In the world of cryptocurrency, marketing plays a vital role in the growth and success of businesses. This holds true for ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) and cryptocurrency projects as well. Developing a well-planned and impactful marketing strategy is of utmost importance in this industry.
But why is it more critical for this type of industry?
The crypto market has expanded dramatically over the past two years. There are now thousands of crypto businesses popping up wherever you look. If you have a crypto startup, you need to gain traction amidst so many competitors. Building a digital marketing strategy is an excellent place to start if you want to boost your brand.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that ICOs and cryptocurrencies are the same thing. If you want to market your brand the right way, you need to start by understanding your marketing goal. Are you marketing your ICO? Or are you marketing your cryptocurrency brand as a whole?
ICO stands for “Initial coin offering” and represents a fundraiser to progress a project. On the other hand, cryptocurrency is a digital currency. Due to the similarities involved, marketing strategies for both concepts are often the very same.
Here are 17 marketing strategies for ICOs and cryptocurrency that actually work:
1) Create a website
If you want an idea of what a website should look like for an ICO or cryptocurrency project; check out the website of any of the top fifty coins on CoinMarketCap.
Keep in mind that this is the very first place that most serious investors will start their research. For this reason, without a professional website, you have nothing. After all, would you take a technology project seriously if there was no website?
2) ABC – Always Be Collecting Emails
When you’re marketing your brand, you should always be collecting emails. This should happen right from the beginning of an ICO or cryptocurrency project. It takes a great deal of time to build up a subscriber list. Nonetheless, as any professional marketer will tell you, email is still the most effective way to reach a target market.
2) Networking on LinkedIn
Networking is crucial in any industry, but for a little-known project in an emerging market like blockchain, this is even more important. It would be best if you established relationships at every opportunity, and LinkedIn is probably the most effective way to do this.
In fact, with valuable tools like Linked Helper, team members in an ICO can automate the process of reaching out to potential sponsors and influencers on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn users are very responsive to messages and open to cold messages or inquiries from people they do not know. This is an advantage LinkedIn has over other social media platforms. If you’re a newcomer in this market, you must make maximum use of LinkedIn’s networking capabilities.
3) Social Media
ICOs and cryptocurrency projects need to be on social media for anyone to know about them. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to start. However, beyond simply sharing your projects, it’s just as important to keep these channels up to date.
In other words, if visitors find a social media page without any posts or updates, it sends out all the wrong signals. Likewise, projects need to ensure that every question is answered and every comment is given an adequate response.
By engaging with your target audience, you can create a thriving online community. Building a loyal community in the cryptocurrency industry is a powerful way to boost your brand, and social media is one of the best places to do this.
4) Press Release
It doesn’t matter who does or does not publish your press release; it’s essential to have one. There are now many cryptocurrency websites and agencies that are constantly on the lookout for new projects to write about every day. What’s more, these publishers usually have a very defined and specific audience that directly matches the target audience for ICO and cryptocurrency projects.
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Writing a press release is very straightforward, but writing a good cryptocurrency press release takes extra effort on your part. Taking the template of a standard press release and modifying it to fit your company might seem like a good idea. Be that as it may, for a crypto press release to be effective, you need to know what parts of your news to highlight. Potential clients are looking for precise information. Give this information to them immediately so that they don’t need to dig for it.
It would help if you also steered clear of any jargon. The crypto industry is challenging enough for people to understand without you throwing a bunch of industry terms into your press release so that you look convincing. Don’t do that. Breaking your news down into an easily digestible form will help you stand out from the crowd of crypto startups that are always throwing around obscure industry jargon. If you can explain your news in a way that is easy to understand, then your readers will remember you for a good reason.
5) PR and Media Outreach
While it is crucial to reach out directly to the public and target audiences, it is equally important to reach out to media professionals because they play an essential role in getting information to the public. Even though there is an oversaturation of media platforms, sending newsworthy content like press releases and sponsored stories to media publications is an easy and effective way to reach out to investors in the cryptocurrency market. You do not always have to rely solely on stories written by media professionals to get attention. Usually, PR and media outreach only needs to be done in the initial communication process. If done correctly, awareness will follow naturally.
6) Bounty Campaigns
Bounty campaigns are incentives that are offered to multiple participants for various activities associated with an ICO. Generally, they give out rewards or tokens for people who have completed specific tasks that help promote a company’s ICO. Participants are spread across different stages of an ICO, ranging from investors to ICO promoters and developers. The campaign incentives can be in the form of cash rewards, which is still pretty rare, or free/discounted tokens that can be cashed in in the future when the tokens are listed on an exchange.
