How to make an ICO website which your investors will love
6 elements which make an ICO website productive. Easy to apply methodology with examples and comments.
2 719 ICO websites are listed at icobench.com for 06th April 2018. How to stand out? Get the plain success formula for your ICO Website from the experts of Top 10+ ICO Marketing Agencies.
1. What does your investor need? You never know what is inside someone’s head — we do
2. Why should you invest in your ICO website? Genius’ mistake
3. 6 elements for coinmaking website. An easy methodology that you can use for your ICO website
What does your investor need?
We don’t guess — we know it for sure. How? We asked him.
Last year we provided an ICO market research and got some interesting insights. We found the top features that investors consider when choosing an ICO project to invest.
Top-3 things of high importance:
1) Project idea, its relevance and efficiency
2) Team reliability
3) Publicity intensity
1. Project idea
To win in ICO race your project must be innovative and direct to the future. Smart investors need smart projects
Your project core idea should be in-demand. You should solve some up-to-date problem. To win in ICO race your project must be innovative and direct to the future. Smart investors (and today all investors are smart and learned on a painful experience of scums and frauds) need smart projects. In which would you invest: new hand sunflower oil-press or a distributed antivirus soft?
2. Team
Catching a taxi, you prefer experienced driver than a newbie. Investors think just the same
Team is the people to whom investors are going to entrust their money. If you have ever bought something, you should recall that felling of personal trust / distrust which deeply influence on your final decision. Catching a taxi, you prefer experienced driver than a newbie. Investors think just the same. The more experienced and successful team an ICO project has — the more trust it gains.
Your team members and advisors need to be:
- High-level professionals
- Known in professional environment
- Positive experienced in the same projects
If all your teammates and advisors are new in the market — you should engage someone who knows how to improve your trust index.
3. Publicity
The hype around the ICO project gives you extra points to trust, reliability and prospectiveness
Publicity expectedly gets into the top-3 the most valuable things ICO needs. Do people talk about your project? If they don’t, it means no one needs your idea, no one trusts your team and no one buys your tokens. Or no one knows about your existence and won’t buy your tokens. The hype around the ICO project gives you extra points to trust, reliability and prospectiveness. Investors must be sure that the project in which they invest will rise up.
So, now we know what your investor needs. How to give him this information in most digestive way? The best option to give investors all the data about your project at once is to put it at your ICO Website. And here is why.
Why should you invest in your ICO website?
Actually, you shouldn’t.
Only 10% of investors mention the website as the main thing to check when analyzing ICO trustworthy. Let the investor to search for your project’s problem solution in ICO listings, for your team in social media, seek for publicity elsewhere.
Here is John. John is 28. He is a project manager in a major IT company, let’s say Google. John decides to put couple of ETH, gained for his friend’s ITO, into some fresh ICO. His aim is to earn money for a new tesla car.
John goes at the Cryptocompare (for example). There John analyzes statistics for the most recent ICOs (he can get larger margin if invests earlier with the highest bonuses and discounts). John learns everything he could on the most promising projects from the listing site. Then John makes his long-list of the most attractive projects. And the next step: he goes… right, at the websites of ICOs that are in his long list.
You can skip website or don’t work hard on it. Maybe your project is a new Facebook or LHC and you already have ETH for $20M from your billionaire grandpa sheikh. That’s great!
What if your grandpa is just a carpenter, as mine? You need John, a lot of Johns.
Your competitors have already worked hard on their websites as a marketplace that can satisfy John’s information demands. And, the investor is a laziest person you’ve ever met. So he probably will choose to learn all necessary information at the comfortable, high usable, nice designed and properly working website. He could spend a couple hours seeking for information of you and your project in WWW. But John would hardly. There are plenty of other fish in the sea.
