The Brilliant Strategy of Pudgy Penguin That Drove 2 Billion Impressions and 100K Monthly Traffic

Unlocking the Secrets of Pudgy Penguin’s Viral Success

I Joined a Penguin NFT Club Because Apparently, That’s What We Do Now — Kevin Roose, NYT tech columnist, co-host of “Hard Fork,” author of “Futureproof.

If You’re new to Web3 or NFTs, you’d ask why he joined a Penguin NFT Club or what is a Penguin NFT Club.

But if You’ve been into Web3 and NFTs, You definitely know them and the amazing feats they have been able to achieve with their project.

This Case Study takes you on a Journey about who they are and how they leveraged Content Marketing to a Lethal effect, and how you too can replicate this in your brand!

Back to the question of what is a Penguin NFT Club.

Pudgy Penguin NFTs are a collection of 8,888 penguin NFTs sliding around on the freezing Ethereum blockchain — not literally.

Each Penguin is an official member of the Pudgy Penguins community found in the freezing cold, arctic region of the metaverse.

The Brand was initially rugged (Scammed) by its initial Founder only to be de-rugged in 2022 largely in part due to a new CEO — Luca Netz — taking over in April of 2022

Since the new management has taken over, Pudgy Penguins has seen a large increase in floor price for both lil Pudgy and Pudgy Penguin NFTs.

The Core concept behind the Project is centred around building the Pudgy Penguins brand to scale and empowering community members to partake in the journey along with the company.

Since the takeover, the growth and value of the project have been more evident, especially with the floor price has risen from around 2.1eth before the takeover to its current price of 3.78 eth (as of the time of compiling this).

Asides from this huge success, the team have successfully launched a second collection, Lil Pudgy — a collection of 22,222 penguins. Launched via a Dutch auction and with a current floor price of 0.54eth.

The Aim for the team has always been to build the infrastructure needed to support Pudgy Penguins’ various endeavours for years to come.

More importantly, onboard Web2 Core audiences using various means. Most Notably Content Marketing

With this — Content Marketing — The project seems to be leading the race as one of the most inclusive brands in web3. But how were they able to achieve this?

The Numbers Behind Pudgy Penguin Content Creation Strategy

Since the takeover happened, one of the major changes that have taken place in the Brand of the project is the priority given to Content Creation.

In Particular, Relatable content like Memes, Wallpapers, Stickers Gifs etc. It’s simply Mindblowing how much content the Marketing team churns out.

On the back of this, they have been able to amass a massive inflow of organic traffic to the brand and have gotten attention to a huge audience on their social media platforms.

On Instagram, they have built a massive brand page, with 445K followers, with an average of 10k likes on each of their Posts.

On Twitter, growing an engaging Twitter page can be tough, especially one that resonates with a targeted audience, still they have built an impressive brand page, with over 101k Followers

On Giphy, they have really cracked down on that platform with over 2 Billion Gif Views.

With their content on Gifs, they have been able to add a personality to their Penguin characters that make them resonate with a bigger audience.

They also create content on Tiktok, where they have grown their brand page to 4,470 followers and over 140K likes to their content.

For an NFT brand, this is a big standard.

Even when they do not have a Mint coming up, they have consistently created and published content across 4 Major Social Media Platforms; Instagram, Twitter, Giphy, and Tiktok.

They also have a blog and a Youtube Channel, but we focus on just these four channels.

On all Platforms, except Tiktok, Pudgy Penguins Primarily Link back to their Website, driving the most traffic gained towards the website, which is very smart. I will explain why later.

Creating this huge mass of content can only result in one thing and that’s Increased visibility.

This is because search engines prioritize websites that provide useful and informative content that matches user search queries.

By optimizing content for relevant keywords and topics, content marketing can help a website rank higher in SERPs, leading to increased visibility and traffic.

And this is exactly what has happened with the Website https://www.pudgypenguins.com/. Let’s look at the Traffic and Engagement rate on the Website.

Traffic and Engagement

Between January and March, the estimated Traffic into Pudgy Penguin Websites is over 100k, and this is at a 26.55% decline.

And you notice Desktop accounting for 56% of that traffic while Mobile accounts for 43% of the traffic.

