Your Go-To-Market Guide for blockchain startups
Getting your idea off the ground and into development is only one piece of the puzzle for the success of your decentralised app. Not only do you need to have a good idea, but you also need to make people aware of it.
We’re sharing some food for thought, and activities that have worked for us, through our go-to-market (GTM) checklist. This will help you raise the profile of your idea, and launch it to market.
GETTING STARTED/PRE MAIN SALE
Below is a checklist of considerations you should set up and have in place in preparation for your launch/main sale:
Most importantly, define your target audience and the why. What problem is your DApp solving? Why is your DApp the solution? What is your DApps purpose?
In addition to defining the why, understanding who your target audience is will underpin your marketing activity. Once you know who wants your DApp, you’ll be able to be focus your marketing efforts to reach them.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is your solution for businesses or consumers?
Geographically where is your focus?
What does your target audience like to do?
How old are they?
Male or Female?
Are they on social media, if so which channels?
Do they go to events?
Do they have a persona? (It may help to create one)
In some insurances, you may have two target audiences, for example: Investor audience and Developer audience.
The language and strategies you use to attract both of these audiences is vastly different, however both critical for success. If this is the case, create a persona for both of your audiences and then work through the questions above for each.
MARKETING ON A PAGE
Below is an example of a marketing plan on a page:
We’ve broken this into thee distinct sections:
Audience — Who are you targeting, what is their customer experience and what’s in it for them?
Strategy — How are you going to launch your idea to market and what are your goals or key milestones to measure yourself against?
Activities — What marketing are you going to execute in order to reach your audience and strategic KPIs? Where are you going to be seen?
If you like our template, here’s a blank version for you to fill out and apply to your own project:
LAUNCH/MAIN SALE
Now you have defined who you are targeting and how you plan to target your audience, you have set yourself up for success to launch. However, before you launch, as with any major product milestone, there are further considerations for you should prepare ahead of your go live date.
This is your time to shine, so you want to amplify your above the line (ATL) and below the line (BTL) activity to get the furthest reach!
We’ve prepared an example checklist of activity you should consider when preparing for your launch:
Core to this is to have all the details of your sale defined. In our experience, you’ll get the most questions surrounding your listing and token distribution, so make sure you have a clear roadmap established, to manage expectations and all incoming queries.
We’ve unpicked a few of the terms from the checklists and marketing plan above, and explained why you should incorporate these activities as part of your launch execution and overall marketing approach:
SEO Strategy
Having a great product doesn’t matter if people can’t find it. With paid ads you can boost performance, but with search engine optimisation you can do the same, for free.
Great SEO requires both front end content work and back end technical work. At its core the purpose is to show search engines that you are a legitimate and reputable source of information.
By appearing to be legitimate for certain search terms your listing for those terms will improve. This is done by having good content and a well made and constructed website.
As a result the idea behind an SEO strategy is to identify what you want to appear, then to optimise your site for those keywords.
CTA Tiles
CTA stands for Call-To-Action, which means getting your audience to do something or perform some kind of action ie: buy now, click here, sign up.
Buy creating digital tiles or banners that include a call to action you can more easily measure the success of your marketing effort by understanding how many of your target audience completed that action. You can also test your messaging ie: if your CTA was register here, and you had no completed registrations, you may want to rethink your messaging to something that resonates with your audience better, for example; register here to start your free trial or register here for 10% off.
Every piece of collateral you create should have some kind of CTA even if it is as simple as: Join our Telegram to keep up to date with all our latest developments.
Drip Campaign
On your DApp you should incorporate sign up functionality in order to build a database of leads for you to engage with.
When a visitor signs up to receive updates from you, its a good idea to create a drip campaign to ensure you remain top of mind.
There are lots of marketing tools you can use to support your drip campaign and overall marketing activity (Hubspot, Mail Chimp, GetResponse), whichever tool you use, load your new registration into a drip campaign that creates a funnel that keeps users engaged and up to date. From here, new subscribers should receive a series of emails (a drip campaign) to welcome them and introduce them to your DApp. In the image above we’ve demonstrated a drip campaign of three emails that PL^G subscribers receive across the first week of their sign up.
This is also a great opportunity to include your new subscriber in your monthly newsletters or ongoing updates.
We hope we’ve given you some food for thought and wish you all the best for your decentralised app!
If you found this useful in the journey to launching your DApp, we have more helpful resources and tools for you to use. You may like to check out our PL^G toolkit if you’re looking to build your own blockchain or the Centrality Developer portal to support the development of your DApp.
