In the early days of blockchain, whitepapers were considered the most essential document in the project journey. It stated a project’s technical blueprint, economic incentives, and vision. And in today’s fast-moving, community-supported crypto landscape, a whitepaper alone no longer guarantees attention (or adoption). A successful token launch requires a dynamic marketing strategy.
This is where a crypto marketing agency comes in. The agencies here use the right mix of content writing, PR, ad campaigns, and community management to promote crypto projects. They can also assist in listing and marketing Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).
Some of the lessons learnt from successful project marketing include:
The Power of Narrative
A good story is needed to start great projects. Meanwhile, the early conventional market tech launch takes a straight-to-the-point approach, a pure pitch rooted in technical fundamentals. Ethereum positioned itself as a ‘world computer’ that could decentralize applications and services. As a result, this metaphor made the technology more approachable and even created a global developer movement long before its mainnet went live.
Typically, many technically sound projects focused on protocol specs in messaging, which lacked excitement.
Another example is Chanlink (LINK). When the token launched, many people did not quite understand the concept of Oracles, which is a link between blockchain and external data. To solve this, Chainlink’s marketing success was based on a clear and relatable narrative: “Smart contracts are powerful, but they’re blind without real-world data. Chainlink solves this.” This made all the difference. Now, everyone knows what challenges the token solves.
Without some form of storytelling, the most innovative projects can fail to gain widespread adoption.
Build Before You Announce
Projects like Chainlink established the power of building a foundational user base and expanding the product ecosystem before going through the token release. Besides regular technical updates, Chainlink quietly worked on Oracle integrations with early partners and developers. When the LINK token entered the public market, it had already been deployed with some practical use cases and adoption. Today, the token ranks No. 12 out of almost 10,000 cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap and has a market capitalization of over $8.1 billion.
However, on the other hand, the now-defunct ICP (Internet Computer Protocol) by Dfinity overpromised and rushed their token to market during the peak craze. ICP suffered from technical issues, a lack of transparency, and community disillusionment. The loss of trust, however, came at an enormous cost, given the massive valuation of such a project.
Timing Is Everything
The Flow blockchain by Dapper Labs is an excellent token sale run strategically timed. The first success story for Flow was NBA Top Shot, which was done publicly first. The market already knew the token’s purpose, and demand followed naturally when it was launched. This decision to wait for the public sale until Flow had real traction ensured price stability from initial buyers and artificially created demand from users already using the ecosystem.
On the other hand, EOS had a massive year-long ICO that raised $151 million. The problem was that product delivery was delayed, and communication was unclear after the launch. Thus, there was insufficient sustenance in the network, resulting in a fall in interest. However, despite the amount raised, very early supporters got disconnected because there was very little tangible use case for the launch.
Education as Marketing
Polkadot makes it easy for people to understand parachains, staking, and governance, all concepts that can otherwise seem unnecessarily complex. They do this by capitalizing on the education approach. They share informative content in their marketing material. All this makes it easier to onboard users with different tech backgrounds, documentation portals, community-led tutorials, and hackathons, among other things. With this approach, Polkadot grew into one of the most diverse communities in Web3, bringing in developers, investors, and supporters.
Community is the Engine
Dogecoin is the project that showed that harnessing community strength is possible. Starting as a joke, Dogecoin has managed to sustain its relevance mostly due to its grassroots community, social media culture, and always-present engagement, even without proper development for long periods. In 2022, it became the second-largest proof-of-work token in the crypto scene.
In addition, Uniswap has mastered the art of building an active community of users who can stake their juice in governance tokens. This powerful airdrop strategy helped developers harness the power of thousands of vocal, invested supporters.
The Launch is Not the Finish Line
Solana (SOL) comes to mind here; it was sold at launch as a stepping stone, not a final destination. After the SOL token became available to everyone, the team kept releasing developer tools, participating in hackathons as a sponsor, and expanding ecosystem funding. It would maintain momentum during periods with spikes and troughs in price. The Solana team maintained consistent communication, generated incremental product updates, kept users confident, and built a successful brand over time.
Conclusion
A token whitepaper may follow a technical specification down to the nth decimal, but the marketing strategy powers it. With attention being such an isolated entity in the industry and every decision being made by a human being, it’s of utmost importance to build a relationship with the project audience early, constantly, and with intention.
Crypto projects fail to become the next successful token not because the tech is not good enough, but because the marketing strategy was weak or nonexistent.
