The complete IEO marketing guide for 2019 - By Cryptonities.com
Learn how to conduct your IEO Marketing: Create, Nurture, Convert
- Quick facts about the IEO
- IEO Marketing VS ICO marketing
- Goals and KPIs
- IEO Marketing guide: the 10 actions to integrate for a successful IEO marketing campaign
Quick facts about the IEO
Before deep-diving into all the best practices for a successful IEO marketing campaign, Let’s start with quick facts about the state of the IEOs and the token sales in 2019
The only 3 factors that matter for an astonishing IEO campaign:
- The exchange where you list your token sale
- The way you strategize your IEO in regards to your targeted region, countries, and communities
- The way you market and position your IEO.
ICO marketing VS IEO marketing.
ICO marketing is very different from the IEO marketing in many aspects, but the biggest difference that resides here is from a conversion perspective — converting community members and all the traffic you generate into actual retail investment.
Here’s a quick note: The ICO is more of a decentralized crowdfunding model and is easier to crush in comparison to the IEO, and the reason why is because ICOs are being conducted through Smart contracts frameworks and literally open to the public with no boundaries stopping qualified retail investors from contributing.
On another hand with IEOs, this public token sale framework is directly tied up to the exchange where you enlist your tokens for sale and is only open to users within that exchange. It has for sure many perks of course, such as the KYC and regulatory compliance, trusted token collection and distribution, Market credibility ( if you enlist on the right exchange) and many more advantages… check it out here
As opposed to the ICO marketing, The main challenge ( and a great opportunity at the same time ) with the IEO marketing is that you’re targeting two different Personas:
- Crypto activist, enthusiasts, traders, and retail investors who own crypto ( or may not) and are willing to invest in token sales but are not familiar/users with the exchange where your IEO is listed
- Users that are trading and utilizing the exchange where your IEO is listed.
So make sure you align your messaging, campaigns and channels to your targeted audience and your personas to create the right traffic and traction you need and convert it into actual retail investment.
IEO MARKETING GOALS AND KPIs
Before we jump on the Top 10 marketing strategies to implement for a successful IEO campaign, let’s quickly recap the goals you need to set up for your public token sale marketing.
Goals for your IEO marketing
- Grow a highly engaged and healthy community of retail investors, not just bounty hunters and airdrop participants
- Increase traffic to your site and to your IEO profile on the exchange
- Build a healthy awareness around your product, mission, promo campaigns and about your IEO
- Rally content and product advocates around your cause and your IEO, who will engage, share and create content for you.
- Create tremendous amounts of backlinks directing to your site and to your IEO profile
- Grow the engagement on social media by distributing consistent content that is aligned to your target audience and Personas
- END GOAL: Convert all this traffic into retail investment
The KPIs you should be tracking :
- impressions-to-lead conversion ratio
- Number of community members on internal groups
- Number of followers on Social media
- Virality score
- The growth rate of social media followers and engagement
- Website traffic and referral program subdomain traffic
- Lead-to-investor conversion ratio
- Number of participants in the marketing campaigns
- Earned-Media ratio
- Number of listings on IEO aggregators
- Number of page visits on your IEO profile on the exchange
- Number of retail investors whitelisting for the IEO
- Amount raised per IEO round
IEO MARKETING PLAYBOOK
Below are the top 10 organic marketing campaigns for your IEO marketing playbook for 2019:
1. Referral programs
Referral programs are the most lucrative campaigns from an awareness and traction perspective, not only it is the perfect campaign to organically and constantly recruit new community members and advocates at a very large scale — if deployed properly and within the right channels — but it also generates a tremendous amount of traffic, a huge number of participants, and a great engagement rate on social media.
The screenshot below summarizes some of the awesome data we cultivated within just 3 weeks after launching a referral program for one of our clients. Great results without spending a dime! And it’s still growing hour after hour
That is the power of a well-designed referral program: organically build traction, onboard a large number of community members and content advocates( people who share your content, engage with it, and create content for you) and most importantly, build a solid base of backlinks directing to your site and to your IEO.
2. Cross-marketing with the exchange where your IEO is listed
This is perhaps one of the most important elements in your IEO marketing strategy. As we’ve explained in the “ICO marketing vs IEO marketing” section above, one of the most defining factors when drafting your IEO marketing strategy is to differentiate between the two types of personas you’re targeting :
- Crypto activist, enthusiasts, traders, and retail investors who are own crypto ( or may not) and are willing to invest in token sales but do not use the exchange where your IEO will be listed
- Users that are trading and utilizing the exchange where your IEO is listed.
The reason why cross-marketing with the exchange is highly important prior to launching the IEO is that both the exchange and your project need to Joint your marketing efforts to a certain extent to communicate about your token sale and ensure that the exchange will solve part of your equation : Reach out and educate their users about why your project is awesome, give insights about your promo campaigns, and build the right impulse and FOMO (Yes! fear of missing out is an important factor in the conversion)
In other words, you need to establish messaging frameworks with the exchange and ensure that it aligns your announcements and content distribution with your messaging strategy while communicating on the most important aspects of your business, product, vision and tech stack, across all of their channels
3. Market-centric marketing
Your IEO marketing needs to be very strategic with respect to the cryptocurrency markets and regions of the world you are trying to pervade, and thus strategically choose the exchange where you want to enlist your token sale.
On one hand, Market-centric marketing is highly meaningful and decisive because the IEO is a market-centric crowdfunding campaign — If you choose to list your token sale within an exchange located in Asia as an example, your first priority target will be Asian retail investors located in that region who surely can be more comfortable opening an account ( if not already users in that exchange) versus communities on the other side of the world . Which means that your Marketing materials and strategies should also be coordinated to that degree :
Your Press releases, your messaging, the channels you use, the influencers you work with ( tier 1 and tier 2) and the languages you use — all of these elements should be regulated according to each cryptocurrency market
How to optimize your Market-centric marketing?
