launch in two weeks they want to go from nobody to somebody in two three weeks of marketing they want to pay their way in and then they Wonder after having spent tens of thousands of dollars in marketing they wonder why is no one paying attention to my brand and why amen I getting the results that I need to successfully launch this project and that's because they have

not gone through the first two stages of the whisper and tease of the nft project so these are the three stages of the marketing launch with whisper tease and shout and during the whisper phase the goal is to get them to hear about the brand for the very first time and to unlock people's curiosity to unlock a desire to follow follow the project and just stay up to dat with what is happening and to communicate to people that this is still early and you are early on the journey and this is not the final form

of what the project looks like and this is where the first thing that Persona did during the whisper face is that they launched brand teasers and this is what for Persona this is what it looked like so over the first couple weeks all Persona did was just launch micr TR trailers of The Branding of the ecosystem the very first tweet that Persona did was on July 18 2023 and it says a world is forming the Journey Begins and this was nothing but a gif with moving colors the next tweet was to all Gamers out there

we're looking for Pioneers that are ready to connect and this is hey Outsiders ready to connect and this was the next twet so you can see how all of a sudden this is nothing about the road map nothing about the utility nothing about the team you're only building out curiosity you're only building out Intrigue and awareness around the brand that you are launching and for the next two to 3 month all the tweets that they had about 10 to 12 tweets were all fitting within that framework brand teasers brand colors animations nothing crazy nothing too

advanced but just enough to give people a feel of what Persona is and that was about it so then you might be looking at this and you might be asking yourself like how is it that Persona was able to get 184,000 impression on their very first tweet or 27,000 impression on their second tweet and this is through the second thing that they did which is Alpha calls for those of you who don't know Alpha groups are nothing but groups of people often times on Discord who are always looking for the next big nft project and

those are people that are always on the hunt for what we call Alpha and these are early calls into project that are going to allow these people to get in on these projects early which is going to increase the chances of these people making it into the pre-sale if there is one and winning big if this project were to become a persona for example and for Persona one thing they had that add them to get these numbers is they had a very talented very well-connected Alpha caller in house with them in their team that allowed

them to get into all these different Alpha groups on Twitter and to start getting the attention of all these people in Discord communities looking for the next big project to get their attention and to get them to raid their Twitter posts for you to start getting the traction for you to start getting the social proof that is then going to allow you to do everything that we have going on in phase two of the marketing launch but having a highly qualified highly connected Alpha caller in your project inhouse is going to be incredibly important and

the last thing you want to do with Alpha calls is to hire a third party to do them for you because all you're going to get is a supply chain and you're going to be one out of a 100 other projects that this specific person has called on these different Alpha communities so what you want to do is you want to find one highly qualified Alpha caller into your project inhouse make them exclusive pay the price for the premium and have them represent your brand around all these Alpha communities that exists so far for Persona

we have the brand teasers that were then pushed through alha calls the third thing that Persona did is they did what I call the founder funnel and this is where they deployed the project founder account Spike they deployed his account to start start accumulating more eyeballs started creating content as you can see here talking about topics so here 2021 was the year of defi 2022 was the year of nfts 2023 the year of social tokens question mark here's a thread about why I think this is important for you to you get the point the goal

is how do you activate the founder account the founder profile to start accumulating eyeballs on that account that is then going to funnel people back into the project if you can see what the profile of per of Spike the founder looks like his header is Persona the project his description is Persona the project and then his pin tweet that I don't have here but it's pin tweet is a pin tweet from Persona is an RT from Persona so whoever lands on the spike account will have to get funneled into the Persona account and that is

how you can start tapping into algorithms to start generating attention and eyeballs into your project and the way you start generating attention on the founder account is through content is through uh replying to other people on Twitter it is through the Twitter spaces it is through the amas all of these are activities that generate traffic and attention to the main founder account which then funnels back into Persona and no by the way the type of content you create on The Foundry account cannot be replicated on the project account it is okay to reply good morning

to all the people on your timeline that are gming in web 3 from the founder account from the project account doesn't look good it doesn't look branded so you see how all of a sudden it allows for more diversification of content type and content strategy when you are using the found your account so the whisper phase of persona lasted about three month from July 18th all the way to September and it was broken in September once they did the first thing and that thing that they did was starting to on board ambassadors into their brand