The investor is a laziest person you’ve ever met. He will choose to learn information at the high usable website
Good ICO website does not guarantee you Hard Cap. Though website’s absence / negligence closely guarantee poor ROI for any promo and PR activities. And why should I entrust my money to the guy who haven’t even try to help me understand and examine his project deeper? What the project it is if they don’t have a plain website? My mom has one.
Poor website is much worse than any website, it’s a clear mark for John’s worst phobia — scam. Trouble to make a good one.
How to make an ICO website which your investors will love?
6 elements for the coinmaking ICO website
Here is the 6 things for the high-usable and converting ICO website:
1. Project essential description
2. Team and proof of life information
3. Publicity evidences
4. Token and ICO details
5. Online chat 24/7
6. Fine performance
Those elements should work in a harmony as a system to engage and convince John.
More than 1 400 sites for the active ICOs are located on the icobench.com‘s list today. Most of them show great enthusiasm and a lot of fantasy. However, only some of them show properly what John are going to look for.
We analyzed top-20 sites from icobench rating. Average mark by our “6 elements scale” for all 20 hits 62%. The highest got the Stopthefakes.io. It shows the high marks for all 6 criterias. The worst is the Safecrypt.io, mainly because of poor information architecture and low usability. John should use some telepathy at this site to scratch out the information he needs. And as we know — he wouldn’t try hard to do it.
So let’s learn from the leaders’ best solutions and mistakes.
4. Project essential description
Getting project idea clearly, John feels confident about the project. His trust growths as growths the probability for you to gain the investments
Project idea is the most important thing that investor John considers. It should be the most clear and visible thing on your ICO webpage.
Don’t overload John with technical details from the start.
Tell about the project’s opportunity. Why is it so special? Why do people use it? Show the market opportunities and investing advantages.
“Games are not coinized enough” doesn’t sound as an opportunity. “2 billion gamers will join our blockchain game project” — sounds more convincing, doesn’t it?
We defined, what exactly John needs to get your project’s idea.
1) Tell about the project as a solution for common problem
2) Explain clearly hows exactly it works
3) Emphasize what makes your project special and better than any other alike project in this niche
4) Place noticeable link for the Whitepaper with full technology and business-model description. So John can easily read it
5) Enrich the webpage with Illustrative video and infographics. It will influence not only on Johns ratio, but also on his emotions, it can engage him deeply
6) Give links for the deeper information and technical details, alpha and prototypes to show John some real results of your work
By getting this data, John feels confident about the project. His trust growths as growths the probability for you to gain the investments for the project.
5. Team and proof of life
Prove the real people are behind the project
After getting interested on your project, John starts questioning: is that all for real? Won’t bad guys cheat me? Won’t I loose my money?
You should convince John that the real people are behind the project. That you have a team that’s consist of experienced brilliant professionals to rise your project up. Prove your existence, honest intentions and good faith.
1) Provide short information about your team members. It will be a great bonus if you have some market celebrities among advisors or management.
2) Add team members’ social links. Those links must lead to the real, fulfilled and freshly updated personal accounts, thus, John can make sure that he’s staring at the real people.
3) Provide links for the project’s social pages to show that you have alive community and wide coverage. For John it means people know about your project and will use it widely. So it’s worth to invest in.
Social pages should be freshly updated, as well, and have enough organic members.
6. Publicity evidences
Mentions of your project in major thematic media and listings prove your trustworthy and status
As we said above, publicity is in top-3 most important things John pay attention to. Mentions of your project in major thematic media (as CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, CCN etc.) and listings (as CryptoCompare, ICO Bench), prove your trustworthy and status. Of course, all of the reviews and testimonials should be real, authentic and have proof links.
What should your webpage contain:
1) Publications on reputable sources show your popularity and then prospects.
2) Opinion leaders’ reviews proves your reliability and status
3) Ratings emphasize that you’ve already got the high-rated marks by experts, thus you have a strong chances to get to the top
7. Token and ICO details
Don’t forget to clarify, why should John buy your tokens right now
Most of investors are going to make money on their tokens. John is not an exception. So, token sale information is high-priority thing for him. It should be described in all details that matters.
