Most ICO blogs suck! Here’s why…
Most ICO blogs suck, the content doesn’t engage with the right target audience. It won’t spur them to take the action that you want them to take.
Remember when we talked about how to advertise smarter? Similarly to advertising content, ICOs need to shift focus on what they publish as content. So why do most ICO blogs suck?
ICO blogs suffer from the same issues. If you recognize yourself while reading this, good, you have now stumbled upon potential to turn your content into something great. Something that will convince your community to commit to your vision.
Think about our current society. Take a look around when you’re outside, there are advertisements everywhere. Outside, TV, radio, the online world… Consumers are in general overwhelmed with choices on a daily basis.
Attention spans, as a result, are getting shorter. When people click on an article, they need to be convinced within a few seconds that it’s worth their time or they will get their information elsewhere. There’s a variety of alternatives, after all.
People demand fast and quick results, which makes it also difficult to satisfy their needs. The common trend in ICO blogs does not convince the audience of why they need to invest.
But there is a better approach!
People don’t care about products and services. They care about solving an issue they might be experiencing. And that’s what you need to keep in mind when you create content. Because content must be based on fulfilling your customers’ needs and interests.
Without doing this, you won’t be able to build an emotional connection with your target audience, which is the first step in how you can convert them from being a potential lead to an actual investor.
That’s not what most ICOs do. The current trend is to:
- Focus too much on own needs by selling services;
- Writing posts about discounts, airdrops etc.
- Sharing a lot of news updates.
These posts are not necessarily bad. But without having an exceeding amount of actual valuable blog posts that educate, you won’t be able to create that connection.
As a consequence, ICO blogs don’t really offer any value to their target audience. Blogs are filled with articles consisting out of clickbait titles and empty content. The call-to-action is to sign up for the whitelist, to get a discount or to participate in the airdrop program.
A self-centered approach.
Content marketing comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But it has one criteria it needs to solve: it first and foremost needs to provide an additional value to your brand and audience.
If it doesn’t do that, if it doesn’t add value. You’re not doing it right. Your audience will be able to tell when you write your content just to fill up the empty space on the website, or if it actually serves a purpose.
So, if your goal is to create content to promote your products or services, think again. Content is the voice of your brand, and by offering valuable content to your customer, you’ll be able to stand out from the competition.
Moreover, the audience that’s interested in discounts and airdrops etc. is not the type of audience you want as end users of your product.
Writing self-centered content means you’re not attracting the right target audience. As a result your community most likely consists of non-genuine users, who are only interested in the free tokens you’re offering.
Not reaching your soft cap, however, is not the only thing you should be worried about when publishing such content.
Mistargeted audiences will not adapt your launched product post-ICO. This will result in unnecessary marketing spends for acquiring end users and wasted time that could’ve been spent elsewhere.
So all-in-all, by changing your shift of focus when it concerns blog posts, you’ll be able to save money and a considerable amount of time.
What is the secret then?
Focus on building a reason why the audience feels that your product is a must-have, instead of focusing on the product itself.
What should you take into account when writing content?
Rule number one of what you should take into account when you write content is that overall, people don’t like to be sold things.
This means that writing content is not a way for you to tell your audience how great you are and how much you excel at what you do.
Writing content is also not a way for you to sell your main product. The actual purpose of writing content is to grab attention, to introduce a person to your company and thus create awareness, ultimately create a connection between you and the prospect.
Depending on a customer’s mindset and the stage of the sales funnel they are at, you need to pitch different content to them. Blog posts serve as typical top of the funnel content where they have to create awareness for your brand.
By going through this funnel, you will gradually create an emotional connection with your audience.
The actual purchase only happens when there is enough trust between the customer and your brand.
So, you can imagine that by pitching your services and product first, your customer missed out on a couple of important steps in the process of buying.
If that doesn’t make much sense to you, then think of it as if it were a date.
Let’s say you’re on an app like Tinder. Every individual on there tries to raise awareness with pictures of themselves and a short biography.
When you match up with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get married instantaneously. You need to go through a process first.
Chatting leads to dating, a first date leads to a second one and maybe a third or a fourth. Only after those dates, you can talk about a relationship, a domestic partnership, engagement and marriage.
It doesn’t make sense to skip the process, does it? Matching up with someone, is definitely not the same as getting married.
The same thing counts for content. Blog posts, serve to warm up an audience, to go to the next step in the process, where they actually get more interested in your company.
Ultimately, when they take the last step of the process, they have enough trust to engage with investing in your ICO.
How to write compelling content for your ICO
So, I talked about another way, didn’t I? Well, the first thing you’ve got to understand is that after reading your article, your customer should come to the realization.
Let’s take a look at what the key takeaways are for customers.
Writing ICO blog posts, shouldn’t be a struggle! To guarantee you the best results, we created some guidelines that will help you to create compelling content that will convince your audience right away!
Follow these steps, when you create content and you will notice the difference instantly.
Non-ICO related examples
Let’s dive deeper into an example of one of the better blogs concerning content creation: UrbanSurvivalNetwork.
You can find the article I am referring to by clicking here.
Title
Introduction
Middle
Conclusion
Call-to-action
A call to action (CTA) is a designed prompt on a website that tells the reader to take some specified action. Download this, read that… In general a call-to-action pushes a user through the sales funnel.
A call-to-action is important to have because without any the user may not know the next steps to take in order to do what’s necessary to contact you. Thus, he will most likely leave your site without accomplishing their task.
Hubspot, in this article, has a good example of a well-designed call-to-action.
Final Thoughts
Current ICO blogs have the wrong focus. By focusing on selling their tokens, they skip important steps of the buying cycle, where a customer needs to become aware first of the product, and then gradually start building trust.
Because of that the amount of blog posts about their main product, airdrops, discounts on tokens and news updates exceed content that is actually relevant to the target audience.
Therefore, ICO blogs don’t really offer any value to the target audience.
Such content will not attract the right audience, incurs unnecessary marketing costs, and eventually leads to elevated issues post-ICO, such as restarting end user acquisition.
Instead, it’s important to build up that reason why the audience feels that your product is a must-have. This needs to happen step-by-step, of which the first step is to raise awareness by writing and publishing blog posts.
Blogs are typical top of the funnel content, where the main purpose is to raise awareness of a potential lead. By reading your article your customers should:
- Acknowledge he has a problem;
- Realize that all current solutions won’t help;
- Get acquainted with an alternative solution that actually helps them solve issues;
- Become aware about your ICO and the value it could potentially offer to them.
Focus on telling your audience about pain points they are experiencing. Tell them what the current solutions are and what their problems are. Offer them alternatives and explain them what benefits they will get out of the alternative. This way, you will convince your customer to become more aware of your ICO.
If you follow these concrete steps for your own content, you will write content that will engage your target audience and will already start generating trust early on. This technique doesn’t only concern blog posts, but should be applied to all of the content you distribute from ads, to articles, to videos.
If you want to learn more about how you can cut costs with messenger marketing in your ICO, then we have the perfect article for you! Read the article by clicking on the banner below.
