Initial Exchange Offerings (IEO) quickly became a preferred way for crypto startups to raise funds for their projects. However, starting a successful IEO, and securing funds for your project may seem a cumbersome task.
First and foremost, you have to decide what type of fundraising mechanism your project needs. Despite their similarities, initial coin offerings (ICOs) have a different organizational structure than IEOs. An essential part of any fundraising is to have a clear strategy of what you want to achieve and your core strengths. It may sound a bit intimidating at first. Still, we can lend a helping hand with the planning and project optimization to deliver high performance and cost-effective strategy development.
Companies are worthless without their brand and visual recognition
Branding
Branding is the most critical marketing feature of your business, so put your time and effort into creating a clear indication of what your company does via branding. Anything from choosing the proper domain name, logo design, or the name of your project could be crucial for the success of your venture, as it affects the overall performance of your project. Colors are also important, so choose your color scheme wisely.
Design and CTA
After the branding phase, you should consider designing an easy-to-navigate UX/UI-friendly website, which would drive potential investors right into your marketing funnel. The DotCom era is already gone, so invest in clean, clear, and understandable landing pages, with clear “Call to action” buttons and sections. Users love the action!
However, don’t fall into the pop-up trap. Keep the user experience irritation-less, as the precious seconds of focus could be easily lost with a pop-up, prompting to join the IEO.
Research and tracking
Take your time to optimize your content to suit the needs of your audience. Update posts, revise the poor content on your website, and always research what your competitors are doing, so you can stay ahead of the game. However, if video content is working for you, it may not work for your competitors, and vice versa. Test, adjust, then test again.
Tracking action, however, is a mostly underestimated task, which would make or break a modern-day business. Setting up tracking services like Google Analytics for your website could give you vital insights about your audience, how they interact with your content marketing strategy, and also identify the types of content that work best for any given audience.
Marketing is nothing without a strategy
Why do most ICO/IEO projects fail to reach their goals? In over 90% of the cases, it’s because ventures didn’t have a marketing strategy. Choosing to place ads on Google is not a marketing strategy. The whole process of creating a marketing strategy is critical for an IEO to be successful. Our team has all of the tools needed to develop, execute, adjust, and polish marketing strategies.
Clarifying the specific markets and countries from which you are fundraising can distinguish you from the rest. Narrowing the market segments is a key to successful user engagements and tailoring appropriate content that will work with your target audience. Avoiding regions with high regulatory complications is also a crucial step for the success of an IEO, as most of the crypto platforms would not deliver your token sale in those regions.
An excellent copy sells in the long run, so the first major milestone is to create compelling stories that will engage users. Delivering fresh content like articles and news to local or global media outlets would help strengthen brand awareness in users.
The second most crucial point in your business apart from the fundraising itself is the whitepaper. A Whitepaper is the principal strategic document in your ICO/IEO. A good rule of thumb is to present a problem and objectify how your project is going to solve it. Whitepapers are usually containing just the essence, so no need for fancy graphics or sentences. Use short, understandable sentences about your project, the technology behind it, roadmap, how tokens would be distributed, and the benefits of investing in your project. Those benefits may include token price formation after the IEO, price forecasts, special offers, etc. Other vital documents are the One-pager (just the essence of your whitepaper), documentation about the technology behind the project, team members, expertise in the sector, as well as testimonials.
Search engines help your brand
Search Engine Optimization has been blooming in the past decade, mostly due to users relying heavily on search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, Naver, and Yandex. However, user attention is short, so you need to be on the first spots of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Nothing comes easy, so research your sector for the strongest keywords and navigate all of your content around them. Start with a blog post strategy and a dedicated section on your website. Usually, one detailed article (like this one), and 2-3 short, problem-oriented blog post per week would do just fine to boost organic traffic to your site. However, never start a content marketing campaign before you identify and execute your global branding and marketing strategies. Otherwise, you may end up creating content that doesn’t help brand awareness.
Listing
Organic traffic is perfect, and it works very well in conjunction with paid traffic. List your site on as many ICO/STO/IEO forums and websites as you can. Join Reddit groups, showcase your IEO project on Bitcointalk.org – everything helps in establishing a brand.
One of the best organic marketing campaigns you could deploy is the Airdrop/Bounty program. Basically, you give a small number of tokens to each user who joins your project via completing marketing activities (liking your Facebook page, sharing it, posting to Twitter, etc.). Telegram bots help you automate such activities, but the professionals should better do planning and implementation since they know precisely how to deploy such bots.
A picture tells a thousand words, but video provokes emotions
Yes, we live in a video-dominated world. Video marketing, however, is a rather new turf, so taking the lead in such a vast marketing instrument could become the fuel to skyrocket your growth and fundraising. With video becoming more and more accessible and cheap to produce, your video marketing could set you back little to nothing. Professional video presentations and the involvement of influencers, however, is a costly task.
Nevertheless, keep your videos short, engaging, with calls to action. Show your audience the things they can’t read – like how the environment could be greener by investing in your product. For example, a short “talking head” style videos generate a lot of views, but they don’t drive emotion. However, an oil spill and a foggy megapolis provoke viewers to stay longer and absorb your message.
Sometimes, a simple animation of a bar graph or a pie chart may keep the audience focused for longer, while you deliver your message. However, approaches to video content marketing should be taken seriously, as one mediocre video can provoke an adverse reaction.
Social media and community management
Communities are all that matters in a business, whether they are offline (clubs, brand-oriented gatherings, etc.) or online. However, online communities are easier to manage and adjust to best suit your needs. IEO gives one significant advantage over ICO – the exchange, on which you would issue your token sale already has its user base, which can quickly become part of your new IEO community. Binance users, for example, would be more interested in investing in your IEO, if it’s on Binance’s Launchpad. You need an active community around your project.
Online communities are also a magnet – they attract users. An active community can attract possible investors quicker and with more of a success, rather than a weak one. Social media communities (groups, forums, channel participants) can also be measured in terms of how they interact with organic content. The metrics would help you develop a better advertising strategy and yield better results.
Social media are the backbone of every successful marketing. For example, sometimes a Medium post could reach far more “reading” people than a regular blog post on your website.
Paid ads
Advertising, on the other hand, could also establish your brand and boost your IEO. By paying a little extra for cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-action (CPA) ads, you can create tailored advertisements to reach your target audience best.
Email marketing
Email is also a reliable marketing channel, despite the rumors that messaging apps like Messenger, Slack, and Telegram are taking over the last hegemon of the DotCom era. It saw a resurrection with the widespread usage of smartphones and mobile Internet data plans.
An email gathering campaign is as simple as setting up a pop-up screen on your website. To be effective, however, e-mail marketing has to give added value. A simple newsletter or a special offer, tied to the Airdrop/Bounty campaign, could gather those emails pretty quickly.
It seems like a pretty hefty, right?
Over the past couple of years, Cryptoken Media specialized in transforming crypto projects into working businesses via marketing and advertising. We have partnered with one of the world’s most significant crypto industry players, such as Binance, Liquid, and EtoroX. These companies believed in our expertise and in-depth knowledge of the crypto space.
Get in touch with us at [email protected]
