While the IEO fundraising model has great potential, many crypto projects get on board without scrutinizing their IEO marketing techniques. As a result, such projects end up costing a lot on marketing, without yielding results. Even worse, some invest in ads with the hope of generating traffic while forgetting to develop a community.

It pays to master IEO marketing if you want your blockchain project to achieve its goals. It’s the key to gaining traction in the marketplace and succeeding thereafter. Furthermore, building IEO campaigns is not a one-time thing. This kind of campaign requires focus and persistence to work. That means staying up to date and keeping up with the trends for maximum exposure.

Having said that, this guide will provide you with the best course to take to kick-start IEO marketing from scratch:

What’s an IEO?

In the blockchain space, ICO is the most popular fundraising model followed closely behind by the IEO and STO. To conduct an Initial Exchange Offering, you need to make sure you’re using a reputable crypto exchange platform.

It’s the crypto exchange that looks for funds in place of the actual company. Therefore, there are certain obligations that one must adhere to. What’s more, conducting due diligence is an important part of the process.

If you decide to use this fundraising model, then you need to be prepared to pay the listing fee. This fee applies to all crypto-projects that leverage exchanges for fundraising. Also note, that Initial Exchange Offering does not issue tokens to the public.

Why do you need IEO marketing?

Times have changed. These days, crypto investors are wiser than before. They are more familiar with the crypto space. As such, persuading them to invest in such projects requires more effort than before. You’ve got to provide more details about your project for them to consider looking at it. One of the best ways to achieve this is through marketing.

Secondly, there are thousands of crypto startups in the space. For this reason, you cannot depend on exchanges to help you reach your target. That’s because there are hundreds of listed projects on most exchanges. As a result, there’s competition for the few investors available. Due to the higher number of projects, you cannot count on the exchange to market each optimally.

Of course, they’ll manage the basic campaigns like community building, enhancing credibility, visibility, and market reach. However, when it comes to creating thorough marketing campaigns for your project, it’s up to you. After all, who understand the ins and out of your project better than you? Having said that, even if you hire an IEO marketing agency to do this, your active participation is still important.

Marketing goals and strategies for IEO: Important KPIs to track

Before we get to the top IEO marketing strategies in 2023, here are the marketing goals and key performance indicators that you should keep an eye on:

• Generates traffic for your project site
• Promotes product awareness
• Generates organic traffic for your IEO on the crypto exchanges.
• Rallies crypto advocates for your IEO project. They will engage, generate, and share promotion content that supports your course.
• Creates an active and engaging loyal community for your project, not just a group of airdrop or bounty participants

Tips for effective IEO marketing

Even when you rely on third-party platforms to run your token sales, marketing is still important. Instead of over-relying on the exchange to run basic marketing, you can boost it with your strategies. With proper strategies, an IEO project stands a chance of being successful.

• Start early

Don’t wait until your project gets listed on the exchange to start your campaigns. As soon as you begin developing your project, you should launch your campaigns. Ideally, the best time to do this is before the IEO launch.

• Identify audiences

Before you start marketing, identify your audience. Thereafter, determine the market where your product will fit. Make sure you’re directing your marketing efforts to where your target audience hangs out.

• Research

In addition to finding the target market and audience, research and find out what their needs, expectations, and challenges are. This will allow you to set up a solid marketing campaign. Additionally, you can leverage the research when defending the registration of your project on certain exchange platforms.

Top IEO marketing strategies

IEO Marketing

1) IEO PR

Modern PR plays a critical role in promoting the crypto project. Even so, you still need traditional PR. One way you can achieve this is by establishing relationships with reporters and journalists in your niche. Of course, you can simply pay for coverage. It will help with brand visibility and awareness.

Leveraging the services of a PR agency can deliver similar results. They’ll develop a compelling story that will promote your IEO online. Additionally, they’ll help with the distribution of marketing content across various channels that are home to crypto enthusiasts. PR agencies can help you target both modern and traditional media. As a result, your business benefits from maximum exposure.

Blockchain technology is the same across this industry. However, what marks the difference between brands or projects is the back story. You need to highlight the effort it took to design this project including the tribulations. When you have a compelling brand story, there’s no need to buy trust. It will develop in your community naturally.

A good PR agency can also play part in enacting the SEO elements in your PR campaigns. By implementing SEO practices like using popular keywords, external content, and internal content, your project will achieve maximum visibility.

Additionally, by employing SEO, your project develops a reputation as an authority and gets mentioned frequently. With a cutting-edge strategy that combines the best PR and SEO practices, your IEO will benefit from more exposure. This publicity is vital if you want your IEO to be successful. Hiring a good PR agency is a sure way of ensuring that your IEO is successful.

