Importance of bounty programs

Bounties are one of the crucial elements of marketing campaigns in ICOs. However, bounty programs have to be balanced in terms of the general pool of tokens. Why? To avoid influence on the token sale and value of the token after the token sale (token drops, token dumps).

Characteristics of a good bounty program

Good bounty program:

• is well balanced in the terms of general pool of tokens, not reaching more than 10% of the general pool of tokens
• has a market segmentation into channels ICO is available to manage (do not go into too many channels!)
• requires management of people who do it professionally (bounty managers) that support the founders/basic team
• should build a group of natural followers, who just like the concept and added value to the project

Most of the bounty programs base on own tokens of the project. It is very important, because gives the additional motivation effect — paid bounties only in BTC or ETH should warn ICO participants (of course not in all cases). Why not buy followers? Because bounties then transform into ordinary paid marketing, not engagement-based program of specified ICO support. You can miss the assumptions with that.

Segmentation

Most popular bounty programs concern:

• Bitcointalk.org — basing on levels of the users, there are often used signature campaigns, translations campaigns and other advanced forms of evangelist marketing
• Twitter — basing on accounts that have greater amounts of followers, but interested in the participation in ICOs
• Facebook — bases mostly on groups and friends of the followers
• Telegram — mostly dedicated to maintenance of the ICOs group
• Slack — very similar to groups of Facebook and Telegram
• Partnerships — based on relations, like voting platforms, or additional support of dedicated followers (blogs, etc.)

In tokenloyalty.io project we have focused on only several channels — because uncontrolled diversification would not have the business effect to build future loyalty program users (we are focusing not only on ICO participants but also on future platform users).

Most of the bounty programs are announced on bitcointalk, here is example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2360928.0

Avoid mistakes

What is important, one should avoid such mistakes like:

• too high pool for bounties, which may cause the token value drop just after the ICO
• fictional supporters that base on the falsified ranges
• non-rated agencies that may do more harm than effect (i.e. engaging newbe false accounts).

Bounties became a huge business, but one should acknowledge the basic idea — bounties were created to engage community in discussion over business, project, future functionalities. That is why it is worth to engage community in other forms, for example — tokenloyalty is making a research that concerns the business model, but in the frames of the “pay for the effort” we have made a contest to this poll: https://goo.gl/forms/1QbRCzvdnpJtGBjN2

At the end, always people matter — the customers. Don’t forget it.