Every ICO tries to follow its own way of running a marketing campaign in order to stand out from the crowd. For this purpose, it develops market penetration for a product or service in order to provide the target audience directly to the company and its services/offerings.
This word-of-mouth tactic advertises the company and increases its sales as a result. Today, digital marketing and social platforms are one of the most popular marketing methods to promote a project.
In general, a bounty campaign is a special offer from a startup, website, or software developer that allow users to gain respect and financial rewards for performing certain activities to help promote a new product or service for the company. Compensation is paid for different tasks across the marketing department: bug reporting, improvement of the cryptocurrency framework, and more.
Bounties have become a viable form of advertising for most companies. They help attract a greater number of people interested in investing and making improvements to the platform after the ICO goes live.
How Does It Work?
Before bounties became such a meaningful marketing hack, we saw bounties on online gaming websites that rewarded their users if they played an active role in game development.
Bounties are, by their nature, a motivational feature that encourages people to perform tasks that help introduce a product or service to a bigger number of people. As a result, each side benefits: the company attracts new customers, and the user participating in the bounty program receives a special reward and recognition from other participants.
To launch an ICO bounty program, we need to:
- create and edit YouTube videos
- issue content (blog posts, website articles, and newsletter)
- translate the white paper into the required languages
- create an infographic to demonstrate information visually
- provide Bitcointalk signatures
- Increase social media activity on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
In practice, bounty programs are the perfect means of promotion for many companies. Spectacular results make bounties very helpful to any marketing campaign. That is why most ICOs include them in their ICO campaigns.
Rewards are paid in the form of cryptocurrency tokens or fiat currency (this, however, is rare.) The great advantage of bounty-program incorporation is that it brings benefits to cryptocurrency startups and individuals alike.
Types of Bounty Programs
Crypto projects can involve bounty programs in either a pre-ICO or a post-ICO. By the way, bounty programs are not launched during ICOs. Let’s take a look at two main types of ICO bounty programs:
1) Pre-ICO Bounties
ICOs carry out pre-ICO bounties before the start of an ICO. The main idea is to spread the product to people and make them talk about it before its implementation. In this way, the project is positioned and continues to improve its presence on social platforms.
In general, ICOs use informal advertising channels to increase market penetration. Participants go about performing different actions so people can learn more about the cryptocurrency project.
Bounties focus on marketing, social media, and internet support generation before the start of an ICO. They are designed to spread awareness of the ICO.
Pre-ICO can be executed in different bounties:
Social media campaign
These activities advertise the project on participants’ social media accounts. The principle is as follows: the more you do on your social platforms with regard to the project, the greater your reward. This can be anything: retweets, likes, shares, views, and/or comments. The main social media platforms used for ICO bounty programs include Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Content development
This type of pre-ICO bounty program is perfect for users who maintain blogs with a large number of followers and readers. If a blogger writes articles about an ICO, he or she gets a reward from the ICO according to the engagement level of the articles and blog posts and a number of new followers.
Signature bounties
This is the oldest type of bounty program. Signature bounties are useful for Bitcointalk forum users and are designed in the form of an advertisement without creating intricate images.
If a user has a Bitcointalk forum profile, he or she can earn free coins for having the ICO logo in their signature profile. As a rule, this requires a minimum number of weekly posts.
The ICO issues a signature with a code. There are different membership ranks in the signature campaign: Jr. Member, Member, Full Member, Sr. Member, Hero, and Legendary Member. The stake may differ depending upon membership rank. The more participants post this signature, the greater their stake. As a rule, in these types of bounty programs, only junior members and above from Bitcointalk can play.
Referral bounties
The referral bounty encourages participants to invite a new member into the project community. For this, they will receive an additional token. The more members the participant manages to involve in the project, the more tokens he or she will receive in the end. The reward also depends upon the rank of the individual joining Bitcointalk.
2) Post-ICO Bounty Programs
At this stage of ICO development, everything has been accomplished, and money has been raised. Post-ICO bounty programs are designed to improve the project according to community suggestions. They help generate feedback from the community, including:
translation campaign
This type of bounty program is based on the translation of all documents related to a cryptocurrency project and the moderation of forum groups. It is suitable for native speakers of languages like Japanese, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, etc.
In addition, these campaigns involve the cryptocurrency website, the white paper, the Bitcointalk ANN thread, and landing pages. To translate the white paper into a certain language, one has to reserve the language first. The bounty will differ according to to the type of the translated document. By the way, spam and unnecessary posts won’t be counted.
bug reporting
Bug reporting is helpful for developers and project improvement. A well-prepared report can help find painful issues within the cryptocurrency software or platform.
Because of the lack of liquidity, ICOs cannot afford to spend money on expensive marketing campaigns. For this reason, there is no other way to promote the project than to take advantage of a bounty program.
As a rule, cryptocurrency projects set aside a percentage of the total coin supply (between 0.5 – 1.0 percent of tokens) for the bounty program. The most successful projects allocate up to 2 percent for this purpose. There is no need to spend millions of dollars on expensive, and often ineffective, marketing campaigns.
One can find detailed information on this on the project’s website, in its white paper, or on the Bitcointalk ANN thread.
What About Investors?
There is no definitive answer to the question of whether or not investors should participate in bounty programs. This depends upon each participant individually, so do your own research (DYOR). This principle applies to almost everything concerning blockchain projects. Learn all the information provided in the white paper on the project’s website, and consider different opinions along with the analyses of others on Bitcointalk forums and on Reddit.
Investors should come to their own conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of each project. Use websites that report upcoming ICOs, as this will be helpful to your research. Check out ICO Examiner and ICO Watchlist, for starters.
Conclusion
To sum up, bounty programs are considered to be a great method to create and maintain a loyal community around a product or service. They are also a means of interaction with potential customers, and function as brand ambassadors in a very effective and fun way.
Bounty programs are a great opportunity to play a bigger role in project implementation and to earn tokens. There is sometimes the option to exchange them for fiat money (but mostly not).
Activities like ICO bounty programs are mainly used in forums on social platforms like Bitcointalk and Cryptocointalk, and are not related to the technical aspect of the ICO. Check listed ICOs and their bounty programs to play the big game!