In terms of Engagement, between January and March, the estimated Monthly Visit to the website was 37k/monthly, with 23k being Monthly Unique Visitors, Spending an average of 1Min 50 Sec on the website, while visiting at least 2 pages.

Also very important to mention that a good number of the traffic that comes to the website left, resulting in a 52.26 bounce rate.

Still, it’s no cause for alarm because if a website has between 30 and 50 per cent, that bounce rate is considered excellent. Kinda where we’d place their Metric.

Channel Traffic

Marketing channel traffic simply refers to the sources through which visitors arrive at a website or landing page.

It is the pathway or route that visitors take to reach the website and can include a variety of channels.

For Pudgy Penguin, we’d be looking at Channels such as Direct, Email, Referral, Social, Organic, Search, Paid Search and Display Ads.

It’ll help us know the channel that brought the most traffic to the website

Without any doubt, based on the estimated traffic, the highest traffic-generating channels, based on numbers are:

1. Direct — 33,546k
2. Organic Search — 29,684k
3. Social — 20,699k
4. Referrals — 18,845k

There’s no record of Paid Ads, with Email and Display benign abysmally low with <5,000. Well, there’s a clear reason why that is so, the primary traffic-generating form is Content.

Because this is a huge priority, we can see the results on their webpage.

I should say this, I believe a combination of both a Paid Ad campaign to what they currently generate would be super impressive — in terms of numbers

Organic Search

Organic search basically is the process of obtaining website traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs) without using paid advertising.

When users enter a query into a search engine, the search engine returns a list of organic search results that are relevant to the query.

Here, we’d look into the traffic organic search into the Pudgy Penguins website based on two Key factors — Branded and Non-Branded Keywords.

So, Branded keywords are search terms that include a brand name or some variation of it, such as “Nike shoes” or “Pudgy Penguin.”

While Non-branded keywords are search terms that do not include a specific brand name, such as “running shoes” or “Penguin NFT.”

Let’s look at how they have performed on Desktop:

From Organic Search (desktop only), They pulled 19,527K traffic to their website, relying solely on Organic traffic, and a huge emphasis on their branded keywords, which generated 77.52% of that traffic, while their Non branded keywords generated 22.48%.

Let’s look at how they have performed on Mobile:

From Mobile, (people who searched using their phones), they generated 10,157k traffic to their website.

While there’s not enough data for the branded and Non branded traffic on Mobile, We can see this tallies with the data we got from Channel Traffic, Organic Search generated 29,684k Traffic to the website.

Now we also see that 77% of that traffic came from Pudgy Penguins Branded Keywords.

Social Visit

Total social visits refer to the number of visitors to a website that comes from social media platforms.

This metric measures the amount of traffic generated by social media activity, including likes, shares, comments, and clicks on links shared on social media platforms.

Before we analyse the impact of their content Marketing based on Social Visits. It is important to mention two clauses in this data above,

1. It only Tracked Desktop Traffic (which is a huge drawback)
2. I could not track traffic from Giphy and Tiktok (which is a huge drawback)

With that said, in the absence of Giphy and Tiktok traffic data, we can see that, from their socials, they have generated an estimated 12.9k traffic into their website since January and Twitter accounts for 86% of that traffic.

I’d say, Looking at the amount of traffic they generate, this number could easily be double what we have with the inclusion of Giphy and Tiktok. Still, it shows what’s possible and how effective content creation can be.

Pudgy Penguin Exact Strategy for Content Creation

… Here’s where this makes sense. On all Platforms, except Tiktok, Pudgy Penguins Primarily Link back to their Website, driving the most traffic gained towards the website, which is very smart. I will explain why later.

When Creating Content for Marketing, the goal is to resonate with your audience and drive traffic to a single Page or Website. In this case, Pudgy Penguin Chose their Website.

The purpose of this is Optimisation and Conversion, If your Contents push traffic to 4 primary Pages or to no place at all … you might as well not have invested in content creation.

You need a target for your content, where you can drive that traffic through and with the help of CRO and a smooth onboarding experience, convert them into paid audiences or Leads for Nurturing.

