How identifying the right audience will help you manage your ICO campaign cost-efficiently by using Tesla’s marketing strategy
Want to maximize the engagement of your target audience, and minimize the costs to do so? The secret is that it all depends on how you identify your target audience before starting your campaign.
In this article, I will give you some more insight into not only why this is important, but also how to do so.
Most ICOs think the bigger the community, the better. They make sure that their ICO has a Telegram supergroup in place, with a bunch of community managers handling this community.
When you started your business, you most likely found out that there is probably a large market of people interested in your product. But if that’s the only extent of the research you have done, then that’s where the mistake lies…
And that’s also where the money flow stops.
By targeting everyone, as if your ICO is a one-size-fits-all solution, you attract a whole lot of people.
Most ICOs focus on targeting their audience by either promoting their main product, discounts on tokens or their airdrop programs.
It feels like they want to get rid of their tokens as soon as possible, rather than having a successful business that thrives even after the ICO.
In other words, they are not treating their customers, like the most important factor in the business.
Because by promoting the main product, discounts and airdrops rather than focusing on pain points, the company has a self-centered approach in marketing. This way, the right target audience will be less likely to notice your campaign, your content etc.
By advertisements and content focused on the main product, discounts and airdrops, ICOs risk attracting a lot of speculators and non-genuine users, even scammers.
Advertising the main product, discount and different kind of airdrop programs only inflates the budget.
In the above examples you can see exactly what is wrong with the current approach of doing marketing. The message of “Wanna buy some tokens but haven’t decided on a product yet?” doesn’t exactly attract the right kind of target audience.
So what’s actually wrong with this approach? Because of the lack of a deep understanding of your target audience, everything you will do, will be based on an approach that is the equivalent of shooting randomly around without aiming at a target.
What are the chances that you will actually shoot at your target without an aim?
Sure, you will make some sales and you may even be able to reach your soft cap, but you will never reach your potential, post-ICO until you have that deep understanding of how to identify and reach your ideal customer.
Community management for this approach is too expensive and inefficient. You need to hire several community managers to control the wide community. Their job is to tackle questions about the ICO, however, their approach is not focused on customer experience.
Community managers get a basic set of questions, which once in a while they need to answer. They post a bit of news updates. Other than that, your customer will net get any value from being in the Telegram supergroup.
This is considerable because community management is one of the areas in your marketing budget plan that will easily eat away your money.
If you know for a fact that your community consists out of your target audience, it will help you to reduce costs, because you will be able to convert the majority of the community members into token holders.
However, by the current approach in ICO marketing, you will attract different people who may not be relevant (speculators, non-genuine users, people interested in making profit etc.) In general, this approach increases costs for the ICO.
This mistake doesn’t only lead in wasting a significant amount of money, it will also lead to not having any end-users of your product.
Now, you tell me? Isn’t it better to have an investor base of people who are engaged with your product? People, who rave about your ICO, who are in it for the solution to their problems, instead of focusing on an easy way of making money?
What are the benefits of identifying the right target audience?
If you are still not convinced about why you should not only target these users the right way, but also early on in the process, I will not tell you some very important reasons why you should change your approach.
Identifying your target audience the right way will;
- Focus on everything you do in your approach and save yourself countless hours;
- Increase your return of investments;
- Decrease your churn rate;
- Help you fine-tune your ICO marketing budget;
- Help you decide what social media channels to use;
- Guide what type of content you should produce;
- Improve the experience of your community members;
- Ultimately, allow you to grow a loyal audience who will buy from you post-ICO.
Does that sound good to you? Let’s get started.
The Tesla way of doing marketing
A well-defined community will indeed give you endless support. Proof of that is that Tesla doesn’t spend millions of dollars on a traditional advertising campaign. Instead, they let their community discuss it, rave about it, even hate it.
What Tesla with their Model 3 is that they asked people to commit the small fee of 5,000 USD for the car. In total this allowed them to raise 100,000,000 USD worth of sales.
This is the ultimate proof that you don’t need to put a lot of money in your campaign in order to succeed, but you do need a strong community behind you.
How does Tesla do this?
