Token Launch Marketing: The Plan the Listing Data Supports
Search "token launch marketing" and you get the same playbook a dozen times: ninety days, three phases, build community, activate KOLs, send PR on launch day. Most of those pages are written by agencies selling the plan. We sell one too, so here is the difference. We start from what actually happened to real listings, then work backwards to the plan.
Earlier this year we published 16 months of CEX listings collected by hand. The clearest number in that piece comes from Memento Research, which tracked 118 launches: 84.7% of 2025 TGEs trade below listing price, at a median of -71%. That number is the starting point for everything below. Any plan that ignores it is a plan for a different market.
What the listing data actually says
The drawdown matures with age: in the newest cohorts, August listings sit near zero, July around -40% and May at -80% to -89%. Buying every listing since January 2025 would have cost you half your stack, with every $1,000 turning into about $500 on average (Delphi, 652 listings), and the summer 2025 cohort bled while ETH ran to its $4,946 all-time high. The structure behind it repeats: a token lists with 5-20% float while the perp launches full size, and open interest climbs toward the entire market cap, with $BULLA reaching an OI/MC ratio of 70% and $TA hitting 47%.
Three conclusions follow, and they shape the rest of the plan.
Most of the damage is structural. When a launch is built on a thin float and heavy leverage, marketing decides how loud the listing is, not where the price settles. We'll come back to this, because it is the part no agency likes to say out loud.
Attention peaks early and falls fast. The listing window is short. A launch that spends its budget before the date and goes quiet after it hands the market a clean exit.
The buyers who hold are the ones who arrived before the listing. Holders who found the project through its product, its community or a conversation they trusted behave differently from holders who found it through a paid post in listing week.
Where launch plans break
We see the same five failures across projects of every size.
The narrative comes last. Teams spend months on the product and the tokenomics, then write the story in the final fortnight. The market needs one sentence it can repeat without you in the room. If your own team can't say it the same way twice, nobody else will.
The audience is rented in launch week. Influencer posts bought for the week of the listing reach people who have never heard of you and have no reason to stay. You get a spike in impressions and a crowd with one foot out the door.
Everything fires on one day. A single coordinated blast looks impressive on a dashboard and disappears inside a day. The feed has moved on by the time anyone has read your docs.
There is nowhere to go after the post. A post without a destination is decoration. Every piece of paid attention needs a next step: a Telegram bot, a landing page, a specific exchange pair, and a way to count who took it.
Silence after the listing. This is the most common failure and the most avoidable. The team exhales, the content calendar ends on listing day, and the community reads the silence as a signal.
The plan, sequenced
Before the date: narrative, then audience
Start with the sentence. Write the one-line version of why this project matters now, then test it in public before you spend on it. Threads, Spaces and conversations with people who will disagree with you are cheap ways to find out whether the line survives contact.
Then build the audience that will exist on the date. Paid reach can't do this job. It takes a reason for people to come back: a recurring conversation, a product they can already touch, a community that shows up without an incentive attached. Incentive-driven communities count well and hold badly.
Distribution in waves
Stage the influencer work instead of spending it in one burst. Early posts carry the narrative to people who will actually read it. Later waves carry the date, the pair and the call to action. Sequence by region where it matters, because the same token is a different story in Seoul, Istanbul and Dubai, and the right voices in each market are different people.
Wire the conversion path before the first post
Decide the destination before you buy any attention. Post, then call to action, then the place it lands: a Telegram bot, a landing page, a CEX or DEX pair. Then track who got there. Reach is only useful if you can see which of it turned into holders, and you can only see that if the path was built first.
Listing week
By listing week the work that matters is mostly done. What's left is coordination: every channel pointing at the same place at the same time, answers ready for the obvious questions, and someone watching sentiment closely enough to respond while it still matters.
After the listing: the part everyone skips
Write the post-listing content plan before the listing. The first weeks after the pair goes live are when attention decays fastest and when a steady, confident presence does the most. Product updates, a recurring show, honest commentary on the market: the aim is to give holders a reason to stay that isn't the chart.
Where media fits
Trust is the scarce input in a launch, and it is hard to buy directly. A recurring media format builds it in a way a campaign can't: a regular X Space or live video show where the team talks to recognised people in the industry, on the record, week after week.
That is the logic behind the shows we run. A Space reaches up to 150K listeners, and a live show broadcast to X and YouTube becomes a searchable asset that keeps working long after the listing. If you want to see how the format works for a project, the details are on our X Spaces and video shows page.
What it costs
The influencer line is usually the largest and the least understood. We broke down what crypto KOL campaigns actually cost, what a budget buys and how to spot inflated engagement in a separate piece: What Crypto KOL Campaigns Cost.
What no plan can save
Some launches are structured to fail, and it is worth being honest about that before you spend anything. The warning signs are specific: a float under 25% at TGE, and OI/MC above 15-20% on a token under a month old, with anything above 40% a squeeze zone. Top-10 holders sitting on 50%+ of supply mean insiders are already positioned.
If your structure looks like that, the most valuable marketing decision is to fix the structure first. Louder marketing on a launch built to dump only brings more people in to buy the top. We would rather tell a team this before the date than take the budget and watch it happen. You can run the same check on any launch in ten minutes with the pre-buy checklist in Nobody Is Coming to Your TGE.
What this looks like in practice
Two launches we worked on show the approach from different angles.
8lends used regional adoption as the whole strategy: a Korean push through 20+ influencers and 15+ Naver blogs, built for that market, which returned 147% ROI.
67 (sixsevenapp) worked with us as an end-to-end launch partner: product and mechanics strategy, top-level BD, growth sourcing and a curated token launch on TON.
The common thread is sequence. Neither started with a budget and worked forward. Both started with the market and the story, then built the launch around them.
Planning a launch?
Our team has run marketing across 540+ projects over seven years, and we'd rather tell you early if a launch can win mindshare than find out together after the listing. Tell us the token, the market and the date: we reply within an hour and send a custom plan within 24 hours.