Most importantly, the launch of your IEO project and PR campaigns must be aligned to generate maximum traction. All it takes is marketing coordination and good timing. You can also generate more visibility by listing your IEO with icobench.com among other crypto trackers.

Of course, there are essential factors that play part in a successful campaign. These include a manageable marketing budget and paid press ads versus free press ads. Beyond that, you can take advantage of the relationships a PR agency has with top crypto media.

2) Social media marketing

When you’re launching a startup, there’s no better strategy than social media marketing. It provides businesses with a chance to gain traction, by building a reputation and building a community to support them. Furthermore, your business can reach target users. By engaging these people, you can win their trust and get them on board.

Since social media is a global network, you can target massive numbers of audiences. Nevertheless, it’s important to focus on a chosen few platforms that are relevant to your product. A good example is Bitcoin talk. This platform is the best for crypto developers looking for engagement. You can post your content, interact with the target users, and get feedback from them.

With the help of feedback, you can improve the structure of your product. For a similar experience, Telegram forums are another good choice. The community is very engaging and reliable in providing feedback.

Other platforms include Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. These are the best channels for building a community of followers for your startup. When communicating with the audience, keep the conversation informal. However, when you’re targeting investors on LinkedIn, maintain a formal tone.

Judging by the influx of crypto content on Quora, this has also proven to be an essential social media channel. You should learn how it works and begin promoting your project there. Besides posting your content, you can contribute to topics in your niche, especially by answering questions.

Simply search for “blockchain” or “cryptocurrency” threads and then start providing feedback or answers. Once you begin capturing the audience’s attention, you can swiftly introduce your product. This approach will generate traffic and a good reputation for your IEO venture.

Reddit is a suitable channel for running your PR campaigns. On this channel, gaining followers should be the least of your concerns. Reddit is wonderful specifically because it has features that can help you to build a brand image and stand out in front of the community. On LinkedIn, you can target investors in your niche with specific ads.

Finally, Facebook is home to a significant number of crypto enthusiasts and communities. Unfortunately, crypto ads are not allowed on this channel. However, you can still market your venture through other means. Bounty and Airdrop campaigns are some of the marketing techniques you can leverage for this channel.

3) Listing on multiple exchanges

One of the critical factors to consider when choosing an exchange is its rank in the crypto space. You need top exchanges with a solid share of the blockchain market. Some of the best exchanges include Okex, Binance, and Huobi. Listing your project on these platforms also helps it gain the trust of users. However, before you even approach these platforms, you need funds. Thus funds will not only cover your listing fee but also the operational cost of the project.

Ideally, your IEO event should supplement your current funds and not serve as the primary project fund. However, if you need help raising the starter funds, you can still use IEO for that. With this fund, you can launch the product creation process and marketing.

For this strategy to work successfully, you’ll need tier-2 exchanges. Look for those that ask for payment in return for launching an IEO event. Oftentimes, tier-2 exchanges don’t run a background check on crypto projects. Therefore, investors don’t trust them fully. For this reason, you’ll need to launch trust-building campaigns that portray your crypto-project as trustworthy. It goes without saying that you’ll need a significant investment for community and marketing campaigns.

As a bonus, you can launch your IEO on multiple platforms simultaneously if your budget can support it. This is the most efficient means of speeding up fundraising and reaching your target audience.

4) IEO influencer marketing

Influencer marketing plays a big role in the success of IEO promotional strategies. When you’re launching a series of IEO campaigns, executing your social media strategies with the help of relevant influencers can help.  Social media channels like TikTok and YouTube are the best picks when promoting an IEO. It also helps if the marketing content comes from a third party – investors consider it more credible.

Since engaging with the investor community is essential for your IEO launch, it’s important to capture their attention as much as possible. Thus, you’ll need to consider the type of marketing content you’ll be using. For instance, if you are using TikTok for promotions, you’ll need humorous and authentic content.

Since TikTok is geared specifically towards entertaining audiences, the tone of any content you post there must be casual. When you hire a relevant influencer, they can help with adapting your content for the platforms you want them to use. In this way, they’ll ensure your campaign gets exposure, likes, comments, followers, and shares.

There are times when using incentives to lure investors is the key to promoting your token successfully. You can offer coins or tokens from your project in exchange for them promoting your project. You can try out AMAs, Airdrops, contests, blog posts, and bounty campaigns for a start. These are effective techniques with the potential to promote your IEO project to prospects.

The more visibility your projects gain from promotional techniques like bounty campaigns, the closer you get to potential investors. Many crypto projects believe in the power of going viral during campaigns to generate the traffic they seek.

However, to achieve this, you must give the audience a compelling reason to share your project with others. Companies with distinct technology or creative ideas that offer certain benefits or solutions to users are far ahead. These specific projects often find it easier to run a successful IEO launch.

