ICO Marketing. Checklist for Those Who Is Going to Launch an ICO

Starting an initial coin offering (ICO) without a marketing strategy prior to or during the project, to just get your foot in the door is not a good idea. Your online reputation is fundamental for building an ICO online campaign. We have been working with several ICO projects lately, helping them to create landing pages with a personal cabinet for investors. In the article, I will share our thoughts on developing a fast and cost-effective way to organize an ICO marketing campaign.

1. A Detailed Whitepaper

An ICO whitepaper is a document where you explain and sell your idea. Here is a basic structure with a list of questions that you should answer:

Project

Start with describing the general idea of your project. Why does the world need it? Does it help someone? In what way? Remember to tell your story: write about how the idea for the project came to fruition.

Problem

Shift the focus from crowdfunding to problem-solving. Concentrate on the main problem your project is going to solve and how it changes the game. Why do people need to invest? Why does the industry need your project?

Solution

Describe how your project can solve existing problems. What benefits does it give to investors and what can be changed in the industry.

Uniqueness and State of Market

Highlight how your the product is different from existing solutions. Gather information about the target and potential market with analytical materials and reports.

Product

Describe what the product currently looks like at the time. Is it a code or MVP (minimum viable product)? Is it open-sourced? Is it possible to take a look at it on Github?

Tokens Economy and Demand

Describe the financial model, funding strategies, and specify if the first sales and contracts that have been made and share the data that may become in demand.

The Team

This is a trust-building point. Introduce the key leaders, their education, and experience. Do they have professional experience in the industry or an expertise in cryptocurrency that will help to make the ICO successful? Is the project supported by major companies or valuable public personas in the industry?

Investments

Tell your investors how much money you plan to bring to the project and how many tokens to release. Justify how the initial token price was determined and what will happen to the unsold tokens. Oh, and what about bonuses? Will your investors get any bonuses by supporting you?

It doesn’t matter if your ICO whitepaper is 10 or 100 pages long. But the longer your document is, the easier it is to get lost in details.

Quick tip: Translate your ICO whitepaper into several languages.

2. Website or Landing Page for ICO Marketing

When working on a website for your ICO campaign, don’t skip the discovery phase. Figure out what is the current state of the market, determine your key competitors and how they promote their campaigns; do a SWOT analysis to boost your chances of achieving your goal. Having a trustworthy website allows you to kill several birds with one stone.

Determining the target audience. Website traffic is full of insights, use Google Analytics or another tool to understand them.

Market validation. Adding a form to your web page could help you collect a pre-launch list and figure out whether people care about your project.

Introducing a product. Describe its features, technical characteristics and how it could be helpful for your target audience.

Introducing a startup. Tell your investors about your company achievements, the purpose of your ICO campaign, and the team with whom they’ll work.

Spreading the brand. And last but not least, increasing loyalty to your ICO campaign and attracting investors.

Landing Page of the Startup Roadshow

Having helped numerous startups in their ICO marketing, we believe including the following sections and tools on your webpage may help build trust.

• Charts and latest numbers. Show the statistics of your previous ICO success.
• Calculator. Show the current token cost and the forecast of how much investors would earn from each token over time.
• 3D model of your hardware product. If your product is a physical device, a 3D model will allow users to look at it in detail and interact with the product.

3D model of the LEAF growbox

3. Investor Personal Cabinet for the Reception of Crypto-currencies

The primary purpose of a personal cabinet is to simplify ICO process management. PC is essential for both ICO investors and ICO founders. It allows investors to follow each cryptocurrency transfer in real time and ensures transparency. For ICO founders the above mentioned personal cabinet means the autonomy of work. For example, activating an automatic setting for bonus accruals, and live stats on tokens’ value change.

Investor personal cabinet

4. Outreach Your Investors and Media

Share your ICO project with the press and conduct email marketing campaigns to encourage as many people as possible to invest. There are several resources that may come in handy:

• HARO
• JournoRequests
• Source Bottle

Not every successful ICO project follows all the steps listed above. But the more you do, the more robust your project will be, and the more audience reach you will get. Do your best at ICO crowdfunding, and we are always here to help.

ICO Marketing. Checklist for Those Who Is Going to Launch an ICO was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.