That’s why Pudgy Penguin primarily chose its Website as the direct route for their traffic source. Because from the Website, they can convert this traffic to a good level.

When you hop onto their website, you see Two buttons, Media and Marketplace.

You click Media, you see the Home, Shop, Media, Pudgy Bridge, Meme Maker and the Team buttons

Whereas when you click Marketplace, you see their NFTs, allowing you to purchase one.

This is an effective Conversion Optimisation Strategy (CRO). It limits your choices to just two options (This or That), making it easy to make a choice.

Now that we’ve talked about that, Let’s discuss why Pudgy Penguins Content Strategy Works.

We’d look at some points like Content Relatability, Social Media Platforms, and Content Repurposing.

Content Relatability

Content relatability refers to how well the content of a piece of communication connects with and resonates with the audience.

It measures the extent to which the content is relevant, relatable, and meaningful to the audience, and how it evokes an emotional response or a sense of familiarity with the brand.

So you’d notice how Pudgy Penguins’ primal form of content is Pictorial — Pictures, Gifs, Memes, Wallpapers, Quotes, and short videos.

They do not spend time on Short or Long form content or Podcast, and that’s because it does not properly express the brands’ strength.

Relatability is an important factor in content marketing and communication, as it helps to build a connection and trust with the audience.

When content is relatable, it can help to establish a sense of common ground between the audience and the brand, making it easier to engage and build a relationship with the audience.

To create relatable content, it’s important to understand the audience’s interests, needs, and values, and to tailor the content to address their concerns and aspirations.

This can be achieved through storytelling, using humour or emotional appeals, or by using language and imagery that resonates with the audience’s cultural or social background.

And that’s exactly what Pudgy Penguin has been able to do with their content on all their platforms.

Social Media Platforms

Choosing the right social media platform for your content marketing strategy is essential to reaching your target audience effectively and efficiently.

That’s because different social media platforms attract different audiences.

By understanding your target audience and their preferences, you can choose the platforms that are most relevant to them, allowing you to reach them more effectively.

For Pudgy Penguin, Since their content formats are mainly pictorial, this is asides from their blog content, they chose to be on Platforms that would best suit their content.

They Chose, Instagram, Giphy, Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter. This ensures their content relatability was spot on.

Content Repurposing

Content repurposing is the process of taking existing content and adapting it to create new formats or types of content that can be used across different channels and platforms.

This can include taking a blog post and turning it into a video, a podcast, or an infographic, for example.

Or in the Case Of Pudgy Penguin, Taking an Image of a Penguin and turning it into a WallPaper, Gif, Meme or Picture.

At its core, content repurposing is about finding new ways to breathe life into your existing content and reach new audiences with the same message. And Pudgy Penguin executes this expertly.

It’s a powerful strategy for maximizing the value of your content investments, and it can help you to increase your reach, engagement, and overall impact.

But beyond the tactical benefits, content repurposing is also a powerful metaphor for creativity and innovation more broadly.

It reminds us that sometimes, the best way to create something new and valuable is to start with what we already have and to look for new and unexpected ways to transform it.

Let’s Wrap This Up.

Content marketing is important for every Web3 brand.

Creating unique and compelling content that showcases your brand’s values, mission, and vision, can differentiate your brand from other brands in the Web3 ecosystem.

Without any doubt, it is possible to generate the same feats as Pudgy Penguin, not in terms of Numbers, but in terms of the results they achieve; generating organic traffic to their brand.

Most Brands like Pudgy Penguin typically have in-house teams, work with an Agency or have a hybrid of both to deliver an exceptional level of results. It is a worthy Investment with a good ROI.

If you’re looking to replicate anything remotely close to this for your Web3 brand, you can simply use this case study as a blueprint and work towards it to get a massive result for your brand,

Or you can work and hire a team or someone who can help you achieve this same feat.

Looking to take your understanding of Growth Marketing in the Web3 world to the next level?

Level up your Web3 growth game! Tune in to ‘Web3 Growth Marketing,’ my podcast where I share insider strategies, expert insights, and real-world success stories on Growth Marketing.

Don’t miss out on this valuable resource — click here to listen now!