Before launching an ICO, you might be interested in what an ICO actually is and how to create one. Check out our detailed guide: Part 1 & Part 2. In this article, we will focus on platforms that will help you run an outstanding crowdsale.

You could spend hours persuading the crypto-community about the amazing benefits of your blockchain project. However, if the community isn’t ready to invest or join your project, then you’re wasting time. Undoubtedly, you want the crowd to do certain actions when they visit your website, but you need a start-to-finish strategy for engaging with your potential investors & community members. That is why we’ve created an ICO funnel (see image below) with the platforms that your Blockchain project should use when launching an ICO and continue utilising to engage the community after a successful crowdsale. The image should help you visualise the platforms that you need to use to help potential investors/community members become familiar with your company, from Awareness to Action (and hopefully beyond).

Awareness Stage

This step of the journey includes anyone that could invest or become a user of your Dapp. It is the broadest addressable qualified audience.

What Marketing Channels work well:

Display Advertising, Blog, Newsletters, Video, Social Media.

What platforms work well:

Crowdholding is an open-innovation network for entrepreneurs to get answers and anyone to innovate while earning cryptocurrency. Crowdholding connects businesses with a qualified audience to build better businesses together.

The awareness stage is about identifying customers’ needs and Crowdholding assists in potentially fulfilling them. Use a combination of crowd-wisdom and crowd marketing tasks available in the dashboard. Creating challenges to get feedback about your Whitepaper, Landing page, Marketing strategy or Product Roadmap will help you understand what the community cares about. We recommend that you post relevant content for the prospects to consume and then share through the automatic Facebook & Twitter Bounty sharing systems. Get in touch with our Customer Success team for more information via email: hello@crowdholding.com

Bounty0x is a decentralised bounty network enabling anyone to manage their bounty programs, and users to receive payments for completing bounties. The network is powered by the BNTY token.

They have developed a decentralised platform where bounty hunters are able to receive payment in tokens in exchange for completing bounty tasks for ICO startups. This is a useful platform to use to increase your company’s traction on Social Media channels as well as raise awareness about your project in the crypto-community.

The platforms supports bounties in any ERC-20 token, Ethereum, NEO, NEP-5 tokens, Waves and Waves tokens! This ICO guide aims to present you with all the platforms that can help you launch an ICO. Bounty0x can host your Facebook, Twitter, Telegram or another bounty campaign to increase awareness via their website.

Steemit is a social network that looks and functions a lot like Reddit, but with one HUGE difference:

Steemit pays both the content creators when their work gets upvoted, as well as the people who curate the best content on the site by upvoting others work.

This Quora thread explains it.

Start with asking questions and engage with the community with queries about your industry and use a branded hashtag. Keep it short and remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Therefore try to resist the urge to post no more than 4 times every 24 hours. Getting exposure to the crypto-community on Steemit will increase the recognition of your brand.

BitcoinTalk

This platform represents a forum, supposedly founded by Satoshi Nakamoto and early crypto-enthusiasts.

It is an essential place to be present for every ICO. It can be almost said that if your project isn’t on bitcointalk, it doesn’t exists. Creating a branded thread is a tricky experience. You need to register an account in advance (at least 3 months before announcement of ICO) and develop it by actively posting news, asking questions and learning about cryptocurrencies. This will increase your user account settings and will allow you to post images and deliver a thread cover that attracts people to the project.

Build your profile on bitcointalk to gain additional awareness in the blockchain community. Become a thought leader and deliver value, it will be repaid!

Consideration Stage

This step of the journey includes anyone starting to consider investing or becoming a user in your industry. It is the broadest addressable qualified audience with some (mild) intent.

What Marketing Channels work well:

Social Media, SEO, Blogs, Events & Conferences, Platform Reviews & Ratings (Text & Video), Project Comparison, Rewards Programs, Online Consultations, Webinars, e-books, PPC.

