How to promote an EOS dApp?

by | Apr 15, 2019 | EOS

In the last article we were reasoning about dApps migration tendency on EOS blockchain. You can read more about it here.

So if you are migrating to EOS or making your dApp from the scratch, maybe you are wondering: “How to promote my dApp on EOS market?”. We will try to answer this question now.

To begin with let me ask you one question: What really makes the project important, relatable and well-known among others?

There are 2 things: unique value and users.

In case of value things are quite clear. At the initial time, in the time when the first ideas were raised, you already had this understanding of value you want to distribute to market. Cause no value – no product.

And the second thing is a little bit complicated – users. Without people your product’s value is nothing. Only audience’s attention and indifference, applauds and ridicule make sense for project. They bring prominence and publicity, we give chances for people’s ideas and creations. This is a legitimate concern for all of us — how the get people’s attention to our project, especially on the EOS market?

Promotion — solution?

It is not a secret for everyone, who tried to analyze the dApp market or to try some advertising services dApp — you will meet some problems of EOS market. Among them are limited quantity of users, absence of trust and complicated entry process in EOS, just due to the lack of needed knowledge. You don’t need to be even a marketer to make sense of this interdependency. The right solution to convey your dApp value for people is good promotion.

So let’s talk about popular and effective ways of dApp promotion.

P.S. All ways are prepared for the projects with clear understanding of their target audience and demand for the product value they bring.

4 Ways of promoting your dApp on EOS

1. Tokens bounty program

Bounties in the digital word take their origin from online gaming platforms that offered rewards for participating in their game development. Bounties are essentially incentivized reward mechanisms offered by companies to individuals.

@What are Bounty Programs in ICO campaigns?

Majority of projects on blockchain platforms have its own token, most likely your app has it too. Token acts as some kind of public shares. Besides the main purpose, tokens can be used to for promotion.

Project may offer to make clearly identified actions to dApp promotion and attract new users for your product. And of course, projects should pay for those actions with tokens.

Usually each task is specified as concretely as possible and estimated in a fixed number of tokens. Here are some popular tasks for bounty program:

  • Repost of a dApp promo publication. Moreover more followers user have on his page, the more tokens should be brought to him by the reposts.
  • Referral rewards for inviting other users
  • Chat activity rewards
  • Bug bounty programs – checking bugs and vulnerabilities by users

In this promoting approach you need to keep balance with bounty token amount to avoid token value dumping. Conditions of bounty program must be balanced as well. It should be quite simple to attract users, but not very simple to avoid token gathering bots.

Main Pros:

  • Gaining user base
  • Project and Brand recognition increasing

Main Cons:

  • Token could lost it’s value
  • Involvement of knowingly disinterest in project users
  • Problem with bots

2. Cooperation with Opinion Leaders

First of all we need to determine who are this Opinion Leaders.

In all markets, EOS market in particular, there are many professionals at their business. And some of them are actively communicating with the market audience. This active people have a lot of subscribers on their social media pages, people are listening him and they are under his influence.

Opinion leader’s point of view is valuable for his audience. And of course they can tell to his subscribers about your project.

This way of promotion has great value as it brings direct communication with your TA.

On EOS market there are a some professionals who are Opinion Leaders. They can write an article about your dApp, create video or even become you brand ambassador.

The most popular and engaging content, made by Opinion Leaders, is video reviews.

These guys can make a good review of you dApp or make an interview with you project representative:

There are a lot of gambling dApps on EOS. So if your project is among those, many promo options will be closed for you. But it is not a reason to refuse advertising. Here are few good channels, that can make a promo for you:

This guys don’t have so big audience, but they can reach the specific audience you need.

Pros of using Opinion Leaders:

  • Your message gains value;
  • High engagement level in your message;
  • Brand’s visibility for active target audience;

Сons:

  • Lack of bloggers, which doesn’t have their own project to promote and establish;
  • Leader reputation could be doubtful, you need to check everything good
  • Cost. Lack of such persons generates high price of their services

3. In-dApp FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

FOMO marketing constitutes an effective way of users involvement in dApp promotion. As crypto dApps are still very much driven by emotions rather than valuation, FOMO is a huge factor to swing this emotional driver. It can still sometimes apply to other markets, not just cryptocurrencies, but it does seem to affect cryptos much more than others.

Every FOMO campaign are lead by 3 main foundations: slots scarcity, profit probability and time limitation. You may easily use FOMO marketing for your dApp.

Good ways of FOMO for any kind of dApp will be:

  • Time limited competitions
  • Leaderboards of some in dApp actions
  • Daily, weekly, time limited tasks

All of this FOMO features must have a reward and the result will not take long.

In-dApp FOMO Pros:

  • Drastic users quantity increasing;
  • Great users engagement

Cons:

  • Complexity of implementing. You need to know your user’s behavior very well to launch FOMO that will influence on him. Balance between reward and efforts must be respected as well.

4. Community Building

Community is the army of your dApp! The bigger community you have – the bigger impact your dApp create on the market. Community is a core of your audience, the most loyal users. These people are spreading the word of your project to the world.

Active and satisfied community will easily involve new users and will show a great growth. Opposite mood will scare away newcomers and entail a decrease in community. So your only way to succeed is to keep the community in a satisfied state.

Only community brings popularity to startup. The right constructed model of communication with them may bring you more than you can expect.

On EOS market the most common channel for community building is Telegram messenger. We don’t know a person who is an EOS user and don’t have Telegram account.

But of course there are few other channels that will help you to gain your community:

  • WeChat. Use this messenger if your dApp audience includes asian people  
  • Discord. This application is made for gamers. So if your dApp is gaming dApp – this is essential for you.

Right Community Building strategy consists of:

  • Content that builds trust
  • Content that educates
  • User-generated content
  • Other people’s content
  • Content that converts

Point of these content variations is to grow your business through the building high meaningful value for your audience.

Of course there are a lot of other different ways to promote your project. We’ve pointed major options of marketing activities which, from our point of view, is essential for EOS market. This ways of promotion will keep you dApp growing. But you can make you own research and add more specified promotions. Eventually, every kind of promotion need to be implemented according to the project specifics.