Last Updated on 2 weeks by Web3 Studio
Maximising the uptake of your ICO (Initial Coin Offering) by attracting the right people, in the right places, and by providing inspiration and value to them is no easy task in a thriving but increasingly crowded cryptocurrency market.
Statisa has collated data showing that $14Bn was raised in 2019 alone!
Nailing your ICO campaign is integral to ensuring you get the funding and traction you need. So we have created our own guide to help you to do just this.
How Is ICO Marketing Different?
Regulations
Regulations from governments and platforms such as Google and Facebook impose restrictions on the free digital marketing of ICOs; verifying your ICO with them can be time-consuming and may not get you the results you need.
Audience
Many channels used for digital marketing, such as mainstream social media platforms, news outlets or influencers will have audiences that will not be keen on crypto. Instead, the opportunities lie elsewhere with crypto outlets and influencers, as well as platforms such as Medium and Telegram.
ICO projects also tend to seek investment from private and institutional investors, and so the scope of channels gets expanded to paid advertising, and places like crowdfunding platforms, ICO directories, and social media used more often within the ICO space, such as Discord.
Opportunities
ICO marketing gives opportunities to incentivise crypto community adoption from the public, investors and marketing partners via airdrops. In this way, your brand and your token can be leveraged ahead of its launch to boost traction.
Crypto brands can also use blockchain marketing to assure a quality community and leads.
With the right strategy, brands can leverage the open network of crypto communities to engage more deeply with their target audience compared to most other sectors. Quality content, relationships, community, and engagement are key.
Next, we discuss the marketing strategy for your ICO project and then give you 9 tools to make your marketing strategies successful.
ICO Marketing Strategy
A solid ICO marketing strategy is built not just for a successful launch, but also cultivates long-term prospects for your brand and token.
The value of the vast majority of tokens decreases substantially once a year has passed from launch, with many dying out.
So, building a loyal and growing community, a network of affiliates, collaborators, stakeholders, investors, and a global reach, will be essential to keeping the growth rocket going. To do this, consistently providing value and inspiration to these groups will be key.
A marketing strategy can be summed up into six key elements:
- Goals: Setting measurable goals for your ICO and marketing plan
- Audience – A sophisticated picture of who you will reach and what motivates them
- Brand – Your story, values, brand voice, and unique selling points
- Content – The types of content you’ll create, for who (audience) and where (network)
- Network – A set of channels to reach your audience segments effectively
- Measurement – How you’ll measure the effectiveness of your strategy and content
ICO marketing has many nuances for success. You’ll also be marketing to potential investors and using channels such as ICO Directories to list your token. Here are 9 great tools for hitting the ground running with your ICO marketing strategy.
9 Marketing Tools for Your ICO Marketing Campaign
- Whitepapers
- Content Marketing
- A well-designed website
- Attention-grabbing press releases
- ICO Calendar Listing
- Bounty Programs
- Affiliate Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
ICO White Paper Writing
Whitepapers can give crypto enthusiasts and particularly investors cause for excitement and get them jumping on board. Think of it more as a business plan with technical elements.
A carefully written whitepaper does three key things: it shows what your offering does, how it works, and why it’s worth investing in. Here are some key elements to include:
- Disclaimer and Introduction
- Description of the market and the problem
- Description of your product that solves the problem
- Tokens: the token distribution plan with ROI projections for investors
- How the raised funds are going to be used
- The team and their credentials
- The product roadmap
Content Marketing
Content is your gateway to giving value to your audience and inspiring them. Content marketing raises awareness, moves your audience through the customer journey, and in this way builds your traction.
The following can be powerful for your content marketing plans:
- Videos – Videos are highly shareable and are great for explainers and can keep your audience’s attention. Remember most people see videos with no audio, so take care to make the visuals great!
- Blogs – Relate hot topics and keywords to your brand and token rather than speaking of them alone; use your brand voice, and ensure value and a unique impression is given every time to ensure you stand out from the crowd.
- Influencer marketing – the right influencers can leverage their audience and great content creation abilities in your favour, playing a key role in your content’s success. Influencers can help via affiliate marketing and may help
- Press Releases – Content created specifically for crypto-focused news outlets and social platforms; having a great distribution strategy and network is important for the impact of your PR materials to reach their full potential.
A Breath-Taking Website
Website design is a crucial tool for any succesful digital marketing strategy. A good website, that is both easy on the eye, and provides a great informative experience, is a great way to build trust.
This is crucial as most people will visit your website before choosing to invest in reading your whitepaper and advocate for your brand.
Additionally, as Google continues moving towards ranking websites by the quality of visitor experiences, having a great and stable UX and keeping visitors around for longer will be key.
- Great content in shorter form – focus on your best points in a catchy and neat format
- SEO – Research and apply keywords, structure your site clearly and format the content, include keywords in your images alt-text.
- Give a great user interface and experience – is it smooth, reliable, navigable, satisfying to browse, and fast to load? Does it do all of these on different devices?
- As a hub: Have your videos, blogs and a range of call to actions been added to help your audience to dive deeper into your brand and gain value? Is your content on other platforms linking well to your website?
ICO Directory Listing
ICO calendars or directories, such as Icodrops, are places where you can list your upcoming ICO and get found by crypto-enthusiasts across the globe.
Creating a listing typically entails providing your project name, details about the token, a link to your ICO website, and contact information.
Bounty Programs for ICO Marketing Strategies
Bounty programs are common and powerful marketing campaigns that involve offering your tokens to audiences in exchange for completing actions that build traction for your brand and offering, such as sharing links, and creating content.
An example is airdrops, which can be offered to the wider public and affiliates as a way of incentivising adoption and traction for your brand.
This said, offering bounty programs without content that inspires and drums up excitement for your offering can make these strategies fall flat.
So, having materials such as great explainer videos, one-pagers, and crafting an exciting press release will serve as great multipliers for the airdrops you are willing to offer.
A note of caution if your incentivising results, is thinking about how to prevent low-quality traffic such as fake email registrations. For this, blockchain marketing can be useful.
Affiliate Marketing for ICOs
Affiliate marketing pays based on results-based commissions – you may work with those such as influencers and agencies who will manage the strategy and content creation of these campaigns for you, while you pay for the results that they generate.
Email Marketing for ICO
Email marketing is a great way to keep your audience segments in the loop with valuable content that motivates them to engage with your brand.
Segmenting your audiences and where they are on the customer journey is a key part to making this work.
Collecting email subscribers on your across your marketing channels and content can help you to build a powerful network that deepens your audience engagement whilst encouraging them to visit your channels, such as your website and blogs which will complement their traction.
Conclusion
A great ICO marketing plan is strategic and uses the right marketing tools to get results that lead to both a successful launch day and sustainable growth for your brand afterwards.
3A comprehensive network of stakeholders, followers, investors and affiliates is the key to this.
A great plan utilising the right tools and channels for building this sophisticated network is at the core all successful marketing campaigns, which has extra challenges and opportunities to it.
Having a great ICO marketing partner is a common way to do this. Fracas is a leading web3 studio with a proven track record of success, and an ICO marketing agency, providing ICO marketing services. Our in-house marketing team would love to hear your plans, reach out to us to get insights tailored to your brand and token.