1) How much does it cost? It’s the basic info for anything you’re going to sell
2) Technical details: how many coins are on sale, are they premined, token distribution etc. It shows you understand what are you doing and give a feeling of control to John.
3) Bonuses and discounts schedule helps John to plan his purchase. It stimulates him to make a decision faster as well
4) ICO stages timing is helpful not only in John’s purchase planning. It also shows that you’re confident in your roadmap
5) Don’t forget to clarify, why should John buy your tokens /apply to the Whitelist right now? Most of the sites we examined did. Only 4 of 20 ICO websites show the investor’s benefits more or less clearly. It’s the least popular point of our features list. Before the entrusting money John must see his profit clearly.
6) Don’t be shy, show clearly how much funds have your project already raised. It indicates market interest for your project and its’ growth speed. The faster you gain money the better opportunity you promise to John.
7) Additional legal information gives your project extra points to security and trustworthy. Whatever you promise, investing in any ICO is a risk. John is under the great pressure. The more clear legal documents you’ll provide to him, the more trust you’ll gain.
8. Online contact 24/7 — The fifth element
If you aren’t able to answer community questions 24/7, you are loosing them
John has found almost everything he needs to put your ICO project to his short list. He supports the idea, believes in your team and has already counted how much he’ll earn, buying with the Whitelist bonus. However, he still hesitates. He wants to meet you personally to ask some questions, to get personal contact. John needs to check if you worth of his trust and money.
As John probably can’t visit your office in Palo Alto (let’s suppose, you still don’t have one), he tries to establish connection through the internet. You must be ready to meet John in a convenient way for him at any time he would like to talk to you. And, as you intend to gain his investments — you should do your best in answering all the questions he has.
What does John expect from online chatting instruments on your ICO website:
1) Easy to reach button to ask the question right now. And this button should work properly
2) Behind the button should be the real alive relevant discussion, without bots and flood. John will recognize what’s going on from the one sight.
Fast first hand response from the team members — that is what John really needs.
If you aren’t able to answer community questions 24/7, you are loosing them. And saying 24/7 I mean it, literally. You might have investors from Japan, Belarus and Canada, so they may put their questions at 3 am, and your silence might push them off forever.
You better get ready in advance. Hire specialists to build the real community, not to make a visibility of one. Teach them all your project details, so they can cover you when you’ll be having a nap or pitching somewhere.
9. Performance
Make John feel confident and comfortable. And he will repay you generously with his attention and his coins
We had some discussions inside out of the team about this 6th parameter. Performance is not actually some piece of information or functionality of the ICO website. Why should we put it by the other 5?
Performance affects on each other element. Bad performance makes impossible for John to find on a website information he needs, even if it actually is there. Performance is like a water in a soup: no one notice its presence and quality till it is fine. And bad one can spoil all the rest.
In our top-20 research only 7 websites show normal performance. By performance we mean not a nice graphics and fancy animation. Quite the contrary sometimes.
The major performance parameters we (and John as well) consider are:
1) Fast site load. You present Hi-Tech cutting edge project, your site should be as fast, as a photon. Don’t make John wait — he has a lot to do on your competitors’ faster loading websites.
2) Clean website means John can easily find everything he needs and get the essence at a glance.
3) Appropriate design. Make every detail helps John to figure out as soon as possible who are you and what is your project about. Don’t try to entertain him or make him guess — it’s annoying.
4) Put bright understandable buttons at proper places. It also makes John feels confident and comfortable. And he will repay you generously with his attention and his coins.
John explored all the 20 ICO websites in his long list. He crossed out those with the lack of information to the point, blank LinkedIn team profiles, dead chats, unclear ideas and uncertain media support.
Is your site still in John’s list?
Want your ICO website attracts investors as a sunflower attracts bees in July? Drop us a line.
