Table of Contents

An Introduction to Crowd Marketing........................................................................................................................ 3

What is Crowd Marketing? .............................................................................................................................................. 3
Crowd Marketing vs. Crowdfunding....................................................................................................................4

Creating Your Baseline Marketing Assets...........................................................................................................6

Asset 1: The Website.................................................................................................................................................................6
Asset 2: Social Media.............................................................................................................................................................21

Getting Press Coverage .......................................................................................................................................................24

Amplifying Your Message...................................................................................................................................................28

Summary..................................................................................................................................................................................................31

About Crowd Builder.................................................................................................................................................................32

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An Introduction to Crowd Marketing
The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has quickly emerged as a major force in early-stage
funding for founding teams around the world. The growth has been explosive: in 2017,
more than $1 billion was raised, up from around $200 million the year before.

Entrepreneurs everywhere have taken notice. Launch platforms are proliferating, and
competition for capital is heating up. For teams launching an ICO, the fundraising
techniques that worked a year ago like a good white paper and an announcement
on bitcointalk.org are now no longer adequate. In 2018 and beyond, the success of
an ICO will be due to the strength of its marketing.

This e-book will address exactly that the marketing and crowd building strategies
that you need to do from Day One. Well provide some background into crowd
building and crowdfunding strategies, and offer our best practices. The idea is to help
you build a community long before you spend money on advertising.

And for more crowd building tips and techniques, sign up for our Crowd Builder
newsletter here.

What is Crowd Marketing?

Crowd marketing is the process of building a large, authentic, and engaged

community.

This sounds suspiciously similar to a number of vague marketing terms, so lets take a
moment to clarify. Heres what crowd marketing is NOT:

Its not influencer marketing. This is when you leverage the audience of an influencer
like a celebrity or industry expert usually for a fee. The idea is that an influencer
endorsement has more pulling power than endorsing your project on your own.

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Its not social media marketing. Of course, every business needs a social media
strategy. It helps you build your brand and awareness of your products or your
services. But this is an ongoing strategy distinct from crowd marketing.

Its not viral marketing, that elusive holy grail of marketing, when you put something
out there, and whether by pure luck or design (usually luck) users share it en masse.

With the rise of crowdfunding, the concept of crowd marketing as a standalone

marketing category is gaining momentum (an ICO is really just another form of
crowdfunding). For crowdfunding to be successful, crowd marketing has to happen first.

Crowd marketing is crucial because there are a number of unique challenges to

crowdfunding in an extremely competitive market. For example, most crowdfunded
projects begin without any fanbase, customers, or followers to leverage. The flywheel
is starting from a stationary position. If that werent enough of a problem, there is also
a limited amount of time to grow a crowd before it needs to be harvested.

Crowd Marketing vs. Crowdfunding

When Kickstarter, the first big crowdfunding platform, burst onto the scene in early
2009, it shone a bright spotlight on the wonderful world of product makers a sector
that traditionally found fundraising difficult because moving from invention to scale
is expensive and time-consuming.

Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo went a long way towards
levelling the playing field for product makers. With a decent idea and a polished
video, makers could now validate their idea before any real out-of-pocket
investment. Even better, they could raise startup capital directly from early
customers by pre-selling their yet-to-be-made products.

After some well-publicized crowdfunding successes like the Pebble and the Coolest
Cooler, each raising over $10 million, the bar continued to rise, which meant the recipe

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required to create a successful campaign soon got old. As more and more products
flooded Kickstarter and similar platforms, a good idea and an awesome video
became the minimum requirement.

Crowd marketing became essential when it was proved that a ready-made

community dramatically increased the chances of a successful crowdfunding
campaign.

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Creating Your Baseline Marketing Assets
So before you begin crowdfunding, you need to begin crowd marketing. And before
you begin crowd marketing, you need a few baseline assets. Your crowd marketing
campaign will go much more smoothly and distinguish itself from the competition
if you consider these assets beforehand.

Asset 1: The Website

It seems too obvious to even mention than any marketing effort needs a website. But
successful crowd marketing campaigns for ICOs take a particular approach to a
website. Below, we provide two examples of well-executed ICO websites.