What Platforms work well:

Crowdholding

Once potential investors and the community get to know you, they start evaluating their options. In the case of a potential investor or user, they might be evaluating the relationship of the project with the blockchain community.

Crowdholding allows your business to deliver the right content in the right way to the community, building a transparent and trustworthy brand along the way.

On the platform you make use of the wisdom of the crowd (a.k.a Crowd Intelligence) to innovate, validate product ideas and get insights from blockchain thought-leaders. The community can help you with:

Innovative ideas development

Marketing & Sales enhancement

Product improvement and testing

Market research & Business Expansion

IT development & Bug testing

ICO launch strategy & support

Content is key to the consideration stage and the community on the platform can give advise on how to create the perfect video script, webinars, brand specific guides and etc. Tapping into a knowledge ecosystem unrivalled to any other out there.

To launch a project on Crowdholding, the businesses purchase YUP tokens as a mediation. The Crowdholding community earns YUP tokens and other ERC20 tokens for investing their time to innovate, give feedback and share on Social Media. When it comes to ideation challenges (a.k.a. co-creation tasks) community members can vote for the best submissions. This saves business owners time as ideas are filtered and the ranking determines the distribution of the token-rewards. The rewards are distributed to all community members who submitted an idea and received a vote. The more votes a submission gets, the more cryptocurrency a user earns.

In the consideration stage, it’s all about getting your business to be chosen over the competitors’. By working closely with the blockchain community, you not only improve your business offering, but also position your brand as an innovator.

As your potential investors & users progress through their journey, you need to keep track of their growing interest. To assess their readiness, prepare a list of activities that properly identify the hottest leads.

At this stage, you can use Steemit to analyse prospect activities and social profile information, allowing you to tailor the conversations to each individual. Examining the posting history and interest of users on Steemit will give you an edge over competitors as your business will better understand specifically what an individual is looking for, allowing you to more thoroughly speak to their needs.

BitcoinTalk

After the individual finds out that your project is solving a need, segment them into different groups. Be sure to consider their behavioural data, previous posts & comments as well as needs to offer more unique experience.

At this level of the journey, you should be posting in different bitcointalk threads good content that adds value to the prospects and that can take the form of blog posts, infographics, courses, webinars, eBooks, certifications, videos. Identifying different segments of prospects and offering the lead valuable content should then push them down the funnel to the Action stage. From there, a whole new strategy takes shape.

Action Stage

This step of the journey includes anyone that could invest or become a user of your Dapp. It is the broadest addressable qualified audience with loads of intent.

What Marketing Channels work well:

Email, Affiliates, Live chat, Terms & Conditions + Refund policy, Search & Display advertising.

What platforms work well:

Crowdholding

Until this stage, the advice was to stick to a more informal approach positioning as a thought leader…not anymore. Now is the moment to crush your competition and prove your solution is the best one.

So, what kind of a strategy works well for this stage? When it comes to boasting, nothing works better than the experience and reviews of your current followers. Use the Crowdholding platform to validate your solution publicly, allowing the crowd to rate and compare your offering to those of competitors. Launch tasks that ask the community to share their positive experiences with your brand or challenges that compare you to the competition head to head.

Consider creating content for your prospective investors, but also implementing several drop nurturing tasks that involve your current community in the creating of best practices for using your solution. The crowd would see more value in the product if they are engaged in the creation of features for using your solution more effectively and efficiently. They are more likely to recommend your project to fellow crypto-enthusiasts.

Although, Crowdholding does not have an ICO investment dashboard (Crowdfunding module), the platform helps at this stage to create a crowd of evangelists that become the driving force behind your word-of-mouth marketing. Proactively collaborating with the community and reaching out regularly for feedback, will help the crowd feel like they are the power behind improving the product to better fit their needs.

It is true that this effort might seem overly time-consuming, but keep in mind that delighted individuals are one of the best marketing investments that your company can make.

KICKICO OFFICIAL

KickICO is a crowdfunding platform with a native token. Their platform is useful to raise your entire ICO or only a share of it. Their community of investors actively support great projects and it is a way to convert individuals who have already familiarised themselves with your project and are now ready to contribute.

