A Comprehensive Guide to a Successful ICO Marketing Campaign

Applicature: a comprehensive guide to successful ICO marketing campaign

Challenges Facing ICO Marketing Strategies

Successful marketing campaigns for ICOs are based on a combination of traditional marketing and PR. To be efficient, an ICO marketing campaign must apply a totally coordinated and collaborative effort. This involves community media bursts, innovative guidance, comprehensive study, and a high level of reliability. A project should hire an ICO manager who knows which crypto community meetings and occasions you should be present at. This will allow building relations with the right people. By the way, exceptional ICO marketing managers might also have connections to get you into these events at a lower cost.

From a perfunctory point of view, here are the tenets of triumphant ICO marketing:

1. Promotion via cryptocurrency communities, PR, social media, and regular press is the perfect way to introduce a product/service to the world (Reddit, Github, etc.)
2. The power of social media plays a great part in upgrading an ICO marketing scheme. This might be a hard task, though, because some leading social media has already banned crypto advertising (Facebook, LinkedIn).
3. Creating high-quality content is a crucial mission that should emerge on every ICO marketing task list.
4. Targeting market research and primary consumer needs analysis is another important task.
5. Word of mouth power. You need to tell everybody about your idea and the current problem you are going to solve at each particular meet-up or conference, on YouTube, and even on TV/radio.

Detector project market budget allocation

Nowadays, initial coin offerings are the most popular tool for raising funds and attracting investments. Marketing specialists apply blockchain technology in a manner that was never before considered possible. People around the world are hurrying to invest in various digital cryptocurrency projects, realizing that this is one of the key perspective spheres of the future.

A Comprehensive Marketing Guide

ICO marketing campaigns need complex promotion methods and strategy elaboration. To develop a competent ICO marketing strategy that will lead your project to success, you will need to:

• correctly present your project and the problem it is going to solve
• evaluate competitors
• prepare the necessary internal documentation
• take into account legal and financial aspects
• have a strong relationship with the crypto community
• carry out technical implementation (from tokens to site development)
• correctly allocate budget for paid promotion
• have marketing managers accompany the project at all stages of the ICO campaign

For startups, time is a crucial element. ICO marketing consultants suggest at least 30 to 90 days to build a strong, active, and efficient ICO marketing campaign. The duration of the ICO campaign is one more item to think through. Generally, the essential period in the ICO model is the first 24 hours and the last 24 hours. Briskly changing financial markets focus on this time because there are so many ICOs. As a result, it’s not possible to notice all of them.

Concept

First of all, you’ll need to decide on a main concept for your future startup, and find out whether it will be of any interest to users. Describe the idea of your project, its use and unique proposal, and why you need tokens to realize it. Specify the relation of your idea to the blockchain.

White Paper

This is the most important document on the company’s website. The presentation of the white paper should explain the project in detail: the idea, technology, business processes, team, and so on. The white paper goal is to describe the project and offer beneficial ideas and significance to possible investors.

Road Map

The presence of a road map favorably highlights a startup among competitors who do not have this tool, and speaks about the likely prospects of the project. Any startup aimed at long-term existence should have a plan for developing its own coin on the ICO market. The roadmap includes various points or steps of development. A successfully launched ICO projects a roadmap for the next calendar year. For more clarity, here is an example of the INS Ecosystem roadmap.

Example: INS Ecosystem roadmap

Videos

It takes time to study the white paper, but not everyone does it. So make a short video with basic information about the project. It will not scare away investors, but will create the opportunity to explain a lot about your ICO. The YouTube video platform is a popular and useful multimedia instrument for ICO promotion.

Team

One of the most important ICO startups tasks to complete is to correctly and distinctly present the project’s team. Describe everyone who works on the project. Write about the team, and technical and business advisors. Another good way to gain trust among customers is to add each team member’s photo on the website. It would be useful to publish information about your team on Crunchbase, where many successful team profiles can be found. Typically, to provide complete information about your team, the following steps are taken:

• create profiles in social networks
• provide the possibility to communicate directly with the team
• show the size of the team
• show interaction within the team
• describe the experience of your team and their work results in the crypto industry.

Team presentation example

Developing a Website

An ICO website performs several functions at once:

• It is informative (tells users about the startup).
• Advertising (promotes the project).
• Sells (as a rule, the sale of tokens is carried out through the site).