Tesla puts their customer central because what really moves a customer is his experience. That’s more than just a product.
Tesla doesn’t care about the straight-to-your face selling tactics usually sales representatives have in car dealer’s stores.
Instead, they make it easy for the customer to find the store by placing it in shopping malls and the sales representatives only care about the customer, eg. they don’t push and they make it easy to make a test drive, no matter how many times you come to look at a car.
Tesla’s way of marketing is similar to the ideal way of ICO marketing. They both advertise products before they are actually released and they rely on their community to do so.
Tesla makes use of the presale technique, which is something unique to automobile industry. By unveiling the product and asking for a small commitment, in order to get a prior access to the car, the community will engage. The community benefits by being able to buy shares from the company as well as the product.
See the resemblances?
With their approach in marketing, Tesla shifts from the company towards the customer. Take a look at #TeslaModel3 on Twitter and tell me how many raving fans you find on there?
How to identify the right audience
Now, take Tesla as an example of where you want your company to be positioned. Because it is proof of why identifying the right target audience will help you manage your ICO campaign cost-efficiently.
No more thousands of dollars spent on advertising campaigns. Instead, by having a granular approach to defining your target audience, you’ll get an increase of return of investments.
Now let’s take a deeper look at how to achieve that and how to really identify that target audience.
Creating a customer avatar
A customer avatar is a fictional character representation of your ideal customer. This is necessary, to understand any pain points your user may be experiencing and how you can offer them a solution that they can benefit from.
By carefully crafting a customer avatar, you will be able to finetune your marketing strategy.
By collecting the following information about your prospects, you will be able to understand your customer without any problem.
Using the customer avatar
When you have collected all the necessary information about your ideal customer in the sheet, you can give the avatar a name. Is your ideal customer named Jonathan, Kevin or Mark?
Let’s say you called him Kevin. Kevin is, of course, not a real person. He’s a customer avatar. A representation for all the thousands of real people that potentially are your ideal customers and thus will potentially invest in your ICO.
Craft your messages specifically to Kevin. Tell him how your product can solve his problems and more importantly why he benefits from it. Tap into his emotions, you understand his frustration after all.
This applies to everything that you do, from creating valuable content that will help Kevin see that there is, in fact, a solution to his problem, to catching Kevin’s attention by smart advertising campaigns.
You will be able to lead Kevin from only getting aware of your ICO, to be a loyal token holder.
Using the customer avatar to help you define your target audience, will significantly save your costs, as you will know how to attract the customers that will stick with your product for the long run, ensuring your business also will be profitable.
With this granular approach to identifying your target audience, your advertising campaigns will significantly have better results, and you will notice a positive return of investments.
You will spend less, save a significant amount of money and ultimately, you will reach your soft cap with a lot of ease.
Moreover, this will significantly change your approach to community management. As your community won’t exist of those wanting to know when the airdrop takes place.
You will be able to save a considerate amount of money that you would otherwise spend on managing your Telegram supergroup.
Final Thoughts
Most ICOs think that attracting as many people as possible to their campaign, will lead into an endless amount of investors. The more people in their Telegram supergroup, the merrier.
You will attract different people who may not be necessarily relevant (speculators, non-genuine users, people interested in making profit etc.) to your token sales. In general, this approach increases costs for the ICO.
Moreover, it leads to ineffective and expensive community management, where the customer isn’t placed central. Eventually leading to wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on both community management and ICO marketing strategy.
You can avoid wasting money on all of these matters by identifying the right audience from the start.
By creating a customer avatar, you will be able to finetune not only your ICO marketing strategy and its budget, but you will know what kind of content to write for them, what kind of advertising campaigns will grab their attention etc.
Ultimately, this will lead to an increase in return of investments and a decrease in the churn rate and a customer experience like Tesla’s.
By putting your customer in the front seat, you will get not only a lot of investors but also a customer base that you will profit from even after your ICO.
Did you like what you just read? We have plenty more where that comes from! We want to help you a create cost-efficient marketing strategy, therefore we wrote an article on how to cut ICO costs with messenger marketing. You can read it by clicking on the banner.
