6 Tips on Marketing an ICO

In recent years, the competition between ICOs increased drastically due to the growth of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects. This competition brought another challenge to ICOs and also raised the costs of acquiring potential customers. Since each ICO aims to reach their target cap, they need to raise their marketing game in order to achieve that. ICO marketing is relatively a new concept but still there are some steps you can easily follow to step up your competition and have a successful ICO period.

ilker cikrikcili
4 min readSep 17, 2018

Care about your community

Gaining trust and receiving support are really important for an ICO. The best way to pursue that is to build a solid community including people that has strong belief and support for your project.

Telegram counts as one of the best options to create a group for your prospective investors and community supporters. You must act on Telegram immediately and start growing your community in day one. For that, you can use bounty programs, brand ambassadors and community managers that understand your needs and target audiences well.

Create a powerful content strategy

An ICO project must be really clear on the message it tries to give. Therefore, creating your strategy before you start publishing is really essential. As an upcoming ICO, you need to first care about creating “awareness”. To achieve that, you must also get the support of your community following the steps in number 1.

Due to the reluctant frauds in the ICO world, gaining trust is the next step for your ICO. For this, you will need several documents and live platforms. For instance, you must publish your white paper before you press “Start” on your content strategy. You must have a live website with the team, product, roadmap and contact information. Your most essential content will come from these and releasing them as soon as possible will create credibility for you.

You need to clarify which message you are willing to give your followers. Do you want to create awareness in a certain subject or do you want them to engage with your project in deep levels? After that, you can start identifying your target, most important channels, tone of voice etc.

Of course, these won’t be right in your first shot so you should keep in mind that you should ALWAYS keep testing and changing.

Focus on the advantages of your project

Each ICO project has a problem to solve and a target to achieve. You must be extremely clear about these reasons and share it with the people that are or will be potentially interested in you. When doing that, make sure that you are in a conversation with them rather than only giving a monologue, talking about yourself. A one-way communication is extremely ineffective in all areas of life.

Remember! You’re trying to shine apart from all other projects. Therefore, you must clearly define the need for your project and how your project is better than any of the current solutions.

Make sure that you make a competitive analysis for your marketing strategy as well and understand how they connected with their potential investors to sell their idea. Then, compare your traction and strategy with them to highlight your weak and strong points. There’s no better critique than the audience, itself.

Use popular platforms effectively

With the rise of the ICOs, some platforms have been really successful in attracting the community and increasing the visibility of ICO projects.

To find community members and connect with them, I suggest you to use bitcointalk. Although it has been extremely popular lately, it still manages to make you visible enough for your community and it’s mandatory to keep an existence in that platform.

You can view our page from here; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4884588.0

If you’re aiming to make a bounty, bounty0x is the best platform to go by.

You can also use bitcointalk for announcing your bounty.

Plan a powerful PR and event strategy

In order to keep pace with the sudden changes in the technology world, you have to use both traditional PR studies and digital power. 46 percent of the ICOs in the past year have failed. Some of them failed because they were not a strong project, while others did not provide sufficient funding because they could not do a good PR.

First of all, you should determine the advantageous aspects of your ICO. Then, you should identify the advertising elements that present the benefits of your ICO and present it to the target audience in an objective approach. Later, you should contact the industry-oriented people. You can reach these people via online and offline network. Press is the key factor in this scenario. You must be in contact with journalists, bloggers and other media employees. If possible, you should talk to them face-to-face in order to achieve intimate relationships. You should give a story to people and be creative. This will give you a chance to be released in multiple channels.

Calculate all of the outcomes and constantly change

You must clarify your KPIs and what you aim to achieve in doing what you’re doing. Throwing content or organizing events for no reason will have no returns in the end.You must proceed by considering them.Use the analytic tool, try plenty of testing, and see the results. Examine similar ICOs and take care to compete.Notice how the ICOs are progressing. Rely on your project and pay attention to your steps.

If you have any questions regarding marketing, you can always contact me via our telegram group;

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ilker cikrikcili

Digital Marketing, Business Model Development, Market Strategy, IT Product Development