KickICO charges 4% of the amount raised, payable in ETH. If you wish to pay with your projects’ tokens, then it will amount to 8% of the raised capital. Their community is well-developed, having surpassed 30,000 members and it is worth looking into them. You can currently issue utility and digital currency tokens. There is no option for a white-label, so you will have to stick to their website to host the ICO. Don’t forget to put detailed information about your business to help investors support the investment rationale.

Acorn Collective

Acorn Collective is another platform for entrepreneurs to raise capital. Their platform is transparent and unlike other platforms where you can be charged 5–10%, Acorn helps you for free.

Acorn is able to bring together marketing automation tools, marketplace services and backer interaction data, allowing your business to tap into this crowdfunding data, giving your crowdfunding campaign an edge and higher likelihood for success.

If you wish to position your business as a trustworthy project, working with Acorn will improve transparency, trust and control, allowing for milestone

deployment of funds and campaign tracking.

Loyalty Stage

This step of the journey includes all your existing investors or Dapp users.

What works well: Newsletter, Forums, Chat, Referral & Reward programs, Exclusive content

What platforms work well:

Crowdholding

Every business, including yours has to strive for high levels of consumer loyalty. At Crowdholding, not only you can host bounties, but also maintain a more interactive communication and higher involvement of consumers in various company activities.

After completing the funding phase, you need to work on continuously engaging your community and making sure they do not dump your token. The loyalty phase is about turning all your investors and early adopters into advocates for your brand. However, having assisted your community through the funnel to a loyal crowd member, does not mean they will stay there. Your project needs to pay attention to your most loyal individuals and invest in them.

Crowdholding fills the gap between crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. By allowing businesses to harness consumers’ help and potential in various companies’ activities and facilitating the projects’ funding process all on in the same place, we solve a major issue that crowdsourcing and crowdfunding sphere faces. So far, after raising capital, startups go dark and build products in a vacuum without involving the consumers and eventually fail to meet the communities expectations. Growing your crowd and involving them in your internal processes through co-creation & Crowd Intelligence tasks on Crowdholding will position your brand as a thought leader and allow you to retain and attract more people.

Medium

Medium.com

Medium helps you keep your audience updated about your organisation past the funding stage. This platform allows you to maintain a healthy community built around topics connected to your industry and business. It gives you a chance to inform your community about developments, an opportunity to tap into a crowd of insightful thinkers and a way to grow your audience. Two-way communication isn’t really that common, but there is a comment section under each article that allows you to receive feedback from the community.

Telegram Messenger

Telegram works just like WhatsApp and allows you to send messages to people who are in your channel.

It’s highly secure method for communicating and messaging is encrypted. Keeping in touch with your community and sharing updates about the company through your Telegram channel can help your team make better decisions about several critical points:

What is doing well and should be repurposed

What new things should be created

Which current initiative need redoing

Collecting such information from your followers in the Telegram group would help you create a feedback loop that allows to better match future initiatives to the community’s expectations. Although, easy to use, Telegram doesn’t allow to sort content or organise the channel into sub-topics. You have to create a new group for each new discussion board, otherwise the amount of submissions might turn the communication into a mess.

Conclusion

Matching your actions to the expectations of the community is a crucial strategy for launching a successful ICO. As demonstrated in this article, there are numerous solutions that help your project success with moving potential investors and users through the funnel.

Crowdholding is the only platform that targets all the stages of the funnel. The careful on-boarding process ensures that startups joining are not a scam and guarantees high-quality submissions and delightful community engagement. Thus, the Crowdholding community assist with Crowd Marketing to raise Awareness, gives exceptional answers to business issues and that is crucial for the community in the Consideration stage, allows you to engage the community around the concept/idea to motivate more investors to participate in the Action stage. Lastly, the platform allows for Post-ICO community engagement that increases your project’s trustworthiness.

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