Thousands of blockchain-based startups dream about launching an ICO. But just having a project idea without the thinking about the marketing strategy and budget will doom many launches before they even get started.

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Startups face an uphill battle to get noticed in a space where hundreds of ICOs run at the same time. So getting some solid advice from someone who has spent time in the marketing trenches is critical.

Marina Baslina, ICO Marketing Consultant here. Today I’m going to share my insights about ICO marketing. I have over 7 years of experience working with international startups, but I’ve found ICO marketing is a different animal altogether. There are many aspects to marketing an ICO that you’d never have to consider in a conventional marketing campaign.

Below are my top 5 tips for anyone considering launching an ICO.

Don’t try to make money, try to be useful to the crypto/blockchain community. If the community doesn’t get behind you, you’ll struggle to succeed. You need to form strategic alliances and get supporters behind you in order to create a successful ICO. There must be at least one blockchain expert on the team. Sometimes you get too close to your own project to be able to look at it objectively from an investors’ point-of-view. For example, one potential investor told me that he didn’t like the idea of e-Residency because blockchain is about being anonymous, so he didn’t care about the KYC. For example, at CrowdCoinage we incorporated Estonian e-Residency into their platform to provide investors with verifiable identification about key players in projects they are considering investing in. Make sure you join a promising project with the idea that it really is based on blockchain technology and makes blockchain available to the masses. The biggest issue is that people concentrate on making money, and not on the bringing value to the community. This may work for short-term gains, but in the long-run, you’ll spend a lot of money creating an ICO. So why not create something sustainable and exciting that people will invest in long-term? ICO marketing is a completely different thing than other marketing projects.

At first, I thought it’ll be easy based on my experience in IT startup world. But it’s more complicated. If you don’t have a working product and you rely only on the ideas, you have to make sure the idea is groundbreaking.

Because “small” token buyers who invest $300 on average are planning to sell the token when ICO ends. That’s why they care about your arrangements with the exchange, and about whether your team is real. They don’t really care about the project future compared to large investors.

That’s why you should start with private sales, with a pool of large investors, that will close your hard cap for pre-ICO, this way it’ll be easier to communicate with small investors on the next stage.

5. Creating an ICO is very similar to classic startup funding. If you want to get millions from private investors you have to present your idea on conference calls, do the roadshow, and create a whitepaper (which is in some ways similar to creating a business plan.) So the whole process is about the idea, the team and your passion. It won’t work if the project founder is not pushing it forward.

There you have it.

There are many more moving parts to an ICO than you might think. So make sure that you have the budget, the strategy and the right experts on your team before you even consider an ICO. Having an idea to create a blockchain-based project isn’t enough on its own to attract the kind of attention you need.