Sample Website: HelloBloom.io

For our first example, we chose a project called Hellobloom. (The Hellobloom token
sale is a week away from opening day at time of writing.) We selected this project
because it has a fantastic team with a lot of marketing expertise. The site is also
beautifully designed by Griflan, a Philadelphia design firm.

We broke down their website by taking screenshots of major sections. Lets dig in and
see what they did.

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Section 1: Above the Fold

As you can see, the homepage above the fold is simple and clean. They uses a clear
title and subtitle, leaving the reader with an immediate high level understanding of
the value proposition. At the top of the page, a simple navigation bar promotes their
Slack channel and a whitepaper. We also love the way the nav bar sticks to the top as
you scroll down.

Whats also interesting is that on the homepage, they dont overdo the number of
social media icons. On the far right, there are only three: Facebook, Twitter and
Telegram. This itself is notable because these are three distinct channels serving
different audiences.

In terms of messaging, Hellobloom supports Slack and Telegram, which is unusual

and possibly a bit cumbersome to manage. Other teams tell us they are leaning
toward Telegram for their ICOs because scammers are infiltrating their Slack
channels and attempting to coax users into sending cryptocurrencies to fraudulent
addresses.

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Section 2: The Pull-Me-Down Tab

A nice touch that we havent seen before is the little pull-me-down tab in the top
center of the homepage. It reveals the screen shown above, which provides a
shortcut to the various sections of the page. This is a good idea because the page,
while comprehensive, is quite long.

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Section 3: What Is Bloom?

The third section provides a little more detail about the product while keeping the
design clean and the copy concise.

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Section 4: The Status Quo

The next section breaks down the issues facing the current credit infrastructure. Here
they are succinctly defining the problem that they are about to solve.

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Section 5: The Solution

Here they concisely introduce their the three components of their solution: BloomID,
BloomIQ and BloomScore. They then address each of the three sections in separate
screens, which you can see below.

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Section 6: BloomID, BloomIQ, BloomScore

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This clean and well-designed website is meant to communicate at the highest level,
so users can quickly get the idea of the product. Thus it is important to note that the
whitepaper explains the product with more depth and detail.

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Section 7: The Bloom Token

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This section does an excellent job of describing the token ecosystem and how tokens
can be earned and burned. This is a crucial section, because potential token
investors want to get a feel for the likelihood of a real ecosystem developing around
the concept. A robust ecosystem means demand for the tokens, which means prices
go up.

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Section 8: The Bloom Card

This section is unique to the Bloom project. In our opinion, its genius, because they
arent waiting for other companies to support the protocol. Instead they are creating
a specific, tangible project that serves a number of functions: it demonstrates the
proof-of-concept, and at the same time it starts adding the consumer data required
to build credit histories and ultimately the credit scoring mechanisms.

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Section 9: Roadmap and Timeline

Since these ICO projects are usually quite technical, its very important to show users
what youre building and when. They want to know how long it may take for the
ecosystem to develop and thus create demand for the coins. This section, as its title
says, lays out the product roadmap and timeline. There are five stages; the other two
are revealed when you slide or swipe left.

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Section 10: The Team

Were only showing the first row of the team here to point out that again the design is
clean and the photography is professional. Obviously, you can click through for more
detail about each person. It is interesting to note that more and more ICO teams are
not separating operators from advisors, although they do provide job titles.

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Section 11: Wrapping It Up

The final section at the bottom of the page wraps it up with clever graphics and
provides a call to action in this case, to join their mailing list.

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Sample Website: Science ICO

The Science ICO, run by TokenHub, is another great website example. At time of
writing, they have two days before their ICO. As you can see in the screenshot above,
they are not only capturing emails but have also added a demand signal (How
much would you look to invest?). They also have a register now button. For legal
reasons, TokenHub could only take 99 U.S.-based investors; we assume they use
demand-signaling and registration to give them better visibility going into the ICO.

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Asset 2: Social Media

Social media is perhaps better explained as a suite of assets, because youre going to
utilize a number of different platforms. Here are the ones that in our experience have
worked best for ICO crowd marketing.