ambassadors that will start representing the brand of persona and the way they did it was by onboarding two influencers highly trusted influencers into their ambassadorship program as ambassadors of the brand the first Ambassador was Mani who's a content creator with about 13k followers you can see September 14th 2023 exciting times we're thrilled to welcome the amazing money as persona's newest Ambassador and the next Ambassador that we had over here is nft boy with over 100,000 followers and you can see October 3rd 23 the beauty of the journey is found in the friends we meet along

the way excited to welcome nft boy who as well is a content creator and an opinion leader in the nft space and at this stage you might be wondering what are the implications of working with these influencers and how much does it typically cost if I were to roll out an ambassadorship program into my brand and this is where I have for you price estimates of how much it typically cost to work with influencers in the nft space so right here we have sponsored threads so a piece of written content or sponsored spaces having people

hop on your Twitter spaces to be part of conversation and bring their own audiences and for audence sizes below $110,000 people typically charge between $250 to $500 and for sponsored spaces $100 to $250 above 40,000 followers people charge in fencers charge between 3,000 to 5,000 per thread and for sponsored spaces ,000 to $2,000 for them to hop on your spaces now I know these do get big numbers these are big numbers that we are talking about but this is the price of working with highly respected highly trusted ambassadors that are going to funnel the audiences

that they have that already trust them into your project and here's a small hack that I have for you most influencers do not like working on one-off activations they like to build long-term relationships with long-term Brands so for you one way that you can cut down on the cost of these numbers is by offering ambassadors packages so for example you send them a message you're like hey man I'd love to work with you on a three-month campaign and what I'm going to ask from you is four tweets per month and two Twitter space appearances and

10 comments on the Twitter posts that we make and for that we have a total budget of about four or $5,000 for example so all of a sudden you're able to get each individual piece of the menu for much cheaper price on a longer term timeline and you're all of a sudden able to squeeze the most value out of these influencers' audiences most people need to see a typical project seven to eight times before before they can even start paying attention web 3's attention span is incredibly short so working on a long-term basis with influencers

not only is cheaper but it also becomes more beneficial for you from a marketing perspective so with influencers go with quality not quantity two highquality influencers will out compete 10 average quality one-off activations with many influencers and the next thing they did during the teas phase of the marketing was number two Discord soft launch so by this stage people have started paying attention to Persona people are curious there's curiosity that is being built and now the goal is to convert that Curiosity into interest and one way to do that is to bring people further down

the marketing funnel and expose them more deeply to the Persona brand and that is where Persona did a soft launch of their Discord and the way they were able to do it it was masterfully organized is by having certain Easter eggs within the the marketing materials that they had so for example on August 31st 2023 they made a post it's time for a little riddle game the first 10 Pioneers who crack the code and send it to spike the founder account will get access we'll get invitations into the private Discord of persona so people all

of a sudden had to read this and try to come up with a riddle within this specific gif that they posted the next one right here in December 15 2023 we heard you love riddles persona's Discord is calling decode the secret in this image and gain access to the Discord 100 invites and boom all of a sudden you have to sit down analyze experience the brand and be part of the lore which is Persona and that is one way that you not only number one get to funnel people into your Discord which then allows you

to build a deeper relationship with them but also the thousands of people who were not able to get into the actual Discord of persona they were able to get those people to engage and experience the brand maybe 100 people were able to make it in but there were thousands of people that just sat there and tried to decode the actual riddle and what this did is it exposed people to more time with the brand there's a direct relationship between how much report a prospect has with your brand and how much time they spend on your

brand so if the average person took three minutes of their day to spend on Persona that's three minutes they didn't get to spend on the next project that is competing for your attention and that's how you get to build Report with your Audience by having them experience your brand and spend time with you now the third thing that they did and this is something that really got the attention of the nft space and this is where people really started to pay attention to Persona as a brand is they did product announcements so for most of

this people had absolutely no idea what Persona is who they are what they are building who is the team behind Persona and are there even people worth paying attention to and this is where on January 16th they made it official via a Twitter space they called it the reveal tour and this is a space that we help them work on and we hosted you can see my business partner right here C permit the reveal tour and as it turns out they reveal to the world that Persona is actually a product by a blockchain company called

unagi and unagi already has a product live on the market they were behind one of the top five gaming tokens on the BNB blockchain and all of a sudden they revealed that these two brands are connected and that there is more behind the Persona brand and just beautiful art teasers and ambassadors and talk about building interest this announcement definitely got people to sit there and be like ah interesting this sounds like something I would be interested in being part of let me pay closer attention to and instantly after the roll out of such announcement you

