Marketing

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Selling an ICO is all about storytelling. Make your project tangible, make it emotional — merely tell a story that people want to hear.

There are a few things that you need to adapt to. The cryptosphere has very quickly developed standards (critical success factors) that you have to fulfill or the crowd won’t recognize you. Other channels and methods are up to your imagination of course. Innovation and creativity are very much needed to stick out of the clutter.

Bounty program

Prepare a bounty program where you incentivize the community to get involved. Typical bounty tasks include:

Translations

Twitter (retweet) incentives

Facebook sharing/liking

Content creating

YouTube content

Signature campaign on BitcoinTalk

Steemit campaign

Telegram regional groups

The bounty program needs to be managed by an experienced agency. The coordination and monitoring of such a campaign are very time-consuming. In the best case, this is the same agency as the one that is doing the community management.

Conferences and Events

There is a large number of conferences and events taking place. However, beware of the hype pitfall. Assess which ones are good — most of them are not and cost a lot of time and money. To find out which ones are worth a visit ask locals, your advisors and check speakers.

Events and conferences are excellent opportunities to get visibility for your project, exchange experiences, and learnings with other projects and network, in general, to assure good networking in the crypto/blockchain space. Large investors usually don’t visit conferences and pitching sessions. They get spammed with investment opportunities.

If you visit events or conferences make the most out of it: get in contact with local meetups, meet the community, let your advisors introduce you to relevant people.

When giving a talk or a presentation/booth, make sure to enjoy yourself, be out there, have good visibility and stick out of the clutter!

ICO Rating Platforms

Check the rating of the rating platforms before you list your ICO there. Also, ask them for KPIs and make sure they are on the correct base (single project not global page). The truth is that most platforms have only a few visitors and ROI is very low. Find other ways to advertise your ICO and make it known to communities. Plan well ahead as you want to make sure you get your correct time slot in accordance with your ICO schedule.

Expensive rating platforms that do due diligence can be very time consuming (you won’t have the time) and cost a lot. The longer they look, the more they find to criticize usually.

Public Relations

The simple truth is that no mainstream news outlet will include your ICO — it is not newsworthy (yet). Investors won’t be driven to your project through PR as well.

However, PR helps you to establish your project and yourself as a thought leader in the industry. It also helps to add credibility to your project by letting you add the logos of the crypto/blockchain-relevant news-outlets to your website.

Your PR-agency can only be as good as the content you deliver. They won’t be doing that for you. The material you send them spreads to their network, and they make sure the news agencies know you exist. The PR agencies focus on traditional media and now also include crypto/blockchain-specific media like podcasts, news portals, newsletters and so on. If you don’t have news of interest to the press, don’t hire an agency!