The ICO fundraising mechanism took the world by storm in 2017. What was once an obscure fundraising method quickly gathered momentum until the space was saturated with blockchain startups all looking to access capital in this revolutionary way.

The hype surrounding ICOs built into such a frenzy that at the end of 2017 the average number of ICO campaigns reached three per day.

This momentum has since slowed down, but launching an ICO can still feel like trying to shout over a cacophony of voices, all clamouring to be heard over the sound of a thousand new companies all exploding onto the scene at once. Even the most revolutionary of ideas can get lost in the noise, so startups that want to stand out need a clear strategy, and a strong voice to cut through the crap.

Success is usually determined by the marketing strategy, which will outline how you’ll promote your ICO through free channels and advertising, and how your marketing materials will instill trust and inspiration among investors.

This strategy can be broken down into two key time periods — Pre-ICO and Post-ICO, and can be sped up with a few explosive growth-hacking tips that will send your startup high into the stratosphere, until it rains down on the masses like nuclear hail!

Pre-ICO

The success of an ICO campaign is set long before the token launch. Pre-ICO marketing is all about developing a strong brand, and then casting as wide a net as possible to lure in potential investors.

Do this by making sure you have a clear value proposition, and key differentiators from competitors.

Make sure that your Whitepaper and website scream success, and then set up a multi-channel content campaign to get you on the radar of influencers and investors well in advance of your offering.

The two key strands of a successful ICO campaign are Content Strategy and Community Engagement:

Content Strategy — Romancin’ Your Audience

Good content strategy is a lot like romance — It’s a gradual process of gaining trust with potential investors by building yourself as an authority in the field, until one day, investing becomes the natural choice.

This is achieved by carefully crafting a story that will resonate with your target audience, and building it to a natural crescendo.

To make sure your voice is strong enough to stand out, analyze your closest competitors and differentiate yourself. Make sure that potential investors, the media and the public will have a good sense of your company’s story before you launch.

Content can be rolled out across multiple channels and in multiple formats…be it videos, infographics, memes or medium posts — but tie it all together in a coherent editorial calendar.

Good content positioned in the right place at the right time can ignite a marketing strategy.

Community Engagement — Come together, over me!

Social proof is a powerful phenomena, and it’s achieved through community. Community engagement should work in tandem with a good content strategy to help build trust with your audience.

To be effective though, your efforts need to be focused in the right place. There are several channels that you can use to maximise community engagement, but each channel must be maintained. Stagnant channels just make you wonder if the team are already planning their exit scam!

Consistent, quality engagement can help build trust with the community, which will ultimately determine if your ICO will succeed or fail.

The Two Ts — Twitter & Telegram

The reigning king and queen of community engagement — Twitter and Telegram. Both are capable of reaching vast amounts of people and creating a tidal wave of interest in your ICO.

However, sporadic tweeting alone won’t cut it — use your content calendar to inform your schedule for tweeting and messaging. Tweet in advance if you must with a scheduling tool like Buffer, but keep them personal, authentic and original.

Telegram has the advantage of sending important messages directly, but don’t abuse this opportunity! Unless the channel is kept clean and tidy, important messages can get lost in an endless stream of inane chatter that isn’t really helping anyone.

Get Reddit Respect

It takes time and effort to build a subreddit, but with careful moderation and frequent updates, you can build a real community around a coin. And in doing so, you might create your own army of redditors that will promote your coin for free on the front page!

GitHub

If your ICO has no substance, no white paper, no vision — then it probably won’t have a GitHub page. GitHub is a community of it’s own, and one that is worth penetrating to get the greatest possible reach. An active GitHub page, with decent content, will lend your project creedence with more techy investors.

Other Social Media

More traditional social media , even Facebook, can still be useful for general communication and building a community. Whether or not this will be appropriate depends on the nature of your product and the crowd you are targeting.

Incentivise Community Participation

Bounty Programs

One marketing method that can send ICOs super saiyan is the bounty program, this is (another article) in itself, but is a way of offering rewards to attract investors to your ICO, and offering further rewards for those already invested — sort of like a ponzi scheme — but no, not a ponzi scheme!

Airdrops

Airdrops are essentially token giveaways, which can help get enthusiasts interested in the project. These have become more popular as they avoid some of the problems which have led ICOs to be scrutinised by the SEC.

Be careful though, giving too many tokens away can raise questions of their worth, and giving too few away might barely be worth doing.

Make the Media

If you can get outside of the bitcoin bubble, then you create such a hubbub that you might compel even normies to consider investing.

That’s what mainstream media can do for you — and while you might not be able to precipitate it, you can be prepared for it. Before the ICO launch, make sure you have a bombproof site, a solid public relations strategy, and a designated spokesperson armed with key talking points and responses to expected questions.

Post ICO: Avoid Post-ICO Apocalypse

After a successful ICO, morale should be high. But pride comes before a fall they say, and at this stage many companies fail to capitalise on success of their Pre-ICO marketing.

Once the dust has settled, you need to capture the momentum and continue a marketing strategy that keeps you from fading away.

Use feedback from the Pre-ICO marketing to inform a long-term strategy for scaling and steady growth.

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Growth-Hacking ICO Marketing

Growth is the “make-or-break metric” of startups — you either grow fast enough, or you die.

So how can this growth be maximised?

Successful growth hackers share a similar approach, which can be replicated through asking the right questions, with the right attitude.

Key Questions

How will we gather data on the marketing process?

Make sure you have your ‘growth stack’ ready, this is a collection of tools that you can use to track the behaviour of potential investors, setup automated communications, and store all user details via a central CRM. Analysing this data will let you know in concrete terms what is working and what isn’t.

Which channel is driving the most traffic (#)?

When you start marketing, you are likely to have many channels in place, and experimenting is vital, but not all of them will be successful.

What channel is driving the most valuable traffic, in other words, performs best (%) in terms of customer conversion?

You will probably end up testing at least six communication channels, but as soon as you can identify the best performing channel, then you can focus efforts on that.

What channel has the lowest customer acquisition cost ($), i.e. cost per customer converted?

By using your stack to run tests on a number of channels, you will be able to see where you get the most bang for your buck — the lowest cost per customer converted.

Key Attitudes

Successful growth hackers tend to share a common mentality of creativity, curiosity, and a willingness to learn.

Beginner’s Mind

One of the central ideas of buddhism is having a beginner’s mind, and it can help hack the growth of both your business and your enlightenment level!

A beginners mind is seeing things with fresh eyes — an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions, it lets you stay open to new possibilities.

This stops you from missing the easy cues on how to improve, like passing comments from visitors, or the obvious solution that you haven’t been able to see because you have been so wrapped up in your automatic judgements.

Detachment

Another buddhist idea to enlighten your enterprise, ‘Detachment’ is the ability to stay objective and keep an eye on the bigger picture at all times.

Detachment prevents your ego from getting in the way of an objective understanding of the data. Growth-hacking requires data-driven decision making, and that can be difficult to achieve when there are strong feelings about the way things should be done.

Startup founders are often overly attached and passionate about their business, but this can be the enemy of an objective approach.