You might have heard that marketing is the most important part of an ICO… Is that true? Well, yes and no… And.. Yes!
It kind of depends on what your definition of marketing is. Mine is very holistic, so I can safely say that marketing is the most important piece of the puzzle if you want a successful ICO.
If you think of marketing as just advertising a product, then it’s definitely not the most important part.
Back in 2017, when people invested millions into scams just because they were looking for the next 10,000% gains coin, advertising probably was the biggest factor for a successful token sale. Scammers raised millions with landing pages without pictures of the team members, without contact information, just by having a decent looking white paper and promoting it.
Nowadays ICO investors are much smarter and more patient. They’re going to watch ICO reviews, check out the LinkedIn profiles of your team and maybe even find out if your company is actually registered.
If you think of marketing as just advertising a product, then it’s definitely not the most important part.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The best marketing won’t help you if you’re not actually trying to build something great! But let’s break it down:
You need a great idea to have any kind of chance at raising money for your project. Even when you only have an idea, you can start using some marketing techniques to find out if anybody is actually interested in your future product. One example is building a simple landing page with a description and maybe even mockups of the product you want to build, driving some traffic to it and having people subscribe to an email list if they’re interested. This way you’ll quickly find out if your idea is worth pursuing further.
If you have the idea and never think about marketing until you’ve actually spent thousands of dollars building a product and maybe even a team, you might suddenly realize, that nobody wants your product. Building a product in your garage without ever talking to other people and then launching it by spending even more money on marketing, almost never works and just isn’t the right approach.
You’re going to need a team, no matter what you think. Not only is it a huge undertaking to build a startup, you’re not going to find ICO investors, if you’re telling your audience that you’re doing everything on your own.
The problem most non-technical founders have, is finding an appropriate CTO who not only shares their vision for the company, but is also willing and able to work for equity.
With some traction in the community, which you will get by doing marketing, it’ll be much easier to find people who believe in your idea and are ready to work for team tokens.
At Rockt, we’re still very early with our marketing because we are finalizing our Lite Paper and strategy, but we already have dozens of community members asking us if they can join the team in different roles from designers to community managers.
What is a company without a product? Well, back in 2017 it was probably a blockchain startup worth tens of millions.. 😉
But seriously, the product is obviously the most important part of a company, but who’s going to know about your awesome product if you’re bad at marketing it? Especially for more complex products that need explaining like blockchain startups are usually trying to build. It’s true that you’ll grow by word-of-mouth if you have a great product and a small user base, but if you can’t communicate what you do when you’re launching with zero users, you won’t even get the first ten.
The way I see marketing, it overlaps with product development. Like I wrote earlier, the right way to launch a company is to first achieve product-market fit, which means that you build a product that your potential users actually want.
Investor acquisition… Not something many marketers have been involved with before stepping into the ICO world. But let’s actually take a step back and talk about seed investors.
OK, the marketing department doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with pitching to seed investors, unless they have personal connections or if the CMO is a co-founder. However, just like with acquiring team members, it’ll be much easier to convince an investor of your startup idea if you can show him that you already have a growing community of people who are legitimately intrigued by your future product. Communication is obviously also a part of marketing, which of course presents itself in the pitch deck, the presentation, the branding and more.
The biggest factor here however, is that an ICO by definition needs a crowd. Of course you could find one single person who can invest $30 million into your product, but ICOs are usually also trying to achieve decentralization, which means they need thousands of investors and future users. You can’t get thousands of people to give you money and time without a holistic marketing strategy that considers all different steps in your funnel.
There you have it, marketing is important for an ICO, but you probably already knew that. Marketing done the right way involves much more than running Facebook ads or scheduling daily Tweets. It should start the second you’ve written down your business idea and touch almost every department of your company to make sure you’re building a product that has an audience, to communicate your idea, to find new team members and investors and much more!
Thank you for reading this far and if you enjoyed this post, why don’t you show some appreciation by sharing and upvoting this! 😁
Shameless plug at the end: If you’re interested, you can check out Rockt and our intro article on Medium by clickiing…. heeere!!
See ya and thanks,
Fab 🤘🏽
