It is possible to raise a large amount of money through ICOs but is it the best way to raise funding for your product? A tremendous amount of money has already been raised from ICOs but if you intend to initiate an ICO be cautious. This article will help you understand how to raise funding through ICOs, problems, challenges and solutions to be successful in this endeavor.

The problem with ICOs

Investors are overwhelmed with a huge influx of startups and experts cannot manage to assess all of them. In addition to this, there is a problem with getting private investors because they are more cautious about investing in such new unknown projects. Private investors are less likely to invest in demo versions of products they are looking to get into more advanced models.

Besides the fact that it is becoming increasingly harder to raise funds through ICOs, another huge factor to consider is that there is a lot of uncertainty in investing in ICOs. Countries are banning investments in tokens and it is expected to increase in the future. Currently, ideas with mining are in high demand. The wildest ideas for miners are in demand and getting investors to shovel out their money. It seems now is the time to focus on creating technology for miners.

What are the consequences?

As investors are less likely to invest in new projects at the moment, you can pump all the money into your business that you want but still end up with no money and no results.

According to Emerson Taymore, founding partner at Philosophie, while ICOs provide liquidity to team members and investors, teams and investors should have lock-up periods that are legally binding to avoid pump and dump schemes. Most ICO companies are in the very early stages of development and are usually far from a point where an investor will see a return on their investment leading them to think twice about their investment.

The ‘wild west’ atmosphere of ICOs creates special challenges which you cannot avoid no matter how much money you invest in the marketing of your product. As the market is larger unregulated, this leaves tokens susceptible to attack and theft by hackers and remedy in the event of fraud is often limited. Unfortunately, as there are no clear guidelines on the regulation of ICOs just yet there is a lot of mystery and risk involved in investing which can lead investors to turn away from new products.

Every problem has a solution

With all these concerns investors are having it may seem like an impossible feat to raise funds with an ICO but in actuality, there is always a solution.

You can create a trackable marketing campaign that will ensure a controlled marketing environment. This type of marketing campaign will allow you to control the content of your product and ensure your marketing is reaching the right customer. You can use this method to create cost-efficient targeting of your targeted investors. By limiting the target base, you may lose some attention but this will save you time and money adding more value for your product by promoting it to all the right people. Along with this, once you know and narrow down your target audience, you open the doors for time-proven advertising channels.

To run cheaper ads, you need to know your target audience and advertise on the channels where they sit, platforms they use, media they read, websites they visit and test things out. It may sound weird, but marketing is all about experiments and testing your hypotheses, with the purpose of finding the most cost-efficient. This is especially true for new products.

Some proven advertising channels that lead to success are email marketing, social media marketing and affiliate marketing. You can use email marketing to your targeted customers and it is a good way to reach new customers as well as improve and build stronger relationships with already existing customers your company may have.

Social media networking such as Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and Twitter will help gain exposure and effectively build your network and community allowing users to interact with you and others passionate about your product. You can also get opinions and help improve your services as well as save you time in finding ways for feedback on your product. These channels are also good for retargeting and branded keywords.

Affiliate marketing allows affiliate website owners to place advertisements on their own websites to market your services. This will bring you mass coverage at little to no cost. Also, this will allow for more exposure as your product is viewed more with no work from you.

Telegram also serves as a great channel for increasing sales conversion rates. If you can set up a bot that automatically sends notifications in case a user left the page with an incomplete profile or if a purchase did not succeed, you can increase your conversion rate by at least 10–20%. Such a bot can also come in handy if you do not want your community to miss something important, since messages are sent directly to each of them, unlike in crowded messy groups where it is easy to miss out on some important updates.

So how do you make your marketing more cost efficient?

Make sure to stick to take these steps:

Create a controlled environment with a marketing strategy that allows you to manage your costs at every stage of your sales funnel (customer journey maps)
Decrease your customer acquisition cost by narrowing promotion to your target audience
Create content around your target audiences’ pain points to make it resonate with it
Your advertising does not apply the approach of “the bigger the budget, the better the results,” but has a clear understanding of who and why we are showing that content
Your community is being taken care of not only the standard way with groups, but also makes use of new technology, such as bots and you are good to go.
Conclusion

Running an ICO can raise funds for your product you must consider all the factors to ensure your success. Once you have a good product idea, start building your community. Find cost-effective ways and partners to get your product in the limelight. But most importantly always be aware of the risk involved. An ICO gone bad can hinder your changes to raise venture funds in the future. So when you go into the ICO world make sure you reach the right target audience, have a full-proof white paper and quality product.

Hopefully this article gave you a more deep understanding of how to raise funds for your product with an ICO. If you would like to know more about how to do cost-efficient ICO marketing, download our guidebook.

This blog post originally was posted on our Medium account, visit the blog post on Medium here.