Choosing the right influencer is vital to your crypto project. The right partnership guarantees that you’ll have an effective influencer campaign that delivers organic traffic. With specialized marketing tools, you can also get data on the potential level of interest that you can expect to get from a specific influencer’s audience.

By doing this, you can determine which users are worth targeting during promotional campaigns. It’s also important to check the influencer’s track record. Does their data prove they are right for your project? Most importantly, have they succeeded in promoting similar projects before?

The type of platform you choose to host your IEO plays an important role. It enhances the chances of your project achieving its fundraising target. Having said that, you should focus on the following factors when choosing an IEO platform:

• Strong Technology
• Multi-coin support
• Safety
• High liquidity
• Security
• Ease of use

Many exchanges will ask for an upfront listing fee and a fraction of the raised funds during the IEO. Alternatively, they may accept some of your tokens instead of the funds. On the positive side, there are no standard procedures that determine what you should pay them. You can always have a private discussion with the exchange platform, allowing you to negotiate for better rates.

5) An optimized mobile-friendly site

The attention of the community is a vital aspect of marketing. The most effective way you can capture their attention is by making a positive impression. Creating a strong impression is possible with the help of a professionally designed website. Remember, your website is a primary source of information for investors. It’s probably the first place they’ll land after stumbling upon your marketing ads on other platforms.

That being said, you need a website that clearly describes your project in detail. Most importantly, you should aim at exceeding your audience’s expectations by crafting an attention-grabbing story for your project. Furthermore, highlight why they should support or invest in this project. As you draft this brand story, ensure that your site is secure, fast, and has a robust structure.

The following are a few essential details that your website should have:

• Mobile-friendly

Many people use mobile devices for online searches. They have better processing speed and support all types of browsers. Additionally, people can use them anywhere. For these reasons, your site must support mobile devices so that you don’t lose potential clients using this device.

• Fast

The speed of your site also matters when it comes to visitor conversion. Only a few website visitors will stick around if your site lags when loading pages. Thus, it’s important to pay attention to site speed. You should also pay attention to the visual stability and responsiveness of your site.

• Clear structure

When you design a website with a clear structure, users can find everything they need with ease. It’s easier to navigate and accommodates all types of users.

You should make sure a crypto white paper features among the content you provide on your website. This is an essential requirement, and one of the things prospects will be looking for in your site.

6) Community involvement

Engaging your target audience is one of the most effective ways of improving your IEO campaign efforts. In fact, this is an important approach that you should prioritize. Engaging with your target audience helps you learn more about your prospects. Using this strategy, you can understand who the people you’re targeting are and what their interests are.

By engaging them, you can personalize your marketing efforts and develop a powerful connection with them. As a bonus, you should be prompt when responding to comments and queries from the community. Lastly, you should provide regular updates as a way to keep them engaged.

7) Whitepaper

According to surveys, tech users consider whitepapers to be one of the most powerful tools when making a purchase decision. To marketers, a crypto white paper is an ultimate tool that guarantees more conversion and sales. Here are the benefits of having a whitepaper for your IEO project:

• Offer your prospects what they want

Crypto investors are seekers of information. They rely on detailed information about a product to make their final decision. This is even more important if they are planning to stake on a project to generate profits. Oftentimes, they are in search of an effective solution to specific problems. However, due to time constraints, they cannot do research by themselves.

That’s where a whitepaper plays a critical part. A well-developed white paper highlights the challenges your project is solving and reveals to investors what they should expect. As a result, the investor receives an all-inclusive package that helps shape their decision. With the information from your white paper, they can make a more informed decision – one that they’re confident in.

• Stealth marketing technique

Prospects are not an easy group to convince. Luckily, if you leverage the whitepaper format well, you can outdo their anti-marketing defenses. A well-crafted whitepaper is a powerful stealth marketing strategy when you’re on the hunt for prospects. That’s because a whitepaper doesn’t come off as blatant sales content. Instead, their focus is on the solutions that the project offers.

Of course, the prospects know your whitepaper is a marketing tool. However, they are willing to compromise as long as it helps them make an informed decision about the project. With this information, they can easily justify their purchase decision.

A professionally written whitepaper helps reduce the buyer resistance. With this whitepaper, there’s a higher likelihood of prospects accepting your ideas.

• Additional benefits
  • Helps with building trust and loyalty
  • Helps with building credibility

The whitepaper is undoubtedly one of the most persuasive marketing techniques. You’ll need a draft of a comprehensive whitepaper that follows the standard layout. This document must discuss all important details concerning your project.  It should highlight the token scheme, business strategy, and most importantly the technology you are using.