have one chance to really Propel your message and amplify what is it you are doing and the way we helped Persona do it number four thing they did during the te's phase is through spaces and this is where we doubled down on organizing space shows for Persona and all of a sudden we started putting together Mega panels for Persona around different topics about the web 3 gaming landscape you could see this one on the 25th of January building a web3 gaming Giant and on that we had some of the biggest projects come up and be

part of part of the conversation which allowed us to do a couple things number one position Persona right here in the middle of a couple other thought leaders because one way to be the cool kid is to hang out with the cool kid we had shrapnel and we had Planet mojo on that space and number two thing this allowed is for Persona to continuously sell themsel as an expert Authority and an expert thought leader in the web3 gaming landscape and we did this with Persona we did over 10 different spaces on the Persona account and

we had them speaking on over I believe 20 other spaces within the web 3 landscape and this here really allowed them to propel their message and Propel their positioning as one of the key players in web 3 and as you're going to see in a second they've at this stage started to become part of organic conversation in the web 3 space but before that there are a couple other things that were happening during the te phase and as you can start to notice the te phase is where most of the work most of the maturing

of the brand takes place but only possible thanks to the initial results that you were getting during the whisper phase so because I'm running out of space here I'm going to be expanding the t's category to the right and because at this stage they were starting to get people's attention into web 3 space what they did and this was number five is they rolled out a quest system so the quest system they build their own in-house questing tool on the Persona website and what this allowed people to do is to log in using their Twitter

account connect their Discord and then all of a sudden partake in certain quests to gain points as you can see 70 points right here you gain points by partaking in certain quests and right here you can see like unagi's post if you click on this it's going to take you to the post that you want to like you gain 10 points if you follow Persona on Twitter you get fif Five Points Five Points right here if you follow Spike the founder you get five points if you follow Hannah the community manager you get another five

points and you can see at this stage how they were able to gamify the whiteless experience and they were able to squeeze more juice out of the interest that they've generated through all the things that they did before War cuz at this stage people are like okay this is worth my attention let me partake in these quests and you can see how this creates a virtuous positive feedback loop where the more people are interested in the brand the more social proof they are going to gain from this which is going to allow them to reach

more people which is going to create more interest in the brand and it creates that virtuous feedback loop that allowed them to quickly grow and become one of the most talked about nft projects in the space now the next thing that they've done masterfully again during the tease phase number six is that they made whitelist winners what they had was the community manager Hannah's account post every time someone would be whitelisted and would receive a whit list they would welcome that specific person via a tweet and what this allowed to do is number one create

fomo when people see that oh holy [ __ ] Sammy had just got whitelisted look at all these people they're all getting wh list I'm not getting Whit listed I should double down on the quests and be more active number two what it allowed to do is create a new channel for awareness what a lot of people do when they get whitelisted especially to a cool project like Persona is they would retweet the actual tweet welcoming them into the Persona ecosystem and imagine you welcome 2,000 people you made 2,000 tweets welcoming people imagine a thousand

people organically retweeting you to Their audience these are hundreds of thousands of eyeballs and impressions of people seeing their friends win and them not winning therefore creating further fomo and fortifying that feedback loop that was all happening and as you can see from the teas phase there's a lot of things going on and one way you can know that they were able to do it well is by this stage we started to see people including Persona organically within conversation so you can see Ash Robin a pretty notable web3 gaming content creator made a thread saying

in the past few months we have seen instant profit here are a couple projects that you should be paying attention to and you can see Persona you can see blood Loop you can see play Amber paleo and a couple others so all of a sudden Persona was in the club they were able to get into the conversation and they joined the club of top projects launching soon another one was hereb this is by Champ here are top five nft gaming crypto projects that you should get whitelist for and boom boom boom boom boom Persona Journey

so you see how all of a sudden thanks to everything that was happening here they became in the club and all they needed now was to go from a top 10 project that was launching into a top one project and that is where we get into phase number three which is the shout stage of the brand and by here we have the entire space is interested in what we have to offer shout how do we convert this interest into conversion and this is where Persona did something masterful something that was incredibly well executed and this

