Case by Digmus: what marketing tool to use for ICO?

One of the most popular quotes in marketing and advertising online communities sounds like this: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half”. In this article we will tell you which half of the money spent on advertising of our pre-ICO was wasted and what lessons we learned.

Due to the current market situation, only a popular blogger or a crypto-guru can launch a pre-ICO without an initial budget for marketing. Frankly speaking, none of our team members believes that spamming in the Telegram chat and on the forum will attract investors.

We’ve started our campaign with the search of seed investors. They gave us the initial capital that is now turning into advertising. In the beginning of our journey we were naïve enough to think that people would believe in our project the way we and our first investors believe in it. However, the fund-raising dynamics during the pre-ICO unlocked the new reality to us. But first things first.

Our approach towards ICO promotion (pre-ICO in our case) can be conventionally divided into three directions: advertisement in specialized resources, targeted advertising, native advertising in blogs and chats.

Advertising and PR in specialized resources

We published our article on a big Russian portal for USD 121 and spent around 3 bitcoins on advertising in foreign resources –listings and websites. But as content marketing is a rather long-playing tool, it’s hard to make any conclusions.
The user can find out about the project in an article published in a specialized resource and then “retreat into himself”: study the discussion thread in bitcointalk, write in the Telegram chat, examine the White Paper…and then come back. It means that specialized resources is the beginning of the marketing funnel in our case. This is the first touchpoint and, considering that these resources generated most of referrals to the website — well, then it’s one of the most relevant resources.

Targeted advertising

We used contextual advertising in Facebook and Vkontakte, Google Display Network (GDN) advertising, i.e. common marketing means of advertising that cost around USD 8690 for us.

At this stage we faced a lot of unexpected difficulties — from ban of the Facebook advertising account (which is a subject for another article) to ridiculously low conversion from GDN. Experience has shown that there is no point in carpet bombing. In the end we’ve realized that we need the most precise fine-tuning of target audience and retargeting as the main tool for these channels.

Native advertising

We used the following social networks and messengers for native advertising:

1. Telegram (5 channels, total USD 2926);
2. Vkontake (3 communities, total USD 30);
3. Youtube (pre-roll on one channel with 650000 of subscribers, USD 868).

It is worth mentioning that prices for advertising in the crypto world are incomparably higher than the cost of promotion in the majority of “ordinary” industries. However, the available tools are rather scarce and are often not supported by convincing statistics.

As a result, this is the conversion to followers:

1. GDN — 91 (including direct visits);
2. FB — 85 (including organics);
3. FB lead form — 366;
4. Youtube — 18;
5. Telegram channels — 50.

A lot of our e-mail/chat followers came from other sources that are not connected with main advertising channels. Nevertheless, the cost of one follower turned out to be tremendous. Considering the amount of funds spent and received during the pre-ICO, this sum is just unreasonable.

You must be certainly interested in not only which tools attracted followers, but also where the people who invested in the pre-ICO came from.

According to our statistics, half of the investors were subscribed to our Digmus mail list, the rest came from other sources. Surprisingly, Facebook lead form, according to our data, didn’t attract investors at all.

What conclusions did we make?

1. Traditional online advertising tools almost don’t work for ICO.
2. You need to spend more time on personal communication with investors and tell them about the project.
3. If the budget is ample — place the relevant content in major specialized resources.
4. Pay more attention to Telegram chats.
5. Don’t use Facebook lead form.
6. Use GDN as a retargeting tool.

Now we will tell you in more detail why we think that Facebook advertising is a failed means of ICO promotion.

Does Facebook advertising work well for an ICO?

Our Facebook advertising campaign started off with an unpleasant surprise. The first day it was launched, Facebook blocked our ad account as the content didn’t comply with their internal policies.

This is the message we saw several times:
Your advertisement hasn’t been approved because it contradicts our Advertising Policies. We reserve the right to decline any advertisement that contradicts these objectives.

We had several accounts and all of them were blocked. We tried creating them in different countries, through a VPN, paraphrased the announcements… Nothing worked. The only thing we managed to do was to find subcontractors (not in Russia) who had already been doing it and they placed the announcement via the existing ad account.

Surprisingly, the campaign launched from another account went smoothly and wasn’t blocked. However, there was a case when new forms were moderated for a while — around 24 hours. We spent more than USD 3 480 on Facebook advertising and the lead form drove 366 followers to us.

Facebook advertising campaign, first of all, suggested “lead ads”. Lead ad is a format of an ad: by clicking on it the user is referred to a contact form with pre-filled fields. Users needed to enter the email in order to be included on the mailing list. The Facebook lead with the lead form turned out to be cheaper than a clickable lead.

However, the Open Rate looked rather gloomy to say nothing of the CTR. Why? We have grounds to suspect that the relevance of the audience attracted on Facebook leaves much to be desired.

Finally, on October 12 when the pre-ICO was held we stopped the advertising campaign. As statistics has shown, it was the right decision as otherwise we would have had no advertising budget at all. No investors were found among emails received through the Facebook lead form.

Facebook is rather costly while its efficiency is extremely low. The Digmus team recommends being cautious when using Facebook advertising during an ICO. We are planning to use retargeting in the future as one of such cautious options, thus proving the relevance of our communication.

If you enjoyed the article and would like to support us, we invite you to join of Digmus decentralized anti-counterfeit platform telegram https://t.me/Digmus