Messaging. A big part of any ICO is keeping the lines of communication open, so your
community can ask questions and get answers. Using a messenger is an important
channel for this process. The choices are basically Telegram, Slack or WeChat.
Telegram is less US-centric than Slack, and WeChat is more China/Africa-centric.
Slack is also the most developer-centric.

Twitter. It takes a bit of work to get your Twitter page off the ground. You want to add
a logo, maybe some eye-catching images, and, so its not totally empty, about
twenty posts. You could use a bot service to get a bunch of fake followers, but
manually following tons of accounts, using relevant keywords from your sector, is the
more white-hat approach. (This is time consuming work, but you can usually find
someone on UpWork to do it for $100.) After about a week, start unfollowing those who
did not reciprocate. There are tools for that too, like Manage Flitter and Unfollower
Stats. This process can be tedious, but it will provide a legitimate base of 500+
followers.

Every team member should have the Twitter app on their phone and tweet and
retweet every day. To keep the content stream on point, use a feed monitoring
service like Feedly: it monitors keywords, so you can see relevant blog posts without
having to bounce around the web all morning. Feedly also has an app, so you can
tweet from there as well.

Facebook. The company Facebook page is another must. Facebook is going to be

your main advertising platform, so you need to get your page up and ready for prime
time. After you have added your logo and background images, add a few more
interesting images, maybe pictures of your team. This way, when a user looks at the

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image section they see more than just an enlarged version of your logo and
background image.

Try using Feedly or a similar link-discovery application to seed your page with links,
preferably all with images attached. Make comments about each one to attract
more comments and likes. Facebook requires a certain number of likes before they
let you nab a vanity URL which you definitely want. (Click here for instructions on
getting a vanity URL.)

YouTube. This is a great place to post short clips about your product. Its also an
especially handy place to post instructional clips on how to invest in your ICO. For
newbies, investing in an ICO is far from a consumer-grade process the more
handholding, the better.

GitHub. We wont get into this one, as its used more for technical credibility than
marketing.

Reddit. In the cryptocurrency and ICO world, Reddit is an influential player. I must
warn you, though, that it takes time to build street cred on Reddit. I recommend
spending at least thirty days posting links and commenting in the relevant
subreddits. This will increase your karma on Reddit, which you need to be able to
create your own subreddit.

By the way, no one knows the magic subreddit formula except Reddit. But if you
build up enough goodwill on the site, suddenly one day youll see a link saying:
Create your own subreddit. Whenever it happens, its super easy to do, and you can
even add your own html to dress it up a bit. That said, redditors care more about
content than looks.

The main point of the subreddit is to give users another platform to ask questions, get
answers and discuss your deal sometimes eloquently, sometimes not so much.

Some good subreddits to start with are:

r/ethtrader

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 r/cryptomarkets
r/altcoin
r/ethereum
r/icocrypto
r/cryptocurrency
r/crowdbuilder

Full disclosure: the last link is run by us. Its where we put the best links from around
the web about growth marketing.

Medium. This is the current blog platform of choice. HelloBloom, for example, has
taken advantage of Mediums feature to create their blog as a subdomain (i.e.
blog.hellobloom.com), but its still Medium. This is a nice way to do less work to set up
a blog. The SEO purists, however, would recommend posting directly on your website
as a folder (i.e. hellobloom.com/blog), and then republishing the article on Medium
and LinkedIn.

Bitcointalk. This forum can be intimidating: it has a lot of enthusiastic users who are
not shy about sharing their views. Nevertheless, its another place to keep open lines
of communication and get some great feedback. In forum-speak, youll need to
create an ANN, or announcement thread. Its a page in html that looks like this.

As you can see, this seemingly obvious set of social assets requires a fair bit of work
to create and seed with all the required content. However, this suite will underpin all
your marketing efforts. Do it right and youre putting your best foot forward, as well as
ensuring that your ad dollars dont go to waste.

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Getting Press Coverage
In the early stages of your crowd marketing campaign, the focus will be on getting
covered by the right bloggers. (Its unlikely youll get an article in a major publication
at this stage of the game.) In this section, well describe how to discover and keep
track of the right subset of influential bloggers.

