The Five Things We Learned Running ICO Campaigns
We have been working in the eventful world of ICOs for over a year, so as promised in our Telegram Channel here are some insightful truths and tips to help you run a successful campaign.
1. Scammers are everywhere
Let’s start with something fun. The first thing we learned is that there are numerous ways you can get scammed, the most popular being adopting the identity of an influencer. Some were basic but others were quite creative, even managing to fake any email address by using tools like Emkei. To give an example, here is the email we got after being contacted in telegram and asking the impersonator to validate from the real email address:
Tips on how to avoid being scammed:
- Most likely you won’t be reached out to by a popular source, so if you receive an offer from a youtuber with a lot of followers it should be an instant red flag.
- Message the official channel asking for confirmation about the offer. By notifying them of a scammer using their name you might even build a relationship.
- Check the email source and look for ‘received from’ section:
2. You should have been a crypto youtuber
Not only has the ICO boom allowed startups to quickly get a capital for their business, but also allowed people making youtube videos related to cryptocurrencies, blockchain, ICOs earn a staggering amount of money. To give a taste of what fees crypto youtubers are able to ask due to companies willing to pay anything for promotion of their project, here is an offer we received from youtuber CryptoChemist:
Since the token value was 0.10 USD, he could have earned the equivalent of 1'000'000 USD. Not a bad haul for one video, we even thought about making a youtube channel of our own.
However, Youtube is a good investment for gaining traction for your company, just try to find the perfect balance between what your marketing budget allows you to spend and if the fee for the video is acceptable based on relevant content and channel engagement.
How to measure the success of a Youtube channel or video? Pay attention to these ratios:
- Views to Subscribers - around 15-20% is the average amount of views a youtube channel gets from their subscribers. If the ratio is less than that, the subscribers are most likely fake
- Comments to Views - the average ratio of comments:views is about 0.5-1%, so if the video has a lot of views but no comments, the views are most likely fake
3. What works - Influencers
Similar to other industries, using Influencer Marketing works very well for ICOs. It is a fast way to improve your project credibility and gain you instant contributors. There are various types of influencers:
ICO experts:
These are experienced researchers who review ICOs and share the results with their community. Most of them are refusing payment for their work, so if your ICO gets a high rating from them or even a commitment to invest, it will gain you both followers and contributors without spending anything.
Visit CryptoDiffer for the list of top ICO experts.
Blockchain Influencers:
The so called ‘celebrities’ of the blockchain industry. Getting these people to sign on your project as an advisor would gain you access to their large amount of followers and get free mentions in news, as they get daily coverage of their activities.
Check CryptoWeekly 2018 edition of the top 100 most influential people.
Having worked on several projects, we managed to build close relationships with some of the influencers and they helped us to a successful campaign.
4. Quality over Quantity
Don’t waste your time and money on low-quality sources on the off chance it will gain your project recognition. To give an example, listing sites. We spent days both building a database and applying our projects to get listed. And from 250+ sites any noteworthy traffic was coming from only 5–6 of them.
Tips on how to evaluate a website:
- Check the page itself, if it looks like a low-effort website or it is hard to use, most likely other people won’t be using it either.
- Using tools like Similarweb, check the engagement report for the site, focus on stats like total visits, bounce rate, pages per visit.
Some our favorite:
The same logic should apply to youtubers. Even though Youtube is one the best ways to get traffic to your website, don’t waste valuable resources on bad channels just to have a video about your project. Here are the ones that worked well and didn’t cost a fortune:
5. Community Management is a must
Work on it early and often. Here are just some of the benefits your project can have from a real community:
✅ Give valuable feedback
✅ Attract Investors
✅ Organic and word of mouth growth
✅ Run a successful campaign without whales
✅ Stay faithful during market crisis or mistakes
Tips on how to build a strong community:
- Be active, quick responses from the team will help you build trust and respect
- Share regular project updates, if possible once per day
- Rewards competitions, e.g. we had meme contest in one of our projects
Interested in more?
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