Besides investors, you should consider exchanges when drafting your whitepaper. Most of them run due diligence before listing your project on their platform. Therefore, your project structure must be promising, compelling, and feasible. To present the whitepaper to prospects, you’ll need a responsive site.

BONUS TIPS

1) Set up a separate budget for IEO marketing

When preparing a budget for your IEO project, it’s important to have separate funds for your IEO campaigns. Many crypto projects often focus on the development process and less on marketing. As a result, they end up not assigning enough funds to run this sector.

When you have separate funds for IEO marketing, you’ll spend properly on marketing. For instance, running bounty and airdrop campaigns will be a lot easier. Moreover, you’ll be able to invest in influencer marketing, among other successful strategies that require an upfront fee. Within your budget, you can even set aside funds specifically for promotion campaigns.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a dedicated budget, running some of these promotions becomes impossible. Ultimately, you’ll feel like they’re straining your budget, instead of seeing the benefits of investing in them.

2) Make sure you can work within a shorter timeframe

Recently, the IEO marketing timeframe has been reduced significantly. Since it’s shorter, it’s also cost-effective. You can now run aggressive campaigns within 2 to 3 months and still hit your target. Unlike alternative models like the ICO, you don’t need 4 to 6 months of marketing to achieve your goals. With the help of top agencies, you can exceed your campaign target. Just make sure you pick a competent marketing team with a desirable track record.

3) Supplement the marketing you get from exchanges with your own marketing

We all know there are marketing benefits your projects get from getting listed on a top exchange. However, that isn’t enough to promote your project and help it attain its target. There are other inexpensive approaches like newsletters and social media marketing that you can use. Keep in mind that none of these is a foolproof strategy, so you should use a combination of strategies to maximize your success.

If you inject substantial funds into real marketing, branding, and growth, your project will have a future. Most importantly, for a project to succeed, you’ll need a campaign strategy that goes beyond the IEO launch.

4) Don’t expect magical solutions

While the IEO model promises remarkable results, don’t expect a total sell-out during the launch. If you were betting on instant sell-out, then you’ll be disappointed. However, after a given period, you’ll attain your results. From previous records, you’ll notice that many IEO projects hit their target beyond the launch period.

That’s because there are many factors to account for. As such, the success of any IEO is not guaranteed. However, if you conduct your campaign well and account for essential factors, then success is attainable.

Some brands begin a presale to create hype and then realize other important strategies are left out. That being said, it takes a collection of relevant and powerful marketing strategies to achieve a successful IEO.

How Pressfarm can help

If you are looking for a top IEO marketing company, look no further. Pressfarm can help you with that. They’ll design and deploy a prosperous campaign strategy for your IEO project. They’ve got a robust team of marketing experts who can handle IEO strategies.  Most importantly, they can amplify the presence of your project in the community. Therefore, reach out today, and watch your IEO business flourish.

Over to you

With an effective IEO marketing strategy, you can significantly reduce the disparity between a successful project and a failed one. Even if you decide to list your project on top-tier exchanges, no investor will consider your project without marketing.

Marketing helps them learn and understand the essential elements of your project. For instance, without the whitepaper, many investors will not consider your project credible.

With IEO marketing, you can reach your target audience with ease. By creating insightful content, you can present your project to them and help them in decision-making. Finally, the IEO presents a great opportunity to fundraise for your project. It’s a transparent process, it’s timely, and it’s very secure.

To maximize its great potential, businesses need to invest in effective IEO campaigns. You’ll also need help from an IEO marketing agency with the promotion, listing, and launch. Most importantly, choosing a marketing agency with years of experience and a vast network can help you achieve your goal faster. You’ll also benefit from brand recognition.

FAQs

Is it necessary to hire the services of an IEO marketing agency?

If you are an expert in IEO marketing, then you can manage some of the above strategies comfortably. However, if you have the knowledge but lack the skills and experience, then hiring an expert is necessary.

It takes more than just the knowledge about IEO campaign tricks to succeed in this field. By leveraging years of experience, a marketing expert can leverage the ideal timing and make strategic choices when deploying these techniques.

However, that doesn’t mean all marketing agencies will do a perfect job promoting your IEO launch. You’ve got to be wise when choosing a marketing agency. Luckily, there are dozens of agencies that can help you with the marketing and launch of your IEO project. Their previous projects, experience, and skills should be your guiding factor.

A good agency will also assist you with getting listed on the exchange, which is an important aspect of IEO marketing.

Does hiring a marketing agency guarantee the launch will be a success?

If that were true, then we would have countless cryptocurrencies. If a marketing agency promises guaranteed results before they’ve asked you specific questions about your crypto project, this should raise red flags. However, hiring an IEO marketing team is still essential. While they cannot guarantee the outcome of the launch, they’re increasing the probability of success. With their help, you can give your project the best chance of success.