- Clinch a deal with a top and global exchange, such as Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Okex, Huobi, Gate, Kucoin — even most of these are headquartered in Asia, they have a large and global user base. You guarantee your outreach to global communities while associating yourself with a reputable exchange.
- List your IEO on a least 2 or 3 different exchanges located in Asia and Europe: when you list your IEO on multiple exchanges located in different parts of the word, you basically purchase the access to their user bases and get the opportunity to optimize the exposure of your Brand and your IEO to different communities. ( the other part of the equation is to make them engage with your content and periodically nurture them)
You can learn more about how to do it here, reach out to us and ask us questions.
4. Influential marketing
As you know, influential marketing is always an essential method to develop awareness of your project and IEO and to articulate your positioning.
In the crypto space, there are two types of influencers :
- Tier 1: influencers who have over 100K of followers and use twitter, Reddit, and youtube to “educate” people on certain aspects of the crypto and blockchain space, and can information about your product — These are typically pretty expensive, and the ROI is unclear, but can certainly breed great traffic.
- Tier 2 : the tier 2 influencers are group/channel owners on Telegram, Reddit, discord, Slack, (or admins on Bitcointalk ) who manage public crypto communities that have at least 30K members. The best way to approach them and recruit them as advocates ( with no cash involved) is to have them participate in your incentivized referral program, or your bounty, or directly onboard them as your advocates with your native tokens in exchange.
5. Press releases
You all know the importance of proper press-releases on reputable media platforms, but you need to acknowledge the difference between the tools and platforms out there and ultimately, how to cause earned-media and how to track it.
There are two tiers of Crypto and blockchain-related media platforms for press-releases :
Tier 1: we’re talking here about Coindesk, Cointelegraph, CCN, Cryptoslate, and many others on the list — all of these media platforms will, of course, charge you a fat beautiful fee for publishing a press release for you. The other great platform is https://pr.prnewswire.com, which is basically a content distribution network, where you can submit your article/ official press release, complete the application and have it posted on their platform. The good thing about PRNewswire is all the earned-media you generate from other reputable news channels.
Tier 2: we’re talking here about all the other small news channels related to crypto and blockchain spread out around the globe. In every market/region, you will find news outlets that can bring extra exposure to your brand and IEO. These are typically relatively cheap and generate decent traffic for you — the Tier 2 PR media can also be included in your PR strategy to reach out to local readers in their local languages.
6. IEO Aggregators
It is imperative to have your IEO listed on all the major IEO aggregators that review and score your project for the sake of clarity for their readers. These sites should be mandatory in your IEO marketing strategy as it brings extra visibility and reassurance for your project.
The most notable IEO aggregators areicobench.com, icoholder.com, coincodex.com, icodrops.com, and many more.
We have a full list of all global and vetted IEO aggregators, you can ask us to get it here
7. Bounty campaigns 2.0
Forget about the days where you manage bounty campaigns with a spreadsheet and bitcointalk.org as your bounty landing page.
Bounty campaigns 2.0 are embedded within your site as a subdomain — bounty.yoursite.com as an example, where bounty hunters can complete all their social actions and bounties directly through your subdomain, which creates a seamless, transparent, and gamified experience for them.
The other great aspect about bounties 2.0 , is that you’re able to retrieve significant amount of data, and verified email addresses, while mobilizing a huge number of content advocates and community members.
8. Social media marketing
Social Media Marketing is also one of the most important elements to articulate your brand positioning and communicate on every aspect of your Blockchain application and IEO.
Make sure to strictly define your personas prior to distributing your content on social media so that all of your marketing materials can be coordinated and regulated through the same messaging framework across all channels while following a consistent content calendar.
Here are the top Social media platforms to communicate about your Blockchain application and about your IEO, and where you should build up your audience.
- Telegram
- bitcointalk
- Steemit
- Medium
- Discord
9. Email marketing
Email marketing is a prominent outreach method that should be embedded within your content strategy and your overall IEO marketing.
So you may be asking yourself, who should I send an email to? And how can i get their email addresses?
The response to these questions resides on how you design the campaigns you’re running. Whether you’re running an embedded referral program, a bounty or a whitelist campaign within your site( preferably all of them), always ensure that you’re capturing email addresses from every participant.
Prior to starting the IEO, You have to do periodic email blasts using the email list you have grabbed throughout your campaigns to nurture your subscribers
The best tools for conducting email blasts are: Mailchimp.com and hubspot.com
10. Airdrops ( a classic)
At cryptonities.com, we’re not big fans of Airdrops, as they only attract individuals who want free tokens without even engaging with your content, but Airdrops are pretty effective when it comes to rapidly increase your community size.
The choice is yours on whether or not to operate airdrops, but if you do, also make certain to capture some of their data.
Conclusion
The purpose of this playbook and this IEO marketing guide is to acknowledge different techniques to create a highly engaged community and optimize your traffic-to-lead ration, and finally, your lead-to-investor ratio.
We would like to conclude with the same statement we made in the intro of this IEO marketing guide for 2019.
The only 3 factors that matter for an astonishing IEO campaign:
- The exchange where you list your token sale
- The way you strategize your IEO in regards to your targeted region, countries, and communities
- The way you market and position your IEO.
About Cryptonities.com
Cryptonities is the leading Dapp Kickstarter and IEO development/ IEO marketing agency. We specialize in building Cryptocurrency and developer communities to drive converted engagement with public token sales in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
