NOSTR For Retail Brands
Building an audience is one of the most important ways to build a brand, other than crafting a superior product or experience. Today, brands build audiences using social media, as we commonly experience. In fact, it’s hard to imagine building a brand without Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat—how would anyone discover you? Brands pursue an outsized emphasis of paid content knowing it’s one of the cheapest and most effective ways to attract eyeballs. Could there be an alternative that isn’t well known? We’ll explore one potential system that could revolutionize how a brand reaches new audiences and whether or not their dependence on common social platforms remains intact.
For the first time since big tech secured its dominance, brands have a choice, and the impact of this choice could be significant. Mark Zuckerberg and friends have been the middlemen between a brand and its audience. They’re the gatekeepers, the internet highway patrol and until now have been unchallenged. They determine what content is noticed, what it costs to be noticed including how performance reporting is articulated. There was a brief moment in 2020 when large advertisers pulled their allocated budgets from Facebook. This was the “Stop Hate For Profit” campaign that lasted briefly. The price of advertising on Facebook dipped for a period of time, the stock price also fell 8%, but life goes on. Brands today see Meta as essential to acquiring customers, even if anecdotally they’ll acknowledge that only their parents and grandparents use the platform. YouTube, TikTok, Snap and X are also mainstays of any marketing portfolio. Each of these platforms act as a roadblock to your audience in some way, always costing money to get your message heard. Until now brands were powerless.
Introducing NOSTR (Notes and other stuff transmitted by relay); a protocol that’s simple to use with the potential to be more powerful than any other communication tool we have today. NOSTR is the underlying code that makes mobile Apps like Primal and Damus come to life. Instead of a username and password, users create a public key (username) and private key (password). What’s notable is that by maintaining your keys, you can switch across apps, platforms and services and keep your contacts, notes and other stuff intact. Imagine if a user with 100,000 followers on YouTube was able to connect with the same audience on Instagram or TikTok, rather than trying to rebuild it from scratch. Most influencers have learned that single platform dominance is the reality. With NOSTR as the underlying protocol, with your pub key intact, users can take all of their activity and control it, running it on their own server at home if they desire. What makes NOSTR notable is that it runs on relays, with no single authority who can de-platform or remove an account. It’s communication that’s decentralized and will likely gain more users over time as awareness increases.
NOSTR for Retail Brands
If it’s not clear at this point how a brand can leverage this emerging tech, let me explain: instead of a paid media budget that goes to each of the big tech platforms, divert that dollar allocation to customers and potential customers instead. NOSTR allows for micropayments called “Zaps” that use Bitcoin and the Lightning Network for instant settlement. For reference, one Bitcoin equates to 100,000,000 Satoshi’s or “Sats” named after Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. A brand would create a NOSTR account, entering its pub key in a client like Primal, then create and connect a Bitcoin wallet using a service like Alby. Primal has Zap functionality built-in so that any account on NOSTR with a wallet can send and receive micro payments. Does your brand want to attract new users? The strategy is simple: pay for attention. Users are more likely to listen when being compensated; it’s human nature. Does your brand want to engage with others? Zap their account, their post, a meme and start a conversation. Forget likes, shares, follows and replace those metrics with Zaps—payments made to individuals using Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin is integrated seamlessly into the internet it’s a fluid method for brands to leverage.
Hypothetical Scenario:
Imagine a retail brand sells coffee and wants to divert a portion of its annual marketing budget towards NOSTR. Now assume there’s a certain amount of content, whether videos, photos, infographics, that already exist. The coffee brand posts a video to Primal, then goes out to its followers and users at large, Zapping them 1000 Sats ($0.42 at today’s Bitcoin price of $41,730). This brand now has the attention of aware and unaware audiences. Users receive an alert that they’ve been paid, with a note that contains a link to the content. Users consume the content and follow various predictable paths across a spectrum of engagement and apathy, but no matter the users’ next step, the brand has paid to gain their attention. Repeating this cycle over and over will ultimately lead to an engaged audience that’s more likely to interact and purchase coffee. Critics might call this approach “pray and spray” and they’d be correct to a point; the technology is still early and somewhat unproven. The first mover advantage belongs to the brand that sees the vision of this new channel, while gaining best-practices and pitfalls before its competitors do. If a brand has planned to spend $30,000 per month on Meta, with Facebook and Instagram included, diverting 5% would allow $1,500 or 36,000,000 Sats to be used for Zapping each month. A small amount of testing within NOSTR could yield insights that propel a brand in ways that are hard to predict.
Interested in reading more on NOSTR and its history, view this article from Forbes, May 2023.
Want to chat more? Contact us at Gravis for a conversation or setup on NOSTR. We specialize in creating brands from the ground up, or refreshing existing brands that are looking to redefine their meaning and focus. Our expertise includes campaigns, photography, video and motion design for social, organic and paid media. Our approach uses a strategy we call “Heart / Brain / Wallet” that seeks to win audiences, inform them of your brand’s features and benefits, and drive conversions through our marketing efforts.
Reach out to our team today: hello@gogravis dot com.