Most teams only wake up to bloggers when they need them. But you cant just say
we need some press and then go out and get some. You have to nurture a
relationship with influencers, and your approach needs to be authentic. Authenticity
cant be forced or rushed, so the earlier you start the process, the better.

Blogger Discovery

When you first think about getting press coverage, theres a tendency to want to go
right for the top tier. Getting Vitalik Buterin to sing your praises would be amazing, of
course. But every single person in the crypto world wants a piece of him as well.
Heres a more pragmatic process but by all means, always be open to getting
lucky.

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Find a Targeted Blogger Subset

Start by hand-selecting no more than five projects similar to yours for example
that are in the same space, or direct competitors, or even anyone who has the
audience you want.

Using a backlink tool Majestic, Open Site Explorer, and Ahrefs are a few good ones
make a spreadsheet of all their incoming links ranked by page rank or social
engagement. Just take the twenty most recent incoming links for each competitor, so
youll have about 100 links. Then click on each link to identify the author of the original
article.

Now enter the following data into columns in your spreadsheet:

(i) author name
(ii) twitter handle
(iii) number of twitter followers
(iv) the sum of all the engagement actions (e.g. shares, likes, retweets)
(v) their physical location

Google is your friend for this laborious exercise. So is Upwork. But once youre done
youll have a list of 100 bloggers and authors who have written about projects in your
niche, and you have a sense of how passionately their followers engage with their
content.

Now visit a few blogs like CoinDesk, Bitcoin Magazine and the LTB Network, and cast
your eye over their most recent articles. If any of those articles fit your criteria, add
the blogger to your list as well.

Rank Your Blogger List

You now have far too many bloggers. It would take years to cultivate a relationship
with every one of them. You might start ranking them by Twitter followers. Although
number of followers isnt the only metric, its a decent indicator of influence (those
that have been beefing up their stats with bots will get screened out later).

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If your project lends itself to Instagram, then you should factor in that following as
well. Youll notice we havent mentioned Facebook thats because Twitter is a easy
proxy. On Facebook, some people create pages so you can follow them. But often you
just land on their personal Facebook page. This feels a bit creepy and doesnt
necessarily give better intel than Twitter.

Once you have your ranking sorted by number of Twitter followers, scan down the list
and delete the blogs whose social engagement number (i.e. likes plus tweets plus
shares) seems at odds with their following. This is where we weed out people with
fake followers and bloggers who dont generate much passion from their readers. At
this stage, you should also put aside anyone out of your league. As we mentioned
before, Vitalik should probably not be on your list, unless you went to school together,
or youve been on a camping trip.

You will now have something like fifty to seventy-five names on your list. Youre not
done yet.

The next step is LinkedIn. One by one, go through every name, find your degree of
separation from each person, and add that information it to your list. While youre at it
you might send contact requests to each influencer to flush out those greedy for
contacts. Everyone on your team should do the same exercise.

You now have enough good data to go through the list as a team and pare it down to
about twenty-five names. Look for the closest connections such as people who
responded to your LinkedIn requests, and people who live in the same town as you.

Commence the Charm Offensive

Hopefully, your crowd marketing campaign is still months away, because youll need
plenty of time for your charm offensive. You now have twenty-five names of people
you want on your side. But you dont want to ask them for anything anytime soon.
Rather you need to start supporting them. Visit their blogs and leave thoughtful
comments. Retweet their tweets and articles, and tag their Twitter handles. If they are

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local, look for them at meetups, or if theyre going to the same conference as you,
track them down and say hi. For those you have not yet met, getting an introduction
through someone you know in common is probably a bit more appropriate. Either
way, your mindset should always be more What can I do for you? than What will
you do for me?

The charm offensive phase takes about three to six months. Three months is tight, but
maybe youre a real charmer, and you can do it faster. Still, if youre doing it right,
within a few months, influencers will have at least heard of you or your company or
someone on your team. Now youre not coming in cold.

The Ask

Now that youve made some authentic connections (and maybe some new friends)
youre in a good position to ask them to write about your project. This should, of
course, be a natural, authentic process. They wont all write about you, but some will
at least engage, tweet, retweet, comment and so on. But do try to tease out ten blog
posts from a wide variety of angles. Ten posts is admittedly ambitious, but aim for it,
and be happy with four or five. And always get the inbound link.

