5 Mistakes Made by ICO Community Managers

No organic firm is perfect.

I’ve made a ton of mistakes in my days as ICO community manager.

As my experience with clients stack up, so does the number of my errors and fires that I or my team starts.

What’s important is your ability to learn from these mistakes as an ICO community manager.

I want to impart my marketing wisdom today by showing you what NOT to do when you are leading or managing any sort of community.

We know these steps because we work in the industry. Crowdcreate is a community engagement and idea platform driven by influencers, investors, and enthusiasts. Our expertise in growing communities and social validation will boost your crowdfunding success. We have worked with some of the largest crowdfunding ICOs and startups including BitClave, ANKER, and Tencent.

Chances are that you’ve probably already made one or two mistakes on this list.

But that’s completely fine. We can all change and learn.

For every mistake, I will provide a real life example I have run across in Telegram.

Hopefully, my data and live examples can help you really level up your ICO community management.

1 — Your ICO Community Marketing Strategy Should Include a Team Brand

Team branding is often overlooked even though it defines how your company is viewed by your community. Everything from your names and logo to your icons and vision should be determined from the very start of community engagement.

Let’s take Hero Token for example.

Hero Token participants claimed confusion from the very start. They had no idea why they were using Slack. They had no idea why they couldn’t find an admin. They had no idea that the ETH address they were sending money to was a scam.

In Telegram, I have had my fair share of imposters and scammers. These villains have tried to pretend to be me, team members, and even core team members like the CEO. However, by keeping our branding consistent we have kept our number of scammers low.

First, we make sure to announce that none of us will be sending out any crypto addresses in our bios as well as on our channel. Our pin message will constantly be updated to reflect that none of the real admins will be soliciting anyone for cash.

Second, we use graphics and icons that are custom so that ripping our icons are incredibly hard.

By focusing your team’s brand, your community can tell who is real and who is not. Giving your community the tools on how to defend themselves from attacks is a great way to build rapport and keep your mediums clean.

Third, we try to keep our dates as consistent as possible. It’s hard to stress the importance of this. Sale dates is branding to how celebrity birthdays are branding. To some community members, ICO hunting is a full fledged business. They need to jot down the most important information they can find and move on to the next hunt. By switching dates around, you essentially cut off part of your sale’s money flow.

Overall, your ICO marketing plan should include these steps or have a variation of it integrated in your community. By keeping your brand consistent, you can ensure the safety of your team and your community.

2 — ICO Marketing Includes Giving Participants An Experience

Often times a company will complete their ICO, and slowly fall into obscurity. Day after day, no new announcements come up and marketing comes to a complete halt. Their community starts to follow suit. Slowly but surely, the ICO community will lose members, money, and participants for your platform.

Why?

Imagine it’s your first time hearing about Disneyland’s sister park, Coineyland. You’re told that it’s going to be the happiest you have ever felt in your life. However when you get there, you find that it’s absolutely barren. Or even worse, there’s a bunch of people doing absolutely nothing. People are milling about but the rides are all broken, there’s no food, and trash is getting everywhere.

This is the experience you’re participants walk into when you have a community but no experiences.

People grow and create relationships through shared experiences. Whether it’s an influencer video, MVP announcements, or AMA live streams, doing things together creates whole venues for ongoing conversation and memes. Funny enough, memes can be incredible.

3 — Your ICO Community Management Agency Does Not Post On Social Media

Do you know how I can tell an experienced manager from a good one?

Bad managers do not ever post on social media.

Social media is one of the most popular ways to interact with your customer. Not only is it free, it is a direct form of communication with the brand itself. By avoiding social media postings, you deny your participants and existing community from sending you feedback or opinions.

With 81% of US users with social media profiles, it is also a great way to market your product and your community. People like joining things that other people are already invested in. Posting on social media is one of the oldest and sure fire ways for steady, organic growth.

As a community manager, it is your job to tap into and engage the 230 million people on Facebook. It’s your job to tap into the 57% of people in Brazil and other developing countries that access the world through social media.

As you organically grow your channel with social media, engagement will naturally grow as social media postings are experiences in themselves!

4 — Smart ICO Strategy Includes A Target Audience

Another common mistake rookie community managers make is targeting a large, general population to amass as many users as possible.

This is a business no-no.

Your potential people are very specific people with similar interests. Consider this. What defines a community? By definition, it’s just a group of people. As the community starts to break off into specific pieces, specific identities are born.

Consider these identities:People who game.

People who play video games.

People who play sports video games.

People who play basketball video games.

People who specifically play 2k basketball video games.

People who specifically play 2k basketball video games of the current year.

These are all people of the same community, some are just abstracted to a further level.

By focusing on specific identities of a community, you can cultivate your brand even further while activating the necessary components of your community at the right time.

Understanding how invested your community is, you can include your ICO strategy to target the most effective group in your community. In fact, you can even start to figure out who is most likely to come to your community in the first place and start targeting that demographic.

Understanding your community and targeting is incredibly valuable.

5 — Not Being Part Of A Community Yourself

The most important part of running a community is being part of the community. Unless you are right by your users, you will never truly understand their wants and needs. Take commenting on blogs for example.

If you remove the community’s ability to comment on your blogs, you lose out on two incredibly valuable assets.

One, you lose out on valuable SEO that your community will naturally build on your website. Community SEO can definitely take your company to the top for Google searches. In addition, you won’t be doing any of the work yourself!

Two, you remove even more opportunities to sell your community to your potential clients. If people see that you are getting incredible amounts of engagement, they will want to join themselves. Blog comments are a self fulfilling prophecy.

Conclusion — ICO Community Management

Everybody makes mistakes at their job.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you have been making these mistakes this whole time.

The first thing is to learn what you are doing wrong.

The second step is to fix it.

Moving on the second step will lead you to naturally take the others.

You can also check us out!Crowdcreate is the world’s largest crypto influencer network. Get your ICO featured with top ranking influencers through our ICO marketing services. Our network has a reach of 2.3 billion views and 4.3 million subscribers on YouTube.