Since the ICO process is divided into two stages, bounty programs/campaigns can incentivize developers to find bugs or provide feedback on other design elements. The people who test and find a flaw in the blockchain are given rewards that are also known as bug bounties. After an ICO is launched, the priority is to fine-tune the released blockchain. In that case, bounty rewards can also be offered to translators who help ensure that the blockchain has a global reach by translating documents associated with development and marketing.
Bounty campaigns are not something that all projects rely on but can be quite beneficial on multiple levels. While it is generally used as a cryptocurrency promotion strategy, it can be much more than that.
7) Airdrops
Airdrops are still very common and effective in the cryptocurrency industry. If you’re new in the market, then sending free coins or tokens to people’s wallet addresses can help you promote your new currency.
Ultimately, airdrops are hugely popular with investors and a great way to get people interested in the project. Needless to say, the more free tokens you provide, the higher the chance that your community will grow.
8) Publish Major Events on Calendars
The main purpose of any cryptocurrency marketing strategy is to retain existing audiences and keep them engaged while also drawing in new investors. It can be quite challenging to monitor and keep track of every development in the crypto space since it is constantly expanding. Usually, to stay ahead of the competition, investors generally use calendars to track a company’s project operations. You need to do the same.
You should publish your initial coin offerings (ICO), initial exchange offerings (IEO), and security token offerings (STO) on major crypto calendar websites to mark milestones or monthly update reviews. This practice will make it easier for investors to know what to expect because they appreciate transparency. It will also make it easier for internal personnel to keep track of public communications.
9) Podcasts
Podcasts are increasingly popular for a good reason. For a cryptocurrency project, this is an opportunity to broadcast to a wider audience and educate listeners about the project’s features.
Having said this, audio content is even more effective now than before, making this one of the more impactful strategies for creating awareness about the project.
10) Interviews
If you perform a simple search on Google or YouTube, you should see that many influencers have a substantial number of followers. With this in mind, instead of trying to garner a fan base for your new channel, it can be far more worthwhile to capture the minds of an audience on an existing channel.
You should not rush this process since projects are more likely to be received well if the brand takes time to establish a relationship with an influencer before suggesting an interview. Either way, you will find that partnering with an influencer is a win-win. The influencer gets to talk about something interesting, which boosts engagement with their audience. On the other hand, your cryptocurrency project will gain some valuable exposure.
11) Email Marketing
Email marketing offers lots of opportunities because it helps companies reach and connect with their target audience personally and increase sales more cost-effectively. Newsletters, whether created by PR professionals or by your company itself, have been a proven way to keep investors informed about a project and give them the ability to promote airdrops and other updates and events.
Consumers can check their inboxes on any device when it is convenient for them. This is because more users are now using their mobile devices to access not only emails but also other types of media and information. Well-designed emails can produce higher conversation rates on mobile than any other medium. Consumers who have signed up to a company’s email list have already committed to receiving emails. For this reason, they will appreciate getting updates about any updates from the cryptocurrency project.
As mentioned previously, given the constant changes in the cryptocurrency industry, it can be hard to run analytics. Email marketing tools give companies the ability to track what happens once they have sent out an email campaign or other content. They can track delivery, bounce, unsubscribe, click-through, and open rates. It gives businesses a firmer grasp of how their email marketing campaign works. It also gives insight into whether they need to go back and tweak the things that do not work. Even though it may be difficult to measure overall cryptocurrency marketing efforts, you can track and measure your email marketing efforts.
12) Influencer Marketing
Given the increased interest in the digital currency world, influencer marketing has become a large part of companies’ and marketers’ marketing budgets. Influencer marketing has become significant in most industries because it gives people more outreach through this group of millions of loyal followers. Of course, choosing the right influencer is important.
Nevertheless, ICO marketing experts have been using influencer marketing strategies for quite some time. This has provided a mutually beneficial relationship for both the company and the influencer. In order to successfully do influencer marketing, you need to reach out to your target influencer. It’s also important to give them a brief of your technology and follow up by discussing the critical parts of your review or analysis.
Since PR and influencer marketing is all about creating a product and gaining visibility, you need to remember that finding the appropriate media outlet or influencer is crucial to achieving coverage for their project. Narrowing down the right people in the industry gives you the ability to stay on top of information and better reach your target audience.
Once you have chosen the influencer, you need to qualify them to see how they match your ideal market and affect your audience. While having a broad reach is essential, you also need to consider quality over quantity. You should spend time reviewing your target influencer’s content to ensure it is relevant to the brand, your industry, and your product. If not, you definitely will not gain the media coverage you want for your ICO and cryptocurrency. Simultaneously, the cryptocurrency industry is a bit different from others when it comes to providing products. You need to be prepared to compensate your influencers in one way or another.
13) Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing follows the same concepts and ideas as influencer marketing. The only difference is that affiliate marketing can be done by anyone who is interested in a brand rather than just a significant social media influencer. Instead, it works by spreading product marketing and creation responsibilities across different parties like the seller and product creators, the affiliate or advertiser, and the consumer.
Affiliate marketing is the process where affiliates earn a commission fee for marketing another person or companies’ products or services. The process is simple enough. Consumers and affiliates search for a product they enjoy, promote the product, and earn a piece of profit from every sale they make. It is yet another way for companies to leverage third parties to run marketing for them in a more cost-effective manner.
You can pay your affiliates in a variety of ways, including pay per sale, pay per lead, and pay per click:
- Pay-per-sale is the current standard affiliate marketing structure. This is where a company pays its affiliate a percentage of its sale price after customers make purchases due to the affiliate’s marketing strategies.
- Pay-per-lead programs compensate affiliates based on the conversion of leads. In this case, consumers must be persuaded to visit a company’s website and complete an action. This can take the form of filling out the details of a contact form, signing up for a trial of the product, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading software of files.
- Pay-per-click focuses on incentivizing the affiliate to redirect consumers from their unique marketing platform to the company’s website.
The affiliate will then be paid based on the increase in web traffic for the company’s website.
14) SEO
It’s impossible to talk about a company’s digital marketing efforts without talking about SEO. When it comes to cryptocurrency marketing, the Internet, social media, and mobile technologies have changed the game and given crypto companies a new set of capabilities. The digital world has made it so that public relations and SEO go hand-in-hand. This is especially the case when creating an effective PR strategy to get the word out there about a company and its products and services. Additionally, without optimizing SEO, companies will never rank high enough on search engines to get noticed.
There is a range of factors that have an impact on a company’s SEO rankings. These include business reviews and star rankings, social media mentions and shares, and keywords in business listings. You need to prioritize quality over quantity when using these elements.
Lastly, you can get your website ranked higher by using the appropriate keywords to boost your online presence and awareness.
To be successful with SEO, you need to identify the keywords related to your project and keep them constantly updated. Additionally, it’s essential to keep your website device-friendly, and your blog posts and content frequent. You need a firm grasp of what your brand is about and you should communicate it efficiently through keywords. You should also keep track of your domain and page authority, track improvements over time, and build links through content.
15) Branding
Given the sudden popularity of crypto projects, it’s important to brand your project in a memorable way if you want it to stand out. One good way to do this is by ensuring that your brand name highlights what makes your project unique. Another way to do this is by using simple names that are easy to remember. Bonus points if you can choose a name that paints a vivid picture in your target audience’s mind. At this moment in time, the more memorable you can make your project, the higher your chances of staying top of mind with potential investors.
Crypto.com recently made a dramatic branding move by buying the naming rights to the Los Angeles Staples Centre. By associating its brand with a popular sport, Crypto.com has boosted brand awareness both within and outside the crypto space. Similarly, Square recently rebranded, changing its name to “Block” in a move designed to increase the project’s visibility in the market.
16) Telegram
Setting up a Telegram profile can help you reach a wider audience with your crypto project. Telegram has recently gained popularity in the crypto space – and with good reason. But we’re not recommending that you go the Telegram route just because everyone else is doing it. Rather, we’re recommending Telegram because it offers tangible benefits for a crypto brand.
For starters, unlike other social media networks, Telegram allows crypto advertisements. Additionally, the platform’s end-to-end encryption offers traders a higher level of privacy. The app also generates popularity for your crypto project by populating your groups with bots. These bots create the illusion of a popular project, thus attracting real people to your groups.
By using Telegram wisely, you can win more people to your brand and build an engaged community online.
Aside from the above, the people behind ICOs and cryptocurrency projects should make every effort to keep up to date and maintain an active presence in the community. Do everything you can to boost your project – attend conferences, take phone calls, answer questions, and make connections. There is never one magical solution that will drive your project to success; it’s the will to persevere that counts.
Do you need help building a PR strategy for your cryptocurrency brand or your ICO?
The team of PR experts at Pressfarm has experience working with brands in your industry to help them stand out from the crowd. The team of PR specialists, expert writers, and skilled designers are experienced at writing winning press releases, designing creative media kits, and writing feature stories that will make a memorable impression. Pressfarm has got all your content creation needs to be covered – from content creation to content distribution. Moreover, you can use our media database of 1 million+ journalists to connect with journalists in the cryptocurrency industry. Reach out today and let us help you generate the publicity your brand deserves.
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