Learnings from an ICO campaign: Growth Hacking 101

This article is to all blockchain change-makers out there, thinking about organizing an ICO-campaign for your projects now that the initial hype is slowly fading away.

I will try to provide you with some valuable feedback about the project marketing & exposure to community — I am sure you are well aware of most of those topics, but it’s always valuable to receive some external feedback, right?

And remember, this is based on my experience as a co-founder of the OS.University — the world’s first University-led ICO. It is not necessary that all of these points are applicable in your case. And there might be others I haven’t thought of. If so, share what you think about it.

Here is my list of top things to consider and dedicate on in order to turn your campaign into a success:

Build exposure to the main crypto markets via the right social media

Being it North/Central/South America, Europe, Asia, or any other region that is important for your project, you need to understand where your target audience resides. For example, Instagram happened to be one the most used social network among crypto investors, and we need to improve it.

Marketing needs to be people-focused — give value to the people

Yes, posts with team updates are important — people care about those, especially your investors. But also do your best to share your expertise with people. Tell them what you are really going through and how you’re struggling with it, provide real value to your people.

Engage with the community and show your care about its growth and sustainability

This means an engagement horizon that is far beyond the end of the ICO campaign and in the best case scenario — it starts far before the campaign. As an example OS.University is now 3 solid years in the research & making.

Outreach potential partners, directly contact them & be genuine

Direct messages need to be personalized and sincere — always start by asking for a honest review and mention that you do want to give prior to receiving. Business development is a full time job for a dedicated member of the team. Ad-hoc doesn’t work.

Advertise

Yes, you may have the most brilliant of ideas, but start spending money on advertising, so that people can learn about it in the hundreds of thousands. Conversion in crowdfunding campaigns is generally a single digit number and this is OK, just make sure your message reaches the right audience! Facebook/Instagram will not work (plus it is against their newest terms). YouTube ads & Affiliate networks might work.

Givaways / Airdrops

All social media channels need to grow at the same pace. Here are some learnings from OS.University — we are very successful on Telegram (strong community of 50,000+), but despite that we created our project account on Twitter, back in May 2015, we couldn’t get traction for a lot of time in this particular network.

There’s nothing wrong in incentivising your community to engage with you on other channels, i.e. to follow you throughout platforms. Sometimes. people get stuck to their most favorite source of news and communication, but you will be judged if your community is disproportionate, despite that factors such as geography affect this.

Exposure of all key team members

All key team members need to be active on Instagram (public profiles) & social media (on a daily basis). Me personally, I have good doze of past experience in training Solidity developers (here’s an old blog post on the subject). However, recently an ICO researcher disputed our development strength, simply because ‘he didn’t see any news on my LinkedIn profile’ about it. You can get angry or you can get your profiles up to date. Again, be sincere, though — nobody likes show-offs or fake ‘thought-leaders’.

Email marketing

This needs to happen on a regular basis & you need to provide engaging content, not only about your project’s story (e.g. status updates). Newsletter subscription popup needs to be brought in place — a kind reminder for people to subscribe for your newsletter does magic!

Summary:

The most important thing when dealing with the community is to provide them value beyond what’s already expected and have a give-first mentality. It will be very hard to pull-off a successful campaign in what is still a shady and shaky crypto-environment, but if you execute on all of the points above, you won’t mistake by doing so.

Do you know any other means to growth hack your ICO marketing? Share below in the comments.