5 Tips for Marketing an ICO
To date, there have already been 420 ICOs launched in 2018, but not all have been successes. As the new, go-to fundraising mechanism, startup entrepreneurs hoping to launch crypto-based solutions are turning to ICOs over traditional fundraising strategies. ICOs offer speed and the ability to obtain funding for a project idea before the product is even built.
But in order to join the ranks of listings that succeed in meeting their fundraising goals, entrepreneurs have to know how to market their coin offerings effectively. There is a lot of noise in the space, and investors do not have the time to review every single listing. So even if your product idea is excellent and you have assembled a strong internal team to bring it to life if you do not follow an impactful marketing strategy, your coin offering may get lost in the shuffle.
To avoid this fate, here are five marketing steps you must follow:
- Build a strong website — This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many hopeful crypto projects skimp on this very important step. If a potential investor’s interest is piqued after hearing about your crypto solution idea, the first thing they’ll (likely) do is search for your website. ICO review ratings will take this into account when rating your ICO. But a company with an incomplete website may also raise investor’s eyebrows. Your site needs to include an overview of your product and vision, a link to your whitepaper, and a team history. It’s also a good idea to include links to your GitHub repository because many investors today want to be able to review your coding.
- Engage with your community — It takes a village to launch a successful ICO. Crypto enthusiasts and influencers have the power to move the needle for your company, but in order to evangelize on your behalf, they have to know about you first. Distributing strong social content across platforms like Medium, Twitter, and Telegram is paramount to success. But you shouldn’t be solely focused on publishing content, you should also be engaging with investors who may have questions about your product or roadmap.
- Make sure you’re visible on ICOratings sites — One of the best ways to get discovered by investors is through ICO databases. These databases compile sale dates and project facts for current and up-and-coming ICOs and it’s important to make sure your listing is visible on as many as possible. Obtaining strong ICO ratings on ICO Reports sites can help you distinguish your project from the increasingly crowded marketplace.
- Offer bounty programs — A bounty program is a way of getting the crypto community more involved in your project. You can offer bounties to individuals for completing tasks designed to progress your product development and increase awareness for your upcoming sale. In exchange for this work, bounty participants receive your coin or token. These kinds of programs can be especially beneficial to teams that are not yet fully rostered. If you’re hoping to use a portion of the funds raised from your sale to build out your team, you may want to consider bounties to help facilitate necessary ICO steps and projects.
- Attend events — One of the strongest ways to grow awareness within the crypto community is to interact with the crypto community. Attending blockchain-focused events and conferences is not only a good way to better understand which trends are shaping the development of the industry, but it’s also a vehicle for networking. Especially as many investors are wary of scams, attending in-person events builds an extra layer of trust. When investors are able to put a face to an up-and-coming ICO signal it reassures them that the listing is not a scam.
You can take all the right product development and technological implementation steps, but if the ICO audience is not aware of your project and disruptive idea, your efforts will have been for nothing. It’s easy to look at marketing as a second pillar of the business. But across this landscape, how you market your cryptocurrency solution could spell the difference between success and failure.
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