Crypto Marketing after the First Round of ICOs

The first ICO mania officially finished by the end of Q2 2018. What does it mean? How did marketing change? What can we expect in the future?

Source: Pixabay

According to different sources, public ICOs dried out throughout Q3 in this year. ICO mania that started in the first half of 2017 and continued for one year calmed down. Public offerings are not as successful anymore. Many investors got burned. But this is not the sole reason why things slowed down.

ICO or Initial Coin Offerings came on the radar in 2016 with time braking project called The DAO. The offering completed spectacularly with a hard fork of Ethereum blockchain and a lot of stolen funds. But this unfortunate event did not stop ecosystem to develop further and “invent” new kind of fundraising. The boost came at the end of the summer and continued until the end of the year. The true push happened in March with first really spectacular projects.

How did it look like

Back then a project that wanted to raise funds took somehow determined road: write down an idea into the whitepaper, create a beautiful webpage, find a minimum utility for a token you are about to issue on Ethereum blockchain and create as much hype around the project as you can. There was no need for a product to be actually working and no real proof of its value.

Project leaders went to different conferences where they talked about the tremendous potential of the project, marketing teams put a lot of money into Facebook and Twitter ads, prices for press releases on leading crypto news webpages doubled every month, influencers seemed to find a gold mine. It was expensive for the team but it was worth it. Many projects raised 10 million USD or more just on a promise.

Investors, that were not really investors but more supporters with too much money, bought tokens with a hope of making x10 in a short period of time and jump to the next project. Many of them did not really care about the future and business case. And when the price did not follow their wishes they got seriously angry.

Crypto marketing was stuck with the golden rule and added some new features like:

Hire ICO team to make your crowdsale, pay them huge money for it

Find investor pools that will buy 90% of your supply

Create one-pagers, do some webinars

Sponsor crypto events

Announce many partnerships even if there is no value

Why the drop

Many uneducated investors put their life savings, took a loan or sold a car for an expectation of quick gains. But to most of them it did not happen. Now they are left with huge loses that will be hard to cover.

It does not mean those tokens will not rise again in price. Actually, after every storm comes the sun. However, it might take quite a while before we can see token market rising again.

For that to happen the ecosystem must solve critical problems it faced in 2018: scams, unrealistic expectations and a lack of demand for tokens. Right now the token market has a lot of sellers and not much buyers. The supply is too high and hype is gone. There are not enough buyers to support the price.

In that time Google and Facebook banned crypto ads and prohibited using their platforms for crypto advertising. Teams had their hands cuffed so they had to be really resourceful. Which most of them weren’t.

Marketing departments forgot about crucial parts of their project: product, the way they do business and communities that backed them. The end result now is dead communities, weak products not many people want to buy and token with low value and no volume.

Investors learned their lesson (for now) so they are not wishing to buy on hype anymore.

Beyond the hype

So now that the old way of doing crypto marketing is over what is the next step?

Source: Pixabay

First of all, the ICO market is not really dead. It evolved to the point where there is much more interest in private sales than public offerings. Which is kind of sad because normal, small investors cannot get in easily anymore. Secondly, many projects demand KYC so anonymity is gone. On top of that, countries are stepping in with regulation so making an ICO will not be that easy anymore.

That means marketing teams need to adapt to this new situation. Building a hype around the project is not that easy anymore. What Elon Musk and Apple succeeded is unique and not achievable through the night.

Crypto marketing will have to focus on a product, how they do a product and remember that communities are one of the first buyers of the product. Moreover, they are the best ambassadors of the project.

In the end, marketing in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies is not much different than traditional. It just changes much more rapidly and it consumes a lot of energy, inventiveness and adjustable marketing strategy. Hack, even Facebook, and Google loosened their rules on crypto marketing.

To stay among the top crypto projects do not sleep on your laurels! Evolve, evolve and evolve. Do not just copy other projects, be the leader of the change!