St. Petersburg was home to a meetup dubbed “Marketing ICO projects” organized by Viktoria Kulibanova, CEO of Spice Media.
St. Petersburg, 13 February 2018 – A meeting dedicated to the promotion of ICO projects was held at the Yasnaya Polyana coworking venue. Representatives of communication agencies and business owners who had successfully participated in ICO projects discussed various practices of launching start-ups and how to promote them.
How to start the promotion of an ICO project and how to budget for it? What tools to use? How to work with opinion leaders? These were some of the questions raised at the meeting with members of the Facebook community #prspb “Marketing ICO projects”.
“Before entering the ICO, any startup has to solve two issues: they have to generate knowledge about the project and attract investor interest. To successfully manage the former, one needs to break through a “crowd” of competitors; to achieve the latter, it is necessary to prove that the project is promising and the founders are honest people”, Victoria Kulibanova told the participants at the beginning of the meeting.
Olga Filatova, a co-founder of the marketing agency ICO NewsChain.online, added that there are many people on the ICO market who want to attract money to their projects but are unwilling to invest either time or energy, and, because of intense competition in the field, they usually fail.
The meeting participants discussed the particularities of working with founders and programmers of ICO projects. According to a co-founder of the consulting agency ICO Office, Anna Berova, how closely an agency interacts with the customer before starting work has a direct impact on the effectiveness of the project promotion. And Esther Katz, vice president of communications at Neuromation.io (neural network synthetic data platform), shared her investor classification based on Karl Jung’s psychological types. Esther believes that this classification has a potential to help one find the right set of tools for each type of investor.
Anna Kirillova, Director of Marketing and PR Finvestech (a company that develops and applies trading algorithmic strategies in managing hedge fund assets), presented the current trends and dynamics of the ICO market:
“About 30-40 ICO projects start every day. Just picture what information noise this creates and how many projects you will have to compete against. Startups, hoping to collect the cherished $ 20-30 million, might increase their spending on the ICO. A budget of $500,000 in any other market niche would make it possible to launch a large-scale campaign; in the ICO, however, this is not such a big amount of money for promotion”, notes Anna.
Kickico's marketing director (fundraising platform for ICO, preICO, crowdfunding and crowdinvesting) Yury Parsamov shared step-by-step instructions on how to promote a startup, talked about the distinct features of working on social networks, cooperating with opinion leaders and the main difficulties his company had faced while delivering projects.
At the end of the meeting, a crypto journalist and publisher Igor Shnurenko analyzed the global crypto media and drew the participants' attention to some relevant problems existing in the media space, such as false agendas, the tightening control over the ICO and the role of blockchain marketing in advertising and social networks. He stressed that direct advertising is already banned on Facebook, Twitter, Google.