Chapter 10. Marketing and the launch

Marketing has come to play a very critical role in ICOs and as the landscape becomes more cluttered, if any ICO is to be successful, the ability to stand out from the noise is important. Your ICO marketing strategy can be the difference between success and failure. You can have the most amazing product ever, but without the right marketing campaign and strategy in place, your chances of success are greatly diminished.

In this chapter, we will look at the various marketing strategies around the four main concepts of:

• The state of ICO marketing

• The message and the tools

• The community

• The launch

While the launch may be the most exciting aspect of an ICO, a lot of work is required for many months behind the scenes to actually make an ICO successful. To start, the various aspects of an ICO campaign must be identified, understood, and planned for, and to achieve this, we must first look at the state of ICO marketing.

The state of ICO marketing

In 2017, a good digital strategy was enough to launch an ICO successfully. Even then, recent statistics from TokenData showed that 46% of the ICOs completely failed (https://blog.iqoption.com/en/token-data-about-50-of-icos-from-2017-have-failed/), and another hundred or so were classed as semi-failed because the evidence suggested abandonment: their social media was no longer active, or, and this is the key, their community size was so small that their chance of success was highly unlikely.

That last statement is crucial because community is a big part of any successful strategy for ICOs, but the community isn't there to fund your project: it's there to market it and give it credibility for the real investors.

The ideal strategy for an ICO is a two-pronged attack, with each prong depending on the other:

Figure 1: An ideal marketing strategy

Founders should build the trust they need by ensuring that authenticity and transparency run through all their communications...

The message and tools

Many projects struggle to get across what they're doing, and aiming to achieve, in a succinct fashion. As mentioned previously, many ICOs are executed by developers who are, by their nature, deeply technical, and so it can be very difficult for them to clearly explain the key facts at a high level. That's part of the challenge of marketing an ICO: to create a messaging framework for pitches, from which all future content can be built.

A messaging framework becomes a critical document as you go through your ICO, containing the key elements to which you will constantly return to: your elevator pitches, your straplines, your use cases, your sound-bite stories, and the features of your platform or product.

It will also help you to clearly differentiate the product from the ICO, and your product vision from the investment opportunity. It will help you to reach out to all the different audiences you want to reach, from product evangelists through to professional investors.

Quality...

The community

Earlier we mentioned the two-pronged attack. In the past, it was enough to have a loyal community around your project and to expect the funds to come from that same group. Now, that's increasingly less the case. Today, the community is there to "do your marketing for you," meaning if they are properly engaged and incentivized, then they can and will have a huge impact on your social following, and the profile of your project in the market.

Investors will look at the size of your community and following when reviewing your project. If it's very low or non-existent, they will worry about your future prospects of success. The community gives you credibility. If absolutely nothing else, it demonstrates to your investor that you have the skills and commitment to build market awareness – a key skill in selling your product and building what will eventually be your business.

ICO rating sites work on "hype scores," and your community size, social following, website traffic, and YouTube...

The launch

The ideal outcome is that your ICO begins seamlessly on the date on which it was promised. This alone is already a mark of the solidity of your outfit. In fact, ideally most of the preparations will be in place before even announcing the ICO date, to ensure the launch date does not have to be deferred. However, you should defer your ICO if you cannot check off the majority of these elements of your marketing activity:

• Have two-thirds of your soft cap, that was promised, before you launch: if you can achieve this with the blessing of some significant investors, who may even be prepared to offer you a testimonial, so much the better

• Ensure your white paper is published well in advance of your token sale and that you work hard to share it with key influencers and investors

• Bounty campaign running: it is essential that friend-to-friend functionality is in place

• Airdrop running: it is essential that the automated and instant functionality of a targeted airdrop is in place

• Dashboard built...

Summary

Marketing and launching an ICO is not a task to be taken lightly. There is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done prior, along with constant monitoring during and continuous efforts afterwards. The planning and strategy need to be more meticulous now, as the novelty of ICOs has passed and hundreds compete against each other on a monthly basis (https://www.ccn.com/100-icos-launching-every-month-in-2018-generating-13-7-billion-pwc/).

In this chapter, we covered some of the key campaign elements, in particular building up to seed funding and then the public ICO. We learned that the message needs to be clear, grammar needs to be spot on, and nowadays an alpha product or a proof of concept is an essential part of an ICO. Creating announcements on Bitcointalk, bounty campaigns, and airdrops will help to spread the word and grow the all-important community.

Next, we will hear from the experiences of some high-profile ICO founders.