Validation

If youve kept up the pressure for three to six months, you should end up with some
pretty decent incoming articles and some great social validation. Now youre moving
from industry outsider to insider. Remain friends with this group never, ever quit
engaging with someone as soon as you get what you want from them. Keep helping
them and keep expanding your network.

This does seem like a lot of heavy lifting. Really, the only way around it is to throw
money at a PR firm. The problem with this approach is you might come away with a
few articles, but you wont have the relationships. We strongly believe that
relationship building is a crucial part of the process. It will expand your network, give
you credibility, make your crowd marketing campaign more effective, and make your
paid dollars go much farther.

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Amplifying Your Message
Crowdfunded projects and ICOs are usually startup projects, or at least in the early
stages of the business lifecycle. This often means that you are pretty much starting
from scratch. Its like the flywheel we referred to earlier super-heavy and hard to
get through its first rotation, but then momentum turns it easier and faster.

But one asset that you do already have is your own network of contacts. Most
business professionals probably have some two or three thousand names in their
rolodex. If you have a team of four people and a few trusted friends and advisors, you
can probably put together a database of ten to fifteen thousand names. Thats not
insignificant.

The Power of Landing Pages

Realistically, people in your contact list probably wont be interested in investing in

your project. However, if it doesnt cost them much time or money they may be
willing to help. The strategy we recommend is to send them to a landing page first
and not to your ICO page or website.

Tim Ferris, in his famous Hacking Kickstarter blogpost, illustrates two types of landing
pages that produce a lot more value from your starting list than simply asking them
for money. Although Tims examples are for a Kickstarter campaign, the same
principles apply for an ICO campaign.

Tims strategy is to send a series of emails to your contacts with a corresponding

series of landing pages intended to amplify. That is, (a) amplify your own social
assets and (b) amplify your best-performing media.

The screenshot below shows how you might use the landing page to beef up your
social assets in this case, Facebook and Twitter. The watch the video button goes
directly to the launch page, where there is indeed a video. However, this button could
take the user to your website or launch page, where they can find out more about

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your product in case they really do want to invest. Either way, this would be your very
first email to your contact base.

The screenshot below shows the kind of landing page you might use multiple times
leading up to and during your campaign. The goal here is to keep updating this
landing page with links to the current best-performing pieces of media in order to
create a fresh avalanche of likes, tweets and shares.

The logic here is that the media itself is likely already directed to the right audience.
So when your contact base helps out with engagement, the boost is experienced by
the right audience. In all cases except the first email, an update video is used to draw
contacts to the page.

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Summary
You should now have a good handle on your marketing asset buildout. Just
remember that its a process: think of the buildout as a task to be worked on for
months, not all at once. Then keep up the momentum and team visibility in the
blockchain ecosystem with fresh content. If you give yourself enough time for these
tasks before launch, then in your final run-up to your sale date the flywheel will be
cranking.

In our next e-book, we will discuss where best to spend your marketing dollars. Once
all your crowd building assets are in place, the only remaining variable to move the
needle is to start spending marketing money.

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About Crowd Builder
Crowd Builder is an application for teams to build their fundraising ecosystem ahead
of a big event like an ICO, crowdfunding campaign, or product launch.

At Crowd Builder, weve seen millions of crowdfunding dollars left on the table
because founding teams do not have the tools to leverage their own personal
networks to maximum effect. Instead, founders pay big money to marketers and PR
firms to create interest at launch when its already too late to create the right
scaffolding to draw press interest or web traffic.

Weve invented a new category to solve this problem: Crowd Marketing. And were
building an application, Crowd Builder, to help teams to create and leverage their
own networks before launch, so that they maximize the impact of their marketing
and ad dollars.

Crowd Builder, based in Chicago, is planning to launch publicly in early 2018. If you'd
like your project included in the beta program please contact Andrew Playford at
andrew@crowdbuilder.com. And don't miss out on our crowd building tips and
techniques. Sign up for our monthly newsletter here.

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