How to make the best out of your ICO’s PR strategy

Launching an ICO can be very exciting for new startups. It gives you a hope that your newest project can get all the funds and investments easily. Smooth sailing, right? One would think so since last year, startups raised over $5.6 billion in funding through ICOs. That is huge. However, only 48% of those ICOs was actually successful. Not so smooth now, is it?

In 2018, when Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are making wonders in every field. With its popularity in every field, your project idea should be unique in order to attract a large audience. At this present stage, a good PR strategy is the only solution available that can help you make a name for yourself. That doesn’t mean it is easy to promote an ICO through PR. There are certain challenges faced in PR promotions. Let’s take a look at those.

The challenges in PR campaign

A successful ICO campaign has several challenges that need to be overcome for it to get the attention they desire. Let’s take a look at the pain points each and every startup face in PR campaign.

Press campaign: While startups think about doing a press campaign for their ICO, they don’t always know what that means. Not every journalist would be willing to write about your ICO unless it is exciting and interesting. Your idea should be appealing to them. But who can actually write about something that does not really exist yet? Ideas are aplenty and they can lead to great things but they don’t constitute a news story.

Bans in Advertising and Regulatory Restriction: Social media is the easiest and the fastest medium that can help reach your potential audience. With several fraudulent ICOs in the market, social media gurus like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have banned the advertisement of ICOs in their media. In addition to this, the SEC has made stringent rules regarding ICO promotions. This means you need to be very careful about how you define and promote an ICO.

Lack of Consumer Trust: Even with its widespread recognition Blockchain and cryptocurrencies enjoys, a layperson would have doubts about trusting this system. That means you need to work harder to earn the support and trust from your audience by validating your project with a strong PR campaign.

PR strategies to overcome challenges

While there are challenges that you have to overcome, an excellent PR campaign can help you resolve them. Let’s take a look at some strategies that can help

Strong PR team: PR is all about finding the right market for your Blockchain startup to communicate with. To that end, a smart and expert PR team who is knowledgeable about the latest trends in the crypto and Blockchain space would be a major coup. They can spread the word about your ICO project to in a way that would reach your target audience anywhere in the world. While this may be expensive, it is an investment that will bring you to manifold returns.

Understand your Audience: Having a crypto-startup means proving yourselves in the complex field of cryptocurrency. There should be proper understanding regarding who you are speaking to in order to appeal to them right away. This is doubly important when it comes to pitching your idea.

Write about your ICO project: People think PR is just about getting press attention. Well, that’s a part of it. But not all of it. First of all, you should create literature about you and that should showcase ‘what you are about’. This will get you more investors when they are published through different media like blog, replies to emails and social media sharing. The outcome of such constant content sharing will be investors who hear about you through these either directly or indirectly.

List your ICO on dedicated platforms: The internet offers a wide range of possibilities when it comes to marketing. There are several free sites, publishing and containing ICO listings. ICO Buffer, Icoalert.com, tokenmarket.net etc are the top websites that allow ICO listing. These websites will help your ICO to gain more publicity.

Leveraging these PR strategies will help you become more successful in increasing the presence of your ICO. They can help you to establish trust and authority with your audience and hopefully bring you the backers you need to kickstart your project.