In one of our previous posts, we talked about how to establish a legitimate ICO. The community behind your ICO, needs to be able to trust you and rely on you. Confidence and trust means that your token sales will go up. However, often the amount of community members doesn’t really necessarily mean that your investments will increase as well. The question thus not only is how to grow that community and what the best ways are to maintain and engage your community, but it becomes more a question of how to ensure that these community members actually convert in real token buyers?

In order to answer that question we need to first focus on what problems you may encounter during an ICO. As a marketing agency for ICOs, we have gone through similar processes and we have stumbled upon these issues ourselves. We have gone through four ICO projects and the conclusion we came to is that community management is one of the most important areas that needs to be covered during an ICO.

Identifying the most common issues

The problem that we faced while doing community management for ICOs is that too little people actually convert into real token holders. We found solutions to these issues, that will make your token sales go beyond the moon and we will try our best to share these solutions with you.

First of all, you want to reach your hard cap. But when you get low engagement from your community, that doesn’t always go as planned. You might have a large following on your Telegram group, but unfortunately real investments stay out and there is only speculators lurking around for bounty programs.

An ICO needs a lot of time preparing, but also a lot of engagement to maintain your community of investors. So when it comes to targeting these investors, globally, you need to plan out beforehand how to engage with them. The problem in there is that too little of the possible investors convert into real token holders..

Second, the blockchain industry is a global one. In your Telegram group there might just be about 50 different nationalities, coming from all over the world. You experience an issue regarding the time zones. You can’t answer everyone’s questions promptly, there’s just too many of them, which also results in a lower engagement rate.

Is the mainstream solution really the best?

Most of the ICOs out there, use a Telegram supergroup to maintain their community. They have several community managers who take care of everyone’s worries and answer possible questions they might have. This seems like the easiest solution; to assign a group of support managers. Many companies do this, but sometimes the result is the same, the average engagement rate is still too low. Moreover, you end up spending a lot of money to maintain a group of managers. The reason for that is because they don’t know what the real problem is the key people in your community are struggling with. Those who are more likely to invest. They try and satisfy everyone, while they forget to often focus on individuals. A community in general is about building some form of an ecosystem where individuals forge relationships with each other and work towards a larger goal, mission or a shared vision for the future. That should always be in the back of your mind.

If we try and draw conclusions from all of these issues that we have now identified, we can assure you that this doesn’t mean that your community management sucks. The problem lies in perceiving your community as a hole, while as it’s still a group of individuals, with their own thoughts and perspectives. Knowing this, you can clearly see that the ones who actually are interested in investing, might lose that interest. This leads to lower engagement and investments, ultimately leading in not reaching your hard cap.

Low engagement rate

As mentioned before the fact that community managers can’t really handle the amount of individuals of the community and tries to please them as a whole, results in low engagement from the community. The different time zones the community is spread out in, also create a problem, as you need to hire a lot of different people, to be able to represent your company. They all need to be able to understand your product as the best, the industry like no other and have to be very communicative and empathic.

Now, if you think about how to solve the problem of multitasking and not addressing a group as if they were one person, you can easily tackle that problem with an alternative method of community management. By creating a Telegram bot instead of having a team of community managers, you not only press down the costs significantly, you also are able to increase engagement by distributing news and sending out scheduled reminders to both your group and individual members. This is useful because often these group messages get lost. Your community often needs to wait a while for a representative to get back to them on their question, which took them initially five seconds to ask. Our society is one that gets answers from Google right away, so most people tend to get a little impatient. Having a chatbot, will lower the stress of having to deal with this and thus increase customer satisfaction, trust in your ICO and on the long run, will convert in more investments.

No real investors, only speculators

We talked about that there is no very little real investors part of your community, only speculators. These speculators however, might be converted as well. But you need to understand where they come from. On the other hand, if you try to imagine that on 1000 people there is 27 people who are actually right on the verge of investing. Would you then not concentrate on those 27 and leave the other 973 to get to know you. In order to do so, you need to understand who your users are and at what stage they invest. Only then, can you counteract and have a better rate of investments. Some of your investors just joined the community and know very little of you, others have been around for a while and are thus more inclined to purchase. Know your customer, is really important.

So how can you take the stage of where your customer is at the moment under consideration? First it’s important to identify the six stages your customer is going through before converting into a token holder. From the initial recognition of the problem to the actual purchase, you can easily analyze the steps your customer has to take by creating a customer journey map. By identifying the most interested people from the community and letting you focus on their needs, you increase your sales conversion rate. Moreover, the customer journey map pushes users through the sales funnel to know who exactly you should focus on. This will give the extra push to be able to convert users to become real token holders.

Answers get lost in the crowd

As a direct result of a growing community, a community manager might not be able to handle all the questions asked by the crowd. Moreover, because of the frequent messages, some questions might get lost or even some important notifications.

We already mentioned the bot as a solution to the problem of handling the many possible investors, but what do you do with their questions? With AI messaging you can easily answer everyone’s questions without your actual involvement. By identified keywords, your chatbot will form a reply suitable to everyone’s worries.

Final thoughts

So while reading this article, you have now realized that there is a solution to what you previously imagined to be the impossible. Which is to convert your community members into real token buyers. By using a chatbot, you can solve issues such as handling a large amount of people, while driving costs down and through AI messaging, you can address all the questions and concerns your community will have in a prompt manner. By getting back to your community as soon as possible, you will create more trust and confidence in your product and thus this will lead to more engagement. With a customer journey map you can easily identify the users most likely to convert to real token holders and thus you can be able to focus on them, for a higher conversion rate, eventually you will be able to close larger deals and thus reach the hard cap you had set for your ICO. Not only will you be able to reach your hard cap, you will also have a community that will stay involved with your company on the long run.

Hopefully this article will help you understand of how to increase investments from your community. Would you get even more insight into how to gain a larger community and how to do cost-efficient ICO marketing? Download our guidebook here!

This blog post originally was posted on our Medium account, visit the blog post on Medium here.