Which countries should you market your ICO to?
To keep your ad spend as efficient as possible for your ICO (intial coin offering) marketing campaign, you want to be able to narrow down the target market as accurately as possible on all the factors available to hand.
One of these key factors is which countries are best to market to for an ICO and this is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the trickier variables in your targeting to work out. Crypto investors by design are hard to locate but there are a few things you can do to whittle down your list of countries.
Regulation
Our two biggest target markets when we were setting up our ICO were the US and China. Since then, China has all out banned ICOs (for now) and the US has brought upon strict regulations which means hundreds of 1000s of dollars in legal fees to comply with so we chose to not allow American and Chinese participants into our ICO. Japan, on the other hand, has completely embraced Bitcoin and licensed 11 exchanges and now accounts for 56% of Bitcoin exchange volume. To this point, we’ve focused strongly on Japan, even creating Japanese versions of our app and of our ICO website.
Follow the Bitcoin
Ethereum is the crypto of choice in most ICOs but I’ve found it quite hard to find useful data on where the Ethereum crypto holders are located but I’ve used Bitcoin data as a reference for where the Ethereum holders might be.
Speculator have done a pretty cool post-China breakdown of where the most volume of fiat to BTC is being exchanged: Japan, US, South Korea and the EU all come up tops.
So which countries worked for us?
Our target countries included: United Kingdom, Australia, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Malaysia, Israel, Venezuela, the big EU countries and the Nordics.
And the markets we got the most registrations and contributions from were: Japan, Malaysia, Israel, Slovenia, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine and the UK. I was quite disappointed by the lack of activity from the EU, perhaps we didn’t market well enough to them or maybe regulatory concern there is still an issue as a lot of those countries are undecided still on how to regulate ICOs and crypto.
Keep an eye on Venezuela
I added Venezuela late to the test after learning about how hyperinflation has citizens turning to mining there and it definitely showed potential so it would be worth testing in your target audiences as well.
I hope this gives you a starting list on which countries to target. Do keep an eye on the regulation status of each country though as it is changing daily, eg Malaysia may come off my list soon. Are there any that you think I missed?
Cove Identity is preparing for a new pre-ICO, you can register your interest on the website.
