Can a poorly designed ICO (Initial Coin Offering) landing page hurt your fundraising efforts?
There’s a lot that goes into holding a successful ICO or token sale for your project. You need a great team, a solid idea, a well-thought out plan detailed as a white paper, and a good marketing strategy.
But with more teams and projects attempting to raise money through this new method of fundraising, how will you stand out?
Sure, your project may have great potential, but if you can’t keep visitors on your page long enough to consume your content and understand it, you end up losing potential investors.
A bad landing page is one of the most common and frustrating mistakes you can make in any online venture, especially when trying to raise money.
It’s a leaky bucket that costs you leads, money, and even your SEO clout. Bad website design is actually to blame for most ineffective landing pages out there; from PPC to ICO.
Is an ICO Even Suitable for Your Business?
Before getting into the details of this post, you need to take a step back and ask if tokenizing your business is the right move.
Although it’s exciting and the potential to raise a lot of money exists, it still needs to be the right long-term move.
This landing page tutorial isn’t much good to you if you’ve set yourself up to fail. It could be the concept that falls short and not your execution.
“In fact, (ICO campaigns) may be detrimental to some companies: You will spend time and money on a campaign, only for it to fail in securing enough funds,” wrote Andrew Marshall of Cointelegraph.com.
“Some startup owners seem to think that an ICO is a tool for any project … While that used to be the case during the formative days of the ICO market, it’s no longer true.”
If an ICO isn’t a good fit for your business, this landing page tutorial isn’t going to help you very much.
If you have determined that it is, great.
Here’s how to stay in the game by building landing pages the right way to position your ICO or token for success.
Piece Together a Design Plan
Don’t just start designing and building. Figure out exactly what you’ll need to include on the page and why you need to include it.
Asking why will not only help when laying out design elements and content, but it will help you better communicate the information you are sharing.
Start with a simple outline. For example:
- Headline & 1-2 sentence pitch
- Details of the sale (start date, how long it will run, how much has been raised)
- Intro video
- Highlights and key points
- Why the project matters
- How your application works
- Distribution of tokens
- White paper and other documents
- The team – who is behind the project and why are they important
- Timeline & roadmap
Laying Out the Header Area
Just like with any website looking to grab the attention of its visitor, you need to have a compelling header.
When it comes to marketing your token’s landing page, you want to capture the attention of the potential investor. Consider the following from Ubex’s landing page:
They get straight to the point: what they do; links to important documentation; and information on the token sale.
What to Include in the Body
As the main content area of your landing page, this will include the majority of the sales content. Include everything from your outline: the what, how, why, who, and when should all be detailed here.
Overview & Key Points
Highlight the top 3 – 5 features/benefits of what you are building. Use graphics to convey this message in a more meaningful way.
How Will Your Project Impact the World?
This is your why. Your story. If you want to stand out from other blockchain-based projects, understand your why and convey it in such a way that sparks an emotional response.
How it Works
Do you already have a prototype to show off? If so, provide a demonstration of that prototype. If not, do your best to explain how your application will work. Make use of visual content to support text.
Distribution of Tokens
This is easily done by displaying a pie chart or some other visual representation of the percentage breakdown of how your tokens will get distributed.
Relevant Documentation
Links to your White Paper, financials, one-pager’s, and anything else that is relevant to your project. List these together in one area for easy access.
Highlight Team Members
If you want to avoid potentially being listed as a scam ICO, you’ll want to make sure that you maintain as much transparency as possible.
This means highlighting who is on your team, what they do, social links for that individual, and an image.
Not only does highlighting team members show transparency, it provides credibility to potential investors. And when trying to raise funds, you’ll need all of the credibility that you can get.
Timeline & Roadmap
Where are you currently with your project? What future milestones have you set? Where will you be in 6 months? 1 year? Showing that you have goals communicates to potential investors that you have a plan. Make sure these are realistic and go into detail where applicable.
Don't Forget Community
The crypto-space is big on community. Those who have interest in your project will want to see that you’re transparent and willing to interact with the community – even if it means answering the hard questions.
Place prominent icons to whichever platform(s) you use for community management: Telegram, Slack, Discord, Twitter, etc.
Use Relevant Images
You may not need to use images, and that’s okay. But if you do, shy away from stock images. The internet hates stock images. We’ve seen quite enough posed pictures of people in suits smiling or people on cell phones laughing.
Use unique images and spring for a professional photographer to capture your team and/or product. Paying more attention to your images will increase your clicks and conversions.
Consider Certification Badges
Let’s face it, the unregulated crypto-industry has its pros and cons. One of the cons being that scams exist and poorly educated investors will get duped into ‘investing’ into one of these scams (Howey Coins, anyone?).
To avoid being potentially labeled as a scam, you may want to consider third-party proof of legitimacy.
You can do this by having a thorough review done of your project. This includes having your token, team, white paper, and other aspects reviewed and audited.
For example, TokenRaise has put together a set of industry-based standards to help add legitimacy to your project. A certifiable, third-party review may increase your chances of receiving more investor interest and trust.
Don't Write Crappy Headlines
Many people write terrible headlines. Heck, a lot of professional writers aren’t much better. Due to the fact so many people are bad at it, and because it requires imagination, they don’t put much thought into headlines.
Your headline needs to spark an emotional response. It doesn’t need to be the ending of the movie E.T., but it needs to create some sort of reaction. Often people won’t make rational decisions, rather make emotional decisions then rationalize them.
Headlines themselves need to be tested. Even if you design a headline to play well, it may not. You won’t know for sure without A-B testing.
Consider using a tool like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to test what you come up with.
Don't Make People Wait - Speed Matters
Think about how long you’ll wait for a page to load before you give up and go elsewhere. Other users are no different.
Think about this. Data shows that a one-second delay in page load speed can result in a 7% reduction in your conversions.
At the same time, a slow loading page will also cost you leads before people even arrive on your site, as Google now factors in your load time into your SEO ranking.
“Speeding up your website is a great thing to do in general. Visitors to your site will be happier (and might convert more or use your site more), and a faster web will be better for all,” wrote former Google webspam team chief Matt Cutts.
“Instead of wasting time on keyword meta tags, you can focus on some very easy, straightforward, small steps that can really improve how users perceive your site.”
Test your page load speeds across multiple platforms and devices with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. The tool will also give you tips on how to speed up your results, which may include:
- Compressing images
- Eliminating extraneous code
- Minimizing redirects
- Upgrading your hosting service
Getting Help with Design
You may have your outline complete and your content put together, but if you don’t have a great designer, how will you design your ICO landing page?
There are many resources online to find great designers and Boonle happens to be one of them. With student designers from hundreds of Universities in the U.S., you’ll be able to find the help you need. Go ahead, browse our student designers and see for yourself.
1 thought on “Designing the Ultimate ICO Landing Page”
Antonio – trying to finalize the website for a preICO. If things go well during presale, will extend your services through out the ICO. Can you please tell me what do your charge and what is your service model? Thank you very much.