Marketing is much more than just paid advertising — it’s an important part of community building.
You can build your communities by offering engaging content, creating active social media channels, and interacting with your followers and influencers. When you market an initial coin offering (ICO), you have to take on the role of a growth hacker. You want to position yourself to lead omnichannel marketing campaigns with elements of social media marketing, public relations, pay-per-click content, email marketing, influencer marketing, new content creation, and more.
Digital marketing and good PR are the traditional ways to promote products and services. With ICOs, you can bring in a unique token promotion angle by using bounty programs.
Bounty program campaigns are used by many startups, websites, and software developers to reward individuals who identify bugs, perform marketing tasks, or otherwise improve a given product or service.
The benefits of using bounty programs are clear. You get better visibility for your ICO without any upfront promotion costs. Rewards can be paid in tokens, primarily after the conclusion of your ICO. By the time you start your marketing promotion in earnest, you will already have a considerable backlog of leads and followers. As a bonus, bounty programs give you some free extra technical support.
There are two main bounty program categories for ICOs — pre-ICO bounties and post-ICO bounties.
Pre-ICO bounties generate hype and awareness for a blockchain token in the startup phase, so pre-ICO bounty campaigns are often exclusively focused on marketing tasks.

Common pre-ICO bounty activities are:

1. Social media bounties — Individuals can earn bounty rewards by participating in your social media campaign with retweets, likes, shares, views, and comments.
2. Article-writing bounties — Bloggers can earn bounty rewards by creating featured articles about your ICO. Similar to the social media bounties, reward levels can be pegged to the engagement level of the articles or blog posts
3. Bitcointalk signature bounties — Junior members and above can earn bounty rewards based on the number of stakes they get.
Following an ICO and its associated fundraising, a post-ICO bounty campaign can generate project improvements based on community suggestions. The overall goal of a post-ICO bounty campaign is improving feedback from the project community. Post-ICO bounty activities can include:
1. Translation — Individuals can earn rewards for translating cryptocurrency project documents and moderating forum groups. This is a great bounty program for native language speakers, including Japanese, French, Spanish, Dutch, and German speakers. Common projects to be translated are the cryptocurrency website, the white paper, and Bitcointalk threads.
2. Bug reporting — This bounty program both creates campaign activity and actively helps developers. The best bug bounty programs clearly and concisely identify issues with cryptocurrency software or its associated platform.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to integrating bounty campaigns into your marketing

1. Take care of your social media accounts. Decent ICO campaigns require comprehensive management of social networks and timely coverage of all news, mass-media appearances, and the creation of detailed campaign information content on all accounts. In each medium, you should operate a blog for the project with project details, ICO terms and conditions, a general market overview, and the future prospects for the project. Additionally, a blogging platform is a good place to post your FAQ. It’s important to remember that you need to prepare your accounts and their content before you start a bounty campaign. If you don’t, the efforts of your bounty hunters in promoting your channels will be worthless.
2. Start forming a community. Organize your community and begin discussions in Slack, Bitcointalk, and Telegram. These are some of the most important channels for open communication between users and the project’s founders and team members. These channels have to be monitored regularly, and questions must be answered in a timely fashion. It’s also important to quash any erroneous information or unfounded accusations.
3. Lay down the rules. The more details you provide for you bounty hunters, the less conflicts you’ll have in the future. Protect yourself from “haters” who might want to sling mud at your project because they misunderstood or misinterpreted the rules and didn’t receive the bounties they expected.
4. Develop content quality and quantity. The more articles, videos, and news you post, the more reposts and engagement you will have. It’s that simple. There are some bounty hunters who can generate quality content on their own, but most influencers limit their activities to reposts and likes.
5. Prepare texts for translation. English is still the native language for the ICO, but quality translations will greatly increase your potential investor base. Make sure you’ve got good translators and they have all the information they could possibly need.
6. Automate where possible. Manually tracking and verifying bounty hunter activities and scheduling payments can require at least 40 hours of work per week. Since you should be involved in activities outside of the bounty program, consider using a platform like Bountyhunters.io to automate the program. Bountyhunters.io was created for managing and tracking bounty campaigns. All calculations are fully automated. The platform also boasts integrated primary metrics and has deep integration with Google Analytics for account conversion and ROI calculations for every influencer action. Algorithms gauge platform quality for all social activities to avoid scams and aggregation, and all payouts are automatically handled either at the end of the campaign or at a preset campaign stage.
7. Retain the audience you’ve attracted. There are many different ways to promote an ICO, but the true measure of success is to hit your target and make leads engage with your project and your brand. You’ll need to combine advertising, social media, PR, and bounty programs to introduce yourself to potential investors, but you can’t stop right at the threshold. You need to continue to nurture your leads with useful content, mailings, consumer service, and constant team interaction.
Last but not least, it’s important that your concept is feasible and makes sense to the community you’re targeting. Your team’s main goal needs to be further development of the project. If your marketing and communication are based on project transparency, your strategies will be more effective, and you’ll gain a stronger community around your ICO.
In short, every ICO should have a real, live project behind it with clear and transparent development that the community can follow. A website and a white paper are just not enough.