Blockchain Marketing Best Practices for 2019: Budgeting

by Media Shower Editorial Team on 03/04/2019

Deploying an effective blockchain marketing strategy to raise funds and/or to gain users will require a substantial budget.

This guide explains why a strong blockchain marketing budget is important and how to craft one that will set your project up for success.

Qualities of a Good Budgeting Plan

A good budget must first and foremost be accurate. It is important to provide an accurate representation of all your costs without overestimating or underreporting anything. This is especially important if you are looking to raise funds through an external source.

To ensure accuracy, it is essential to engage in in-depth research into the market conditions that may affect your costs. This is the second quality of a good budget. It must be well researched. To make your estimations as accurate as possible, you can look into the budgets of projects which have successfully launched their product. Consider where you can extrapolate their figures, especially as it pertains to marketing costs.

Lastly, a good budget should be flexible. However, this flexibility should not be achieved by including any inaccuracies. Instead, you can allow some wiggle room for any unforeseen events by accounting for this under a miscellaneous tab in your budget.

Your in-depth research and accurate pricing will play a major role in ensuring you are best prepared and in reducing the chances of you encountering any unplanned-for costs. However, if despite your best efforts you find you need some extra funds for something essential, you will be happy that you provide for it in your budget.

Why Budgeting Is Important

Failing to plan is planning to fail. Lacking a budget exposes your project to a number of available pitfalls. Overspending is one such pitfall. If you have not done enough market research, then you are more likely to spend more than you should. For instance, you may end up purchasing an advert on a publication that is overpriced and does not have enough ROI to justify the investment. Unfortunately, if you keep overspending, you will exhaust your marketing budget with very little to show for it.

Creating a good marketing budget will keep you in check. A budget is essentially a plan with figures attached to it. Therefore, when you have a good marketing plan, you are less likely to engage in any activities that are outside of your predefined plan. Conversely, if you do not take the time to craft a good marketing budget, then you will be acting without any figures or timeline in mind. This is the easiest way to end up with a failed blockchain project.

Lastly, a budget is essential to galvanizing the entire team behind similar goals. When creating the budget, the entire team should be involved. When the team knows what is important to the project and how steps are being taken to achieve this, they may receive a boost of confidence and increase their faith in the project. On the other hand, a team working without a budget is disorganized and can become demotivated, which would work against the success of your blockchain project.

Building Your Blockchain Marketing Budget

Prior to putting your plans in writing, these are the steps to take:

Conduct in-depth research.
Define the priorities for your project as it pertains to marketing.
Educate yourself on the basics of digital marketing.
Find budgets of successful projects and learn from them.

Now that you have engaged in significant research, you are ready to start preparing your market budget. There are important items that you must allocate funds to in your marketing budget. These should include:

Whitepaper preparation
Branding related costs
Social media management
Search engine optimization
Paid advertisements. This is a wide area but it will serve you to define what type of advertisements will best work for you. Not all advertising platforms allow advertising for cryptocurrencies, so do your research to ascertain where such ads are welcomed.
Guest posts. These work best when they are on publications with a good reputation in the market. They can be blockchain-focused as well as those that are respected within the greater business and technology industry.
Press releases
Events and conferences. Attending and presenting at blockchain-focused events is a great way to get the word out about your project. Many of them require a payment to participate. Thus, it is important to research beforehand and decide on a few which are best suited for the goals of your project. Incorporate these figures into your marketing budget.
Bounty programs. These help to further the reach of your project while ensuring the security of your software. However, you need to allocate funds for any defects found as well as the listing fees for bounty programs websites.
Miscellaneous. This should amount to a very small percentage of your greater marketing budget.

Crafting and sticking to the marketing plan of your blockchain project holds significant benefits. One of the biggest of these is the return on investment (ROI). It is reported that marketing costs should constitute around 10 to 20 percent of the total budget of your ICO. Thus, if you successfully budget for the marketing costs, you greatly increase the chance to meet the funding goal of your project.

Crafting a good marketing budget is a matter of adequate research and accurate costing. Working closely with all members of the team to draft a budget also holds inherent advantages. It is important to exhaust all possible needs and outcomes and include them in the budget so as not to miss any opportunities due to lack of planning.

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