You've Written Your ICO Whitepaper...Now How Do You Market It?

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So you've written your ICO whitepaper...

You've followed all of the examples on this site, and you've created the outline, filled out the document, and added the appropriate diagrams. Additionally, you have your website in place and all of the technical details are sorted?

Now it's time to start marketing your ICO.  Marketing may be the most important part of the ICO process, and it can be difficult.  So how do you do it?

Family and Friends Marketing for your ICO

The first place you'll want to start, assuming you've already created your website, is to start talking to family and friends about it.

No matter what the ICO is in, or what the complexity of the product may be, you are most likely to find that your first investors are friends and family.

Make a list of all of your friends and family with money, and contact them personally. They're much more likely to get involved in your ICO if you talk to them individually about it.  

One way to maximize the participation of your friends and family in the ICO is to create a private presale. The private presale is designed to allow some of your friends and family to get into your coin offering before everyone else.

That makes it feel exclusive, and makes it feel more personal than a general ICO. You may even want to offer a favorable exchange rate for the presale.

Social Media Marketing for your ICO

You will obviously want to have social media accounts for your coin offering.  But you need much more than that.  You need to have a comprehensive social media strategy for your ICO.  

While all of the components of a social media strategy are beyond the scope of this article, and you can easily find them elsewhere on the Internet, we will discuss specific tips and tricks for using social media to promote your ICO.

Make sure all of your team members are constantly promoting your ICO.  From several weeks before, you will want to start teasing your new project.  Give people a link to a launch website, which doesn't say the details of the product but gives people an opportunity to gain access by registering their emails.

As you get closer to the date of your ICO, start revealing more and more about the ICO, and tease the private presale.  This will make your ICO feel exclusive and hopefully get people to want to learn more.

Once you have the presale going, you will want to do a countdown via social media until the ICO.  Make sure that your website also has a countdown, and of course allow people to preregister so that they can access the ICO as soon as it goes live.

Create an Explainer Video

ICOs can be complicated.  And not everyone has the time to read through a whitepaper.  So how do you get the point across, and explain the value proportion of your coin offering? You have to get creative. 

One of the best ways to do that is an explainer video. Now, there's a lot of ways to get an explainer done, but you want it to look good and be clear.

That may sound expensive, but it can be very reasonable.

Depending on your budget, here are some of the ways to get the best explainer for the lowest cost:

Under $100 If you have $100 or less, your best bet is to get a simple whiteboard explainer from Fiverr.  We suggest that you create a simple whiteboard video with voiceover, of 30-60 seconds.  You can get a good one for only $10 here.  Or, for a bit more, you can get a fully custom video here.
$100 to $500 You can get a very good video for around $200 from Fiverr.  The video is fully custom and can be up to 2 minutes.  You can get it here.
More than $500 You can get an excellent, fully custom explainer video with music, totally custom graphics, professional voice actors, and more here.

List Your ICO With Directories

There are several ICO directories and review sites, and you should try to list your ICO with all of them.  Here are the most important:

There are also several ICO review sites, which you should contact, and request that they review your ICO.

Wanna read more on this? Check these out: ICO Whitepaper Templates (more); How to Write an ICO Whitepaper (more).