I’ve worked in Marketing for 15 years. In a variety of roles, in a range of businesses and with different audiences. But never before have I experienced the marketing that is token sale marketing. Wow. It’s been fun.
So I wanted to share my experience of marketing from our perspective — Chainium’s token pre-sale ran during November and December 2017. There are five lessons that stand out…
Lesson 1 — say ‘no’ to virtually all offers of a token sale ‘opportunity’
When someone contacts you saying they have an exciting ‘opportunity’ for you, this is a code. It means they’re selling advertising. For a very high fee. If I’d said ‘yes’ to all, or most, of these advertising ‘opportunities’, we would have spent millions. Literally millions. I counted it all up. It’s limitless what you can spend money on — promoting your listing, buying lists, placing banners on websites, sponsoring articles, sponsoring events, sponsoring websites, attending events, sponsoring everything and anything. I’ve never seen anything like it. We want to spend most of our budget on our technology, not on advertising. So I said ‘no’ a lot.
Lesson 2 — there are no token sale marketing experts
The token sale market is so new that no-one, with integrity, would call themselves a token sale marketing expert. We’re all learning together. That’s what makes it a lot of fun, most of time, and challenging too. We’re all still learning who our audience are and what they really care about. We’re testing and learning. Acting on feedback in the moment and making quick pivots to try something new or different when things don’t work out as planned. If someone tells you they’re a token sale marketing expert, ask them how many token sales they’ve worked on…you’ll see.
Lesson 3 — say it once, say it twice, say it again…and again
No matter how many times we told our contributors that tokens would be allocated at the end of the public sale or they shouldn’t use an exchange to contribute…the questions came up again and again. This is because so many of our contributors were new to token sales and the process can be really tricky to navigate when you haven’t done it before. We under-estimated this. We thought the vast majority of our contributors would have contributed to token sales before. We were wrong. Many of our contributors were first-timers. We now know that we need to help them to navigate the tricky world of crypto-currency and token sales much more than we have before.
Lesson 4 — quality massively out-ranks quantity when it comes to a community
We’ve been incredibly fortunate to grow a fantastic community of Chainers in the last couple of months, from scratch. We now have nearly 300 Telegram members, 1700 Twitter followers, 33k Facebook followers and it’s growing steadily every day. We started at zero in November. Our Chainers are honest, direct and quick to respond — this is just the type of community we wanted to attract. We’re focusing on attracting the right community, not chasing the numbers. We’re doing this by sharing meaningful content on our plans, our prototypes, our technology, our team and our views. Do you sound like our kind of Chainer? Join us now.
Lesson 5 — Taylor Swift out-performs any other type of video content
We created a range of video content to promote our token sale — video animations, team interviews, prototype videos, movie parodies of removing the middlemen. We spent a lot of time and effort on all of these videos — making sure we produced high quality, smart, informative, easy-to-understand stories about our business, our platform, our technology and our team. But the one that performed the best…a Taylor Swift ‘shake it off’ gif that accompanied our tweets. What can I say…who knew?
So, we’ve learned an awful lot about token sale marketing so far. And we’ve successfully completed our token pre-sale. But that’s just the beginning. Next step is our public sale in March 2018…that’s when the fun really starts!
Chainium has rebranded to Own. For more information about our brand change please read this medium post.
