CMO Reveals The Shocking Costs of Marketing an ICO
Hello, my name is Marina Baslina, and I’m ICO Marketing Consultant.
And what I have to say is of critical importance if you’re thinking of launching an ICO.
Even experienced marketers like me often aren’t prepared for the massive investment in time, effort and human resources that an ICO launch takes. While you might have a groundbreaking technology in development, at the end of the day, that technology alone isn’t what attracts investors. The importance of marketing your project cannot be underestimated.
What I’m about to reveal to you comes from my experience marketing our own ICO launch.
I’m being fully transparent with you so that you can be fully prepared before you begin planning your own ICO. What I’m about to share will be eye-opening for many of you.
The Personnel
In order to launch an ICO, you need a full marketing team to handle all of the roles involved.. This means that a CMO you’ll have to manage a team of almost 10 people (in-house team and people from an agency, people who help with article publications, etc). One person simply cannot get it all done by themselves.
At a minimum, here are the key marketing roles you’ll need to fill to launch an ICO.
- Copywriter to help with website copy and social media content — native English speaker preferred.
- Community manager — English speaking.
- Bounty/ Airdrop manager.
- Support team (2–3 people working in shifts, 24/7) for Telegram, Bitcointalk, and live chat on the website.
- Email marketing specialist.
- Traffic manager and Advertising Specialist — to run AdWords, display ads and other ads.
- Marketing Assistant to do all the job small marketing tasks like contacting ICO listings.
You need a team this large because marketing an ICO is a huge undertaking. It’s impossible for one person to handle all of these tasks. If you can, hire people in-house, instead of as freelancers. Often, freelancers will let you down, because you’re not their only client.
If you’d want to target people in Asia I’d suggest hiring a local agency.
The ICO Marketing Budget
When it comes to marketing your ICO campaign, you might be shocked at the budget you’ll need.
The minimum marketing budget needed is $300,000. Why?
Because everything is 3x time as expensive as when you run a campaign for a non-crypto startup. All numbers below are based on my latest experience with ICO marketing providers.
Each service costs $1,000-$5,000 on average.
1. ICO Listings:
On average a premium spot costs $5000. Non-premium spots are useless and do not bring any substantial traffic.
The cost: ~$30,000 for top 10 listings on platforms like ICObench.com
2. Paid Advertising
$150,000 for Adwords (According to Google’s suggestions)
$15,000 for each marketing channel (Asian social media, Twitter, LinkedIn)
$30,000- $100,000 for crypto ads (display ads on crypto websites)
3. Influencer Marketing
Top crypto bloggers ask $30,000 for a single video review on their YouTube channel. Other influencers ask for 1 BTC for a single mention on Twitter. So expect to invest $100,000 on influencer marketing.
3. Roadshow/Event marketing
$5,000 per one event
~$10,000-$50,000 in total
4. PR and Media Outreach
A top crypto media may ask up to $20,000 for publication. General websites like Forbes cost $2,000 for a single publication in the form of guest post.
In other words the budget for PR and Media Outreach must be at least $50,000.
5. Specialized Forums and SMM
You need to make sure your community is active and growing. Thus, you may need to buy commenting services. The role of a commenting service is to create discussions in Telegram, Bitcointalk, etc. One week of this service costs $5,000 on average.
If you’d like to grow your community, you’ll set up an airdrop. If you need 10,000 subscribers in Telegra it would cost a minimum of $15,000. However, in reality some experts ask for up to $50,000 for the airdrop management. Plus you also need to give away tokens to airdrop participants (the same as with bounty).
6. Marketing Team Salaries.
If you go with an in-house team you will need the following personnel:
- Copywriter from English speaking county — $2,000 min per month
- Community manager from English speaking county — $1,500 min per month
- Bounty/ Airdrop manager — you can pay in token, but prices vary, some ask $500 per month, some ask $5,000
- Support team (2–3 people working 24/7) for Telegram, Bitcointalk, and live chat on the website. $2,500 per month per the team of 2
- Email marketing specialist — $2,000 min per month
- Traffic manager and Advertising specialist who will run adwords, display ads and other ads — $2,000 min per month
- Marketing assistant to do all the job small marketing tasks like contacting ICO listings — $500
- CMO — $3,000 min per month
The average ICO marketing budget starts at $500,000 if you count all the numbers provided above.
But the biggest piece of advice I can gives to a prospective CMO is that you need to make sure that everyone spends 100% of their time on your project only.
That’s why an in-house team is more effective.
90% of time people won’t agree to work in exchange for tokens, of if they do agree, they won’t be motivated enough. The cheaper the specialist the more problems you’ll have with them. For example, you’ll get mistakes in the whitepaper, poor written English on your website which reflects badly on your team, etc. Just bad marketing in general.
The costs and personnel involved in an ICO are intense. So if I’ve put any of you off a bit from creating an ICO, it’s not because I want to scare you. It’s to prepare you for the realities of an ICO launch.
And that’s one of the reasons I help ICO projects with the marketing strategy. Being part of the CrowCoinage team as a CMO I realized that my mission is to help startups located worldwide crowdfund their projects and get access to the marketing help they need.
We know all too well the costs and sheer hours of manpower needed to successfully launch an ICO.
