Blockchain & ICO Marketing: The Complete Crypto Marketing Guide

In the ICO world, the first three months of 2018 raised more money than the entire fiscal year of 2017. This proves that a bear market is not a hindrance to running a successful crowdfunding campaign. However, not all ICOs are selling out on their hard cap.

Competition is incredibly fierce with around 300 new projects being released every month and major players starting to migrate to the blockchain industry. More often than not, successful projects have a team savvy enough to give heavy consideration to their marketing strategies. Successful ICOs utilize their campaign in a flexible manner.

By using everything from traditional ICO fundraising techniques to creative ventures, good ICOs try their hand at different kinds of marketing until they find their style.

This is the Complete Guide to ICO Marketing

Crowdcreate is the #1 Community Management & Growth Agency in the blockchain space. Our top-rated global marketing agency specializes in managing and helping you grow your community across Telegram and other platforms. Our management, growth and PR strategies will help you in leading a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Create a Beautiful Website that Explains your Project (The First Thing They See)

It is absolutely crucial to create a beautiful website that explains your project in a simple yet robust way. Given that it is the first thing a potential investor would see and judge you on, It is incredibly important to have it be comprehensive visually. Spending a bit of moneyon your website is a smart move because a dull or off-putting website would prove detrimental irrespective of how innovative your project is.

Make sure things like explainer videos, links to social media sites, press coverage are all uniform and well integrated to the design. The website should aim to simultaneously capture the attention of the user and provide as much information as possible in a pleasant manner.

Write a Comprehensive Whitepaper (The Second Thing They See)

The whitepaper is the second thing participants look at and it is the core element of the vision of your project. Investors in the crypto community will immediately test how technical you are by reading your whitepaper after determining your website adequate. The whitepaper should highlight the niche industry you are targeting and explain how you plan on establishing your product in the blockchain space.

Make sure all available information is neatly arranged and easy to absorb. Things like sale dates, price, how your contracts work, and potential legal/regulatory issues should be addressed.

Get Featured by Top Tier Influencers and Press & Media (Focus on Outreach)

Focussing on outreach should always be on your radar. Utilizing influencers is very important. They have a niche, prebuilt community of investors that listen to them. Leveraging them allows you to motivate and move investor communities.

PR follows the same concept. While Forbes and Entrepreneur are wanted and impressive, it is also important to consider your audience. Targeting both high and mid-tier sites allows you to get pretty good reach.

Build a Community of Supporters, Investors, and Developers

As with any industry, It is vital to get to know your biggest fans. Getting to know your community members outside of the project creates long-lasting bonds within the community. Gaining the trust of your crypto community should be highly prioritized. How the community views your project will play a huge part in determining your company’s brand in the ecosystem. Thus working alongside the community and building your company TOGETHER is very important.

Make Use of Social Media Management

Social Media Management will act as the online face of your company. You can respond to questions and lead people to the correct places by utilizing social media correctly. Different social media sites specialize in different things. By leveraging Discord, Reddit, Facebook, and Bitcointalk, you will hit the developer community, mainstream mom and pops, and investor level community members all at the same time.

Given the amount of FUD and spam present across the crypto industry, Having a well established social media presence would prevent misinformation and let you tackle any stressful situation without it escalating further. For these reasons, It is equally important to have a community management team which excels in level-headed responses to adverse conditions.

Rank in Search Engines with an SEO Strategy

SEO should be one of the pillars of your ICO marketing strategy. Your project’s name should be popping up whenever anything related to your industry pops up. This will ensure you have relevancy for long-term success. Your SEO should also be streamlined in accordance with your on-page brand strategy. This means making sure your website is in synergy with well-researched words and ICO specific words. Nailing SEO would bring in a tremendous amount of users spurring organic growth which is very healthy for your project.

Run a Bounty Campaign and Airdrops

Bounties are a good way to reward and build your participant base at the same time. Most ICO’s have one form or bounty or another in order to leverage the existing crypto community and gain new followers. Bounties to build an ecosystem would attract the best talent to work towards your project. Having a well-funded bug bounty system will ensure that your project is placed under at-most scrutiny from a security testing perspective which will in extension be useful in building trust across the community.

Airdropping is a popular system that distributes free tokens for minimal one-time tasks such as joining a Telegram room, following your social media accounts and signing up for the newsletter. This is harder than you think as airdrops need to be balanced in order to keep the value of your project. It is important to get the way you airdrop and the subsequent details right to make sure it isn’t counterproductive.

Attend Global Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conferences and Meetups

Attending and networking at blockchain and cryptocurrency conferences can prove invaluable to the project. These avenues could serve as a way to meet investors with great influence in the crypto industry. Being backed by a well-respected venture capital fund would accelerate the process of attracting new investors.

Similarly, participating in pitches and getting involved with hackathon can prove an effective strategy. Several blockchain projects have sponsored prizes at hackathons incentivizing developers to build projects revolving around the niche of their project by utilizing the project’s API’s. This is a great way to get developers to work on innovating projects using your technology and also spreading the word about the project among developers.

Before You Go

This is the complete guide to blockchain and ICO marketing. Follow this guide and you should be able to run a very successful ICO marketing campaign. We here at Crowdcreatehave helped several projects run a successful crowdsale campaign by optimizing the aforementioned strategies. Over the years, we’ve gained insights as to what works best for different kinds of projects. We’ve successfully increased the size of our client’s Telegramchannels 1,000% in just 3 months. The results are an increase in funds raised by millions of dollars.

Originally published at www.crowdcreate.us on July 18, 2018.

Blockchain & ICO Marketing: The Complete Crypto Marketing Guide was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.