ICO Marketing in 2018

In 2017 alone, $6,043,429,079 were raised in 872 ICOs. The global cryptocurrency market has matured in the last few years, showing tremendous growth with more mainstream adoption. There are currently dozens of cryptocurrencies worth millions, with almost daily additions.

The growth, pace and volume of money that has been flowing into the crypto market has taken people aback. Because these fundraising operations aren’t regulated by conventional financial authorities such as the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), or the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), fear of fraudulent initiatives mean investors are wary and concerned about the credibility and long-term viability of new crypto initiatives.

Until today, entrepreneurs seeking to build credibility for a new cryptocurrency have mostly relied on ICO marketing through paid advertising. But due to the rise of these regulatory concerns, and the prevalence of fraud crypto initiatives, most of the popular and mainstream social platforms no longer allow PPC advertising to promote ICOs. In the last few months, Facebook, Twitter and Google all announced that they have or will soon completely eliminate advertising of token sales, ICOs, and crypto wallet services on their platform.

All this fear of frauds and scams is reasonable, but without those mainstream ad options, how can a sound ICO venture tell its story, establish credibility and attract investors?

One option is to hire an agency specializing in ICO marketing. There are a growing number of ICO marketing agencies who offer strategic business consulting, brand management, white paper writing, content marketing, digital marketing, and lead generation services. Hiring someone to do the work for you may sound like a great idea, but it will mean an investment of tens of thousands of dollars, and you’ll need to guide them properly to make sure they stay on message. Working with an agency is an option but a big investment of time.

If you decide not to use an agency and keep your marketing in-house, the key is to know what tools are at your disposal and what tactics are the best ones to achieve success.

So are there magic tools out there that can be used? Tools that will reach the right audience? Grow engagement? Keep things simple and organized? Ensure success? Won’t cost the farm?

The quick answer is yes, such tools do exist and no, they aren’t magic.

Inbound Marketing for Your ICO

So where do we go from here? First, it’s important to recognize that the most essential piece of your ICO’s success is to establish and nurture an engaged community through relevant content. Even without paid advertising, there are many ways to reach the right audience, with the right message. In addition, regardless of whether you choose to hire someone or do it yourself, you’ll want to make sure you have a transparent ROI so you can track KPIs and make sure your marketing budget is being used effectively, actively helping you to reach your goals.

Simply put, you want to make sure you’ve accurately defined your audience, identified where they are, and what they’re reading. Then you need to build a plan to make sure you are consistently reaching them with relevant and personalized content – both original and curated. Finally you want to track your efforts to make sure they’re actually having an impact and attracting investors to your ICO. All this is critical to your success.

ICO marketing without PPC advertising is most effectively achieved by consistently publishing both original and curated content with distribution through credible inbound channels, such as blogs, search engines, and social media.

Unlike outbound marketing techniques such as trade shows, direct mail, and even cold calling, inbound marketing efforts do not need to establish credibility to get attention. Creating and publishing content that is relevant and interesting to your audience will help you attract qualified investors, and build trust and credibility over time – by demonstrating your knowledge, expertise, and understanding of core crypto market issues.

Developing your content and regularly updating your audience with news and relevant information to the crypto market in general, as well as your particular ICO initiative is a critical piece of the credibility puzzle. To help you work more efficiently, there are excellent marketing automation tools that offer an integrated environment that maximize your exposure and make sure you are effectively hitting your target market through multiple channels such as personalized email, social media, websites, etc. These tools automate repetitive tasks to help you work more efficiently and reduce the number or platforms you need to juggle.

Simply put, we’re talking about creating and automating your inbound marketing for your ICO, using one tool to manage content marketing, social media marketing, SEO and branding.

Marketing Automation for Your ICO

Marketing automation tools such as Marketo and HubSpot, as well as AI and bots, have become fairly common tools, and refer to software that help you complete all your marketing activities without manual effort.

These tools will help you identify and nurture investors through helpful content that is meant to keeps them interested in what you have to say and eventually turn prospects into investors and paying customers.

Statistics show that automating marketing efforts will save you more than 6 hours per week. With a “set it and forget it” approach, you save time, money, and brain power. In addition, marketing automation tools such as HubSpot, compile all your channels into one, so you don’t need to constantly jump from platform to platform. Most of us spend an incredible amount of time just flipping between tabs and trying to keep track of what we’ve posted and where.

The right automation tool will map out the information you need to find and track your audience. You’ll know where your contacts are, what information they’ve read and downloaded, what web pages they’ve visited and opened, and that helps you to set up automated processes to communicate effectively based on this knowledge.

You can always integrate your marketing automation tools with your CRM, so you can send personalized emails to all the contacts in your database. Did you know that you can increase your reply rate by 250% by automating your outreach and follow-up emails? Without integrating your marketing automation to your CRM, you have to manually upload your CRM database, wasting valuable time and money as well as increasing the risk of use human error. Statistics show that 70% of brands don’t use personalized emails, even though they result in 6 times higher transaction rates.

And what about ROI? Well, if you’re still using a bunch of different tools, you’ll find it harder to track your KPIs and connect them to a specific campaign. Marketing automation will help you access and track your critical marketing KPIs.

Automation will give you transparency as to which campaigns worked and which didn’t, ultimately helping you to focus on the activities that had an impact and help you to increase your ROI.

With a marketing automation like HubSpot you can connect your marketing activities to a specific campaign, giving you comprehensive analytics of your traffic, conversion rates, clicks, etc. all in one place. Even more, you can access reports and see how everything is performing in real-time. If you only have to use one tool that lets you know which of your marketing efforts are having an impact, with marketing automation you get the visibility you need to change your strategy quickly and focus on those activities that are hitting the mark. You can quickly stop campaigns that aren’t working, so you don’t waste resources continuing campaigns that aren’t generating the interest you require.

Marketing automation lets you create a more systematic approach to marketing your ICO in a way that you can track and monitor. You have one tool to hit prospective investors across multiple channels, without having to juggle what feels like a zillion programs, platforms and tools.

How to Market Your ICO Today

So, how can you establish effective inbound marketing for your ICO starting today? First, recognize that it takes time. It takes time to develop original content, it takes time to curate content from other sources, time to build a community, and it takes time to prove that you have serious knowledge and establish your credibility.

A few things you can start to do immediately.

• Start by developing content that will resonate with your audience. For example, you can write a couple of articles outlining your perspective on the ICO market and your ICO in particular
• Draw up a white paper
• Incorporate relevant SEO terms to drive traffic
• Use your own social channels to promote your content and attract attention on websites and blogs
• Set up ICO-friendly channels on native advertising and content discovery platforms such as Taboola and Outbrain to widen the exposure of your content
• Find the right marketing automation tool to make sure you’re working efficiently, hitting your audience and measuring your ROI

Not sure where to start? Have questions or comments?