Initially, users will visit your site to find out information about the launch, but during and after the crowdsale, a huge stream of users will converge on the website. You should immediately think about good hosting, which will ensure the smooth operation of the site at peak loads. In addition, take care of protecting your site from hacker attacks.

Normally, an ICO website should contain the following items:

• presentation of the proposed product (you can add a thematic video)
• presentation of the team (preferably with high-quality photos and links to the portfolio)
• documents (public offer, white paper, roadmap)
• investors’ private office
• startup partners
• subscription form
• contact information (email, social networks profiles, etc.)

Email Subscription Form

When your website has been created, it is recommended that you run a newsletter distribution for subscribers. Send out news about the project, crowdsale date reminders, links to the main documents (first of all, the white paper), and useful informational materials.

To collect a base of potential investors, send them a letter once a week with information about the project: news, successes, plans. In the cryptocurrency world, it is customary to create separate emails specifically for the ICO. Therefore, provide a choice of mailing frequency for interested users in order to remain unobtrusive.

Retargeting Codes

Surprisingly, retargeting codes can be found on single projects. This is the marketer’s oversight. With the help of retargeting databases, you can trace users who have visited your site and remind them about the project. On the other hand, you can use the database to find potential investors.

Search Engine Optimization

An SEO company can provide support by raising the proper keywords and creating internal content, such as blog articles and articles for external publications or other websites. Your cryptocurrency will obtain popularity faster and on more appropriate sites. The more resources refer to your project, the more awareness your ICO grows.

Top-Tier Cryptocurrency Platforms

The efficiency of an ICO marketing campaign will be raised or damaged depending upon the forum chosen. High-quality projects use specialized platforms to saturate their capital necessities. These include major cryptocurrency websites such as BitcoinTalk and Cryptocurrency Talk.

BitcoinTalk is the largest and the most popular forum about blockchain. You can also start discussions on Quora: there are a lot of discussions about different ICOs, specific cryptocurrencies, and polls in which you can actively participate. There are lot of professional groups on LinkedIn with thousands of participants. Other popular platforms include Twitter, Medium, Slack, Telegram, Reddit, WeChat, and YouTube.

Announcements in Popular ICO Calendars

All ICO projects should post information about the upcoming release of tokens on special calendars. There are many resources on which the schedule of an ICO is published: Coinschedule, Cyber.fund, and Icocountdown. Many projects place information about themselves on multiple resources. As a rule, the following information is provided on ICO calendars:

• ICO name
• ICO project concept
• crowdsale start and close date
• links to website

CoinSchedule ICO calendar

Articles and Press Releases

Publish press releases and articles on specialized media. This will provide additional mentions for your project. There are press release services that can provide information and analytics of your project for people who are interested in such content. In addition, marketing managers can make a cogent argument to journalists by explaining to them why an ICO is valuable, and provide reasons why your press release should be published. The main thing is to have all content written by professionals.

Bounty Campaign

To gain more popularity, you will have to pay for social media activity, translations of materials from the site, writing of articles about the project, etc. In this way, your site will be visited by people who are really interested in the ICO. Then, with the “Similar Audiences” tool, you will be able to find the people most interested in cryptocurrencies.

Official Brickblock bounty program details

Event Management

Personal acquaintance and live communication with potential investors is possible within a framework of specialized conferences. By the way, the main audience of such events and presentations are professional representatives of the blockchain and crypto communities. Holding meetings and conferences (including video conferences, where the audience of users is wider) with a well-presented message can increase your chances of attracting investments.

The Final Word

The number of companies planning their own ICO is constantly growing. Some of them are in a hurry to issue tokens because of concerns that in their target country, the ICO will be forbidden. For instance, this has already happened in China. All of this leads to an increase in competition in this market; dozens of different ICOs take place every day, and potential investors find it difficult to understand the offers of block projects. As a result, it is almost impossible to successfully place tokens for companies that pay great attention to marketing and promotion. This will help to communicate their vision and business model, and answer possible questions from users and investors. With a faultless plan combining several promotional methods, your ICO project will have a greater chance of success.

Ready to go public? Contact our skilled team to help you develop a successful marketing campaign.