Launching successful ICO campaigns in China, Japan, and South Korea
This is our second blog post of BITSME’s “Far East” guide. On the first piece of the series “Cryptocurrency regulatory realities and consequences” we painted the picture of the regulatory reality in China, Japan, and South Korea and its immediate effect on the ecosystem. Thankfully enough just two days after we published our last blog where we mentioned that South Korea is probably heading towards full regulation on ICOs, a series of bullish announcements went out to the press, pushing up BTC price up to 8,497$. Let’s hope this blog post will have greater effect.
While the first part of the guide was more theoretical, in this one we intend to dive into the unclear water of executing marketing campaigns and building oriental communities around your project in a very practical way. So let’s get right to it.
BITSME is an investment banking firm helping cryptocurrency-based projects conduct successful TGE campaigns. Blessed with a variety of diversified clients, we had the opportunity of working with multiple service providers and partners. The following presented agencies and companies are far from being exhausting and many great ones remained out. On the same note, none of those mentioned below knew about it in advance or had anything to do with it.
BITSME’s secret ingredients of running successful TGE campaigns in Asia
Translate all core materials into the local language — Kicking off with an obvious one you might say, but you will be surprised to know not everyone gets that. It feels almost intentionally but only a small portion of those communities have sufficient English skills to understand your vision and concept as described on your website, White paper, and blogs.
Additionally, we noticed that these Asian communities are making their decisions whether to contribute or provide projects with their services according to the projects will and plans for establishing their presence in those regions for the long term post ICO. Avoiding making the effort of localizing your basic materials might create a sense of alienation and foreignness keeping them away.
Choosing the right translator is also an important task. In Japanese for example, you can have many different forms of translations for the same English word, translating Bitcoin in one way might be associated with Mt.Gox while others are associated with an alternative thrilling investment. Wrapping it up, as the translation work is basically your representative in those areas, make sure you chose a local translator and not skimp on few bucks that might cost much more down the road. The average cost of a good translator might vary between 0.1–0.15$ per word.
Using Local Virtual Branches — As hard as you may try, you will never be able to nail all the habits and local customs of each of the Asian markets. Although costly, local agencies are your best shot at getting the most out of your campaign, securing your brand awareness to its maximum. A Virtual Branch will basically act as an independent branch of your project, allowing you to maintain the main English campaign while it does the same in other languages interacting with local media outlets, social channels and local communication platform such as — KakaoTalk, Wechat, Naver, Line and others.
Out of the variety of these service providers, we found BaseLayer (Japan), BitGosu (S.Korea) and Block72 (China) Token Advisors (Singapore) to be among the most prominent ones.
Attend several local meetups and Conferences — Creating relationships takes time and securing contributions in foreign territories depend above all on establishing high trust levels. During our visits to the far east, we found ourselves under maticolus and long due diligence. Only after seeing the same people and organizations several times we were able to break through and achieve some great results.
Picking a single event to attend to in each country will probably not have any impact whatsoever. Instead you better off choosing fewer locations, planning your campaign in a way that enables you to return to the same places again and have follow-up meetings enhancing your chances of getting your deal. We at BITSME advise our portfolio projects to make to most out of each trip, and immediately after registering to a major event, secure several other smaller meetups sessions around that area. In fact, in most cases those small overlooked events are equally if not more productive than the big ones as the project usually ends up receiving much more attention from the audience.
Use local influencers — Who is better to deliver your message than the guy from the local neighborhood? On boarding local influencers is key in order to establish yourself in a distinct community. Of course major influencers as Ian Balina or Crypto Daily we give you a major boost but you might get the same effect using one of the local stars which will probably cost you way less.
YouTube might be the leading influencers platform on the west but in the far east other platforms often take the lead. Choosing the right influencer to work with begins with choosing the mainstream platform in that specific area. The most dominant platform in China is Wechat with starlets as Qushikuangren attracting thousands of followers. In Japan, the leading influencers platform is Twitter hosting several major influencers accounts such as Takafumi Horie and Yoichi Ochiai. South Koreans are absolutely insane about videos making YouTube the prominent platform there with few major accounts in the likes of Spunky from BitGosu and Soso Labs leading the rest of them.
Playing safe with Syndicates — With the market in a severe stagnation in recent months, it is often very easy to be tempted to take every offer and contribution opportunity. Just like in the rest of the globe, Syndicates role is becoming more important as they practically transferred into the community investments pipelines. Although there are lots of advantages playing along with those pools, their legal status is problematic and there is more to that. Recently there have been few cases where good projects provided allocations for Asian syndicates that kept the majority of the bonus for themselves offering their community worse terms than they could have received by contributing individually through the TGE sale site. Needless to say that when dealing with big allocations, these kinds of situations can lead to a total chaos.
Another thing to bare in mind is that in some cases, big crypto funds or VCs will be reluctant to join if they will find out many pools are in as well, as they perceive these kinds of contributions as non sophisticated ones that may cause a massive dump right after the sale.
