How to handle your community so that your company benefits from it post-ICO.
Conducting an ICO is a very stressful period of time, for any marketing director. So many things have to be put in place, taken care of and maintained in such a short time span. It’s often emotionally too stressful to handle.
We are a marketing agency for ICOs and our clients’ concerns were for example how it’s possible to guarantee success, even after your ICO and what needs to be done afterwards? The answer to that concern is simple, community management is also important after your ICO.
During this read, you will get a better understanding of what benefits your community can bring to your business, if you are in it for the long run. You may ask why it is important to have an ongoing process even after your ICO. Well, the truth is that if your community would straight away drop your startup, the valuation of your tokens will also drop, which will generate a lack of trust. An inability to manage your community thus leads into investing your money into places where you shouldn’t. An easy way to save money is to manage your community post-ICO.
Benefits a community really brings
Think about it this way, any company, whether they are raising funds or not, will not survive without a solid base of customers supporting their product or idea. For your ICO this means that lack of engagement in your community will translate into bad conversion results in terms of investments. Now you may think that reaching your hard cap is the only advantage that a community can bring to your business. A common misunderstanding!
A community means a ton of other opportunities for your business and ICO and we will go through some of them, so you have an understanding of how important it is to take care and nurture your community.
User base
First of all, the goal of your ICO is so that you can raise enough funds for your startup, to have a long term lifecycle. By having a strong community behind your product so that you can reach your hard cap, you also get a user base of your product later on, after your ICO. Building a stronger brand also means stronger customer relationships and there really is no more valuable outcome. Being involved in the community that you build up, means that you are invested and care about the people and businesses residing there. This then is an opportunity for your business to put a face to the brand. This is important because generally speaking, people buy from people they like.
Selling without the “sell”
One of the most important benefits is that increased trust and deeper engagement from community also means mouth-to-mouth advertising, they will spread the word about your ICO and later on about your company. Invested and engaged customers are thus a great asset when marketing your business. In the world of ICOs, there is a strong and powerful online community scene, where they can encourage discussion about your company and debate about the services you offer, without you having to go for the hard sell.
Valuable feedback
What worries most entrepreneurs is that their business idea might not appeal to crowds as much as you are personally passionate about it. But if you stand behind your product and are willing to, a community can be really useful when it comes to giving useful and truthful feedback on your products. Where better to look for advice from your ready-built online community who already have been using your services or are already familiar with your idea. Validating your idea, becomes easier because you can get direct feedback, after all the customer knows the best. Whether you have a new product, or you are just testing out something, a successful online community can offer discussion and debate about these things, which will ensure that you don’t have to make use of expensive focus groups and are able to get an extra hand in brainstorming.
Post-ICO
Hopefully you got a bit of an insight of what benefits your community may offer you even after your ICO. Additionally it’s also important to have an understanding of how you can handle this community so you can make sure to use these benefits.
Usually when your ICO is done, the marketing agency you have been working with, drops you as a client. They’re no longer in need for quick and easy money. But that’s however like decided you don’t want to raise your kid anymore after only two to three years into parenthood. The work is naturally not done after your ICO, it only begins. You managed to build your brand during your ICO, but after its launch you need to maintain that brand, as well as advertising. This is a natural part of any business, because you want to be able to make sure that your community still trusts you after have raised your funds and to stay in engaged with your product. Quite recently the Chinese government analysis reported that the current life span of of blockchain projects is 1,22 years. To avoid this, Post-ICO activities and marketing become even more important, than you may have been aware of.
Design and content creation are very important factors in having your community trust you. If you think about companies, that a very uniform style throughout their whole communications, social media, worked out in detail. They don’t let a presentation pass, without having it in the style of their company. Unfortunately, design doesn’t get that much of an attention in this business, many agencies do offer design, but they don’t take into account that there is certain brand guidelines and corporate rules to follow when it comes to identity of the company. This already goes back to assessing the project. If the agency you are working with doesn’t assess your project thoroughly, doesn’t discover what the pain points are, doesn’t understand what both your good sides and weaknesses are, then forget about your design and content creation being of high quality. This is easily checked, ask for instance for a marketing deck, if the presentation doesn’t seem to be in line with the website, then you understand that this company might not be the best option for you to work with. And even after you are done with your ICO, you still need to feed your community with developments, updates and make them feel like they can trust you with your designs and content.
How to handle this community so you can make use of these benefits
Of course there is other agencies out there who can help you with these things as well. Before the actual marketing campaign, they start out with assessing your project, making sure that with this assessment you can develop a good and strong business model by identifying weaknesses and areas of improvement within your project that might hinder possible investments.
From this assessment they collect the necessary information about who you are targeting, what these people are possibly experiencing and how you can help them solve their problems. By having this in place they then can create content based on the problems your customers are experiencing. This is important because the content that you create needs to speak to people, they need to feel like they can relate to the story that you are trying to convey and they don’t necessarily care about the services you offer, but they care about whether you are the perfect company to solve their worries and concerns about something they have experienced.
Moreover, an agency that has their design in place, that knows how to create the most creative, but yet effective designs is definitely the one you should be looking out for. Designs that are in line with one another, not only catch attention, but create a consistency and also make that the company behind these spends time and effort in everything they do. This translates into trust from the customer.
Final thoughts
So now you have a decent understanding of what of an impact a community can have on your business. Before you were worrying about your business idea and how to sustain your business even after your ICO. Now you realized that you shouldn’t worry about that anymore. It’s all about knowing how to handle your community and how to make them trust you so that you can get their valuable input about your startup, mouth-to-mouth advertising, get them to do tasks for you under the form of a bounty program and more importantly you will get access to a large pool of users who will actually make use of your product!
What’s most important in doing marketing for an ICO, is to have a general understanding first about your project by doing a project assessment. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses, the competitive landscape, the target audience and their possible pain points, will translate in having the right language in your content. Moreover, it will make sure that you can speak to people, understand their basic needs and issues they experience. With a consistent strategy in the graphic design, following certain brand guidelines, you will radiate trust to your community, which will definitely transform them from investors to users on the long run.
Would you like to get more insight on how to cut costs during your ICO by using messenger marketing? Read our article about it by clicking the banner below.
