The amount of ICOs has been booming for the past year. Billions of dollars have been raised by ICOs this year alone. While the market didn’t exist some years ago, nowadays it’s a very competitive business. Nearly half of ICOs are failing, the reason why ICOs are failing, can be various. But an important contributor in the success of an ICO, is having a good marketing strategy in place. All of this however, for a founder or a marketing director can be really stressful.

It’s a common misunderstanding that conducting an ICO is just another way to raise funds. An easy way, and a fast way. But that’s not entirely true. In fact, we can break it down to several reasons why it is important to have an ICO marketing strategy in place. Doing marketing for ICO projects will take care of the core issues concerning reaching your hard cap with as many investors as possible, such as the community management creates a hassle, the often not transparent nature of agencies, uncertainty towards knowing whether you will reach your goal or not, the lack of control, sleep deprivation, stress and anxiety.

As a marketing agency for ICOs, we have first hand experience with the importance of marketing for an ICO. We have experienced the sleepless nights, the doubt and some strategies not really translating into positive results. But we are confident that we have found the solution to tackle most of these issues. We will give you some fruitful advice to make sure that you feel more comfortable and relaxed during your token sale, so sit back and relax.

Marketing is everything, but there’s a catch…

The most important thing what you often worry about is if there is any way to lower your level of stress during an ICO, so that you can be more confident in reaching your hard cap.

Reaching your hard cap, is probably one of the most stressful factors during an ICO. It is also something that no one can control. No one knows whether you will reach it or not, no one can predict it. Thus, it can evoke a lot of stress, doubt and a hell of a lot of pressure on your marketers.

You can try not to worry about it, try and relax and thus reduce your stress. You can hire an agency to do the work for you. They will offer you the necessary resources they have, to put everything into place. A standard agency can take care of the most stressful areas for you in your campaign so that you hardly have to do anything. They can create content and distribute it, organize an advertisement campaign to get more exposure and direct traffic to your website and they can help you with building your brand. They can take care of the legal aspects and the tech savvy concerns. They can put everything in place and order and they will try to create awareness, increase trust and support your community as much as they can. But in the end there is still no real guarantee of whether they will succeed in their strategy or not. More importantly, unfortunately not every agency out there is transparent. There is a clear distinction between those agencies who offer full disclosure and transparency in their strategy, and those who don’t. The non-transparent agencies usually don’t have their strategy in place, they use the same approach for every ICO and it’s never tailor-made to the needs of their clients and hardly ever curated. Instead of focusing on alternative ways to solve issues, such as reaching out to new technologies, they hire more people to solve their issues.

Marketing really is everything, but there’s a catch within this industry… It’s all about community in the end. They need to be able to know you, trust you and support you and not the other way around. Because if your community doesn’t know, trust or support you, they won’t engage or maintain their interest in your project and it will result into what you have feared: you won’t reach your hard cap. In order to make sure that your ICO is among those successful ones, you need to anticipate on that. It’s not just about creating content and distributing it, paid advertisements and getting more traffic. It’s about creating a controlled environment, which offers you more engagements. Moreover, an agency should offer you a full transparent approach into what they are going to do, you will get insight into a strategy with supportive arguments as to why they have put such a strategy in place. You will have a good understanding of what is being spent and where the money goes and you can follow the strategy yourself. By creating a customer journey map, you can create such an environment.

Focus on the journey your customer embarks on

A customer journey map? What is that? Well, first of all a customer journey map is something very valuable, it’s incredibly easy to make and understand and very useful for your organization. As an organization you should always put the customer first, thus you collect data on your users. But this data doesn’t necessarily convey the right information you need and thus it often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of the customers. What do they perceive as pain points and how can you help them with solving these? How can the customer benefit from embarking on a journey with you.

A customer journey map tells the story of the customer’s experience: from the initial contact with your ICO, through the whole process of engagement, investing and turning into a long-term relationship. It provides an overview of the entire experience a customer goes through, it talks about his feelings, motivations and questions and touches every concern they might have. On the other hand it also shows you more about in what stage your customers might be, and how you have to convert them into real token buyers.

There’s only goal in this, creating a customer journey map enables you to know your customer. It will enable you to guide them through the sales funnel and will allow you to get more engagements from your community. You will thus create a controlled environment. With a customer journey map you can develop a better strategy on how to and where to distribute your content, where you lead them to: from landing pages, to call-to-actions, you will have a better understanding of how to generate more leads because of the map. Ultimately these engagements will translate into more investments and thus you will be able to reduce the amount of stress you are undergoing because of the fear of not being able to reach your hard cap.

Final thoughts

While reading this article, you have now realized that there is a solution to all the amount of stress you have been experiencing this whole time. You have imagined it to be impossible to sit back and relax. By creating a customer journey map you can make sure that your community knows of you, trusts you and supports you, because it’s a two way street, where you also know your community, trust your community and support your community.

A customer journey map will show you all the psychological phases your customer is experiencing before investing or even engaging in a long-term relationship with your organization. A customer journey map is thus a very important tool and part of the marketing strategy, because ultimately it will help you in getting better results and will significantly reduce the amount of doubt you might have about reaching your hard cap.

Hopefully that this article helped you with understanding why it is of huge importance to do marketing for your ICO. Moreover, you can easily make use of our experience in assessing your customer journey maps. If you would like us to create a customer journey map for you, reach out to us! Moreover, if you would like to get some more insight into how to conduct a successful ICO marketing campaign, read our guide here.

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