Crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo is such a powerful opportunity that nearly every entrepreneur considers it when bringing their next product to market. But, it doesn’t come easy. In fact, most campaigns fail.
Here are some of our secrets and strategies for creating successful campaigns:
Crowdfunding = eCommerce
One thing to keep in mind at all times is that crowdfunding is very much eCommerce. In fact, many of the strategies we implement are simply eCommerce marketing best practices! Of course there are a few secrets and crowdfunding specific nuances, but as a whole it works very similar to any other form of eCommerce.
Just like with eCommerce, you’ll find the most powerful marketing tactics to include:
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Growth Hacking
- PR
- Story Telling
- And Paid Advertising
Let’s dive into each of those channels/strategies in more depth:
Email Marketing for Crowdfunding Campaigns
When running a crowdfunding campaign, email marketing is an extremely powerful and potent tool. Good email marketing starts with building a high quality list.
While you can buy a list of leads, we recommend building your own list using a combination of social media marketing and paid advertising to create a list of high quality leads. When it comes to email marketing, quality is more important than quality!
You want to be building your list far in advance of your campaign launch, that way, when you go live, you can let those people know and start with a bang!
Social Media Marketing
One of the most important factors for successful crowdfunding campaigns is the size of your social media following prior to launch. Your chances at reaching your funding goal increase by an order of magnitude if you have over 1,000 fans on social before you launch your campaign.
This should be very high on your priority list, and is something we make sure to do for each and every client before we launch their campaigns. In fact, we often take their social fans as high as 10,000 before launching!
Drop Teasers!
There’s a lot of frontloading work to find success in a crowdfunding campaign, but don’t think you need to be quite about the fact you’ll be crowdfunding! Drop teasers regarding the campaign and your product as well! These teasers will help to amp your followers up for your campaign, resulting in a big splash when you finally do launch!
Crowdfunding Takes Time
It takes at least one year to run a successful crowdfunding campaign from idea to product production and delivery. If you aren’t planning to allocate at least this much time, you need to reconsider your timeline.
Tell Your Story
A crucial part of crowdfunding is getting your fans to feel like they know you on a personal level. They aren’t just buying a product, they’re buying into an idea, a vision. They need to have good reason to trust an support you, and that comes from telling a compelling story.
A lot of this work is done through your opening video and your pages copy, in which you need to include an about the team section and an our story section.
Influencer Marketing and PR is a Must
Next, you’ll want to be sure to allocate plenty of time and resources to influencer marketing and PR. This can be one of the most difficult aspects of crowdfunding as you may not have the necessary connections to get your product reviewed or talked about in top tier publications.
But regardless the difficulty, you need to be employing this tactic. Influencers and PR can drive huge amounts of traffic to your page, plus their endorsement of your product will result in way more sales than you expect!
This is one of the few tactics that both builds trust and awareness simultaneously!
Crowdfunding Agencies Work!
Last, but certainly not least, don’t be afraid to bring on a crowdfunding agency or consultant. Our services can not only increase the amount of revenue your campaign generates, but can remove some of the large workload from your plate and even reduce risk!
The numbers speak for themselves: You have a roughly 30% chance of success on your own, but our agency has a 100% success rate. Simply put, you can’t go wrong when hiring a crowdfunding agency!