was the turning point for the brand and a Perfect Analogy to that is you're probably looking at me right now and you're like Leon what's behind your hand why is your hand behind your back like this almost looking awkward at this stage and this is exactly this analogy that Persona did for the entire time during the marketing they had their hand behind their back just like me there was something that was unrevealed about the project and the moment they opened up their hand and revealed what was hiding all behind it this is where where they

were able to get the entire space's attention and and created the final push that they needed to become the hardest project in the space and for them that Hidden Hand move was the art reveal for most of this people had no idea what the art of persona looked like and they revealed it on February 8th 2 weeks before the mint and the video ah so masterful it was beautiful time Valley is calling February 2024 and this got 1 million impressions and what I want you to do maybe my video team can put the trailer right

now right here because I want you to see how beautifully they were able to reveal their nft art in such a beautiful storytelling Manner and one thing I want you to pay attention to very one thing over here during the trailer I want you to lick right here at that character at the beginning of the of the project I was actually included my isuki was included in the actual trailer without me knowing so I appreciate the team for doing that but let's watch the trailer very [Music] quickly [Music] it [Music] wasn't that beautiful it's a

beautiful trailer that they did and definitely their art was something that allowed them to stand out and really get the attention of the web 3 space the next thing they did after revealing the art is this is where they double down on communication everything they were doing here all of a sudden was on steroids and the goal was how do we continue pushing our brand our credibility and our Authority in the space so the step two is Authority building building right here it was teaser brand trailer it was the brand Trailer part two is Authority

building and this is where they double down on selling the team as it turns out the team behind Persona was also the same team that worked on Tom Clancy's video game at Ubisoft back in the days so all of a sudden you would start seeing a lot more content around their past experience building video games their past experience building building uh companies and really selling their credibility and your Authority in the nft space this is really the conversion event this is where people are like okay that's it this is take my money these types of

things The Authority building initiatives are one thing that helps push people to the other side and this ladies and gentlemen gets us to the final stage of the marketing which is the roll out of collaborations most of their collaborations were done in the final 6 weeks of the marketing so halfway through the teas phase all the way into the shout face and unlike a lot of Brands Persona started collaborations very late and this allowed them to do one thing which is to have high leverage during the negotiation with those projects or those creators that want

Whit list for those of you who don't know how collaborations work let's say you are project a hot project people want to give their Community access to your white list and they want to do that because number one the creators of those groups want the wh list number number two that's how they offer value to their community and that is one of the big reasons why these people are even part of your community in the first place so by waiting for so long all of a sudden Persona became the person to have leverage over negotiations

during the collaboration stage typically most brands they go into collaborations and they're like can you please take my white list and please distribute them to your community Persona we're like ah you want wh list to our collaborations here's what I need from you I'm going to give you 20 Whit lists and I want every one of your 20 people that take my white list they all need to write a thread about Persona or else you're not going to or else your white list is disqualified and these were the terms that they put in place to

the communities that they worked with and everyone agreed from the biggest creators to the smallest communities everyone had to write the organic piece of content about persona for them to receive the white list and this is how they were able to get amas with the Pixelmon Community with gaming Chronicles another strong Gaming Community with inspect and with neot Tokyo they told these people like okay we'd love to give you white list but what can you give an exchange okay we want tweets and we want the Twitter spaces with you and your community and that is

how they were able to create that tsunami effect of attention and organic conversation literally for two weeks Persona was all that was being talked about on my timeline I could not open my Twitter without seeing every second tweet about Persona and the way they were able to do it so masterfully was through beautifully rolling out this three stage process starting off by building curiosity about the brand moving into the teasing stage where they started building the social proof where they really built the social proof and started and put in place the foundation that would allow

them to become viral through the quest system and finally gaining leverage by having beautiful that made their nft project the Most Wanted nft project of the year and then using their leverage to negotiate terms that were in their favor with the communities that they were partnering up with and this how Persona was able to roll out a white list that was for 0.069 eth for 2,000 for 2,500 people and then have another and then have another 5,000 that went out on an auction white list and sell out at 0.29 ethereum which is almost $1,000 per

nft and that is how this project was able to raise 5.5 million off a beautifully executed marketing strategy a marketing plan that allowed them to stand out and become the number one project in the nft space this ladies and gentlemen is the framework that Persona used and that you can learn from you adapt that into to your brand and build the business and the brand of your dream my name is l buot and it was an absolute pleasure sharing all of this with you I cannot wait to see you in the very very next video

cheers