Can you remember the story of Robert the Bruce and the Spider? In our childhood, we have read some stories that have given us some vital life lessons. You might be thinking what’s the link between the story and the present article you are reading. Wait a while! Just close your eyes and imagine how many times you have failed as an entrepreneur.
Behind every successful business, there is a story of failure. But the success is ultimately touched because those entrepreneurs have never given up just like the spider of the childhood story. So far the success of a business is concerned, it depends on the fund or financial base to a great extent.
Gone are those days when aspirant entrepreneurs sacrificed their dreams due to the lack of funds. Crowdfunding platforms have opened the door of success for the business owners. Nowadays, raising funds is not a big deal if you can properly execute an effective crowdfunding marketing strategy. In this article, you will learn everything about crowdfunding marketing that you need to know.
What’s Crowdfunding Marketing Strategy?
Crowdfunding is a marketing strategy for raising money from a huge number of people who can contribute a small amount to your business or project. In return, you need to offer them some benefits. In the past few years, crowdfunding has gained immense popularity. If you can successfully convince large masses of people to contribute a small amount, you will be able to generate required capital within a short time without much hassle.
A Few Examples of Effective Crowdfunding
There are a number of businesses that have achieved immense success with the help of crowdfunding marketing. This list of successful business crowdfunding campaigns includes the Pebble E-Paper Watch, Ouya, Pono Music and many more names.
The Pebble E-Paper Watch
You may recall the Pebble E-Paper gained $10.2 million in only 37 days. A huge mass of backers grabbed the proposal offered by this campaign. Today, we all know the Pebble E-Paper for their reasonable smart watches.
Ouya
The open-source game Ouya raised almost $8.5 million in only 29 days using Kickstarter’s crowdfunding platform. The company managed to offer their contributors the game within 10 months of launching the crowdfunding campaign.
Pono Music
Pono Music touched the magical figure of $6 million within 30 days. After gaining the funding, PonoMusic developed its operating model including a PonoPlayer.
These businesses have done crowdfunding successfully. You can look at them for inspiration. Now, here’s an example of a project that is going through this crowdfunding process right now and doing pretty well. It’s A Squirrel’s Life is a game that is designed to help children develop and improve their math, negotiation, and social (STEM) skills. Squirrel’s Life is an interesting game introduced by Randy Hecht, a former aerospace engineer.
Hecht rescued a squirrel, “Roxy” and Roxy, in turn, inspired him to invent an interesting child’s game Moxy Roxy. It’s a tabletop game for 2-4 players (ages of 8 and above). It is a game of 30-60 minutes in which the participants will undertake a live journey with a tree squirrel. The participants need to collect food and five tail rings that signify the squirrel’s life milestone achievements. The player who accomplishes it first, will win the game.
Moxy Roxy is looking for funding through Kickstarter. It has fixed $15,000 as its target. Some backers have already contributed. And there’s still time left for hitting the target.
Outline of an Effective Crowdfunding Marketing Strategy
Here’s an outline that can help to create your own crowdfunding marketing strategy. A crowdfunding marketing strategy involves several steps. In order to get success, you need to follow them all:
Research Your Audience
Before doing anything, you need to study hard about crowdfunding and then you need to conduct some thorough research. Analyze the nature of your business or project to identify the target audience for your campaign. When you narrow down the range of your target audience, you will be able to determine how you should market your campaign, keeping in mind the possible requirements and expectations of your contributors. You should research both the market and the competition to create an ideal marketing strategy for your target audience.
Pick the Right Crowdfunding Platform
The success of your campaign, to a great extent, depends on the crowdfunding platform you have picked. There are a dozen platforms and each has certain advantages and disadvantages. Since you can pick only one for your campaign, you need to do a lot of research to pick the right platform. Some of the most popular crowdfunding platforms include Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Fundable, GoFundMe and AngelList.
Launch a Website or a Landing Page
Before launching the campaign page on your channel, it would be better if you can create a website or a landing page. Until your campaign page goes live, let this website serve as your central hub for all of your operations. It will help you test whether the chosen headlines and taglines for your brand are working well or not. You can channel the web traffic from anywhere — be it social media platforms or a search engine. When you have a website for your crowdfunding campaign, you can easily compile all the important information about your business or product here. Your user will get all the required information from this website or landing page. Apart from this, it will help you to expand even when your crowdfunding campaign is over. Then, you can use this site as the central hub for marketing your brand or product.
Create a Blog
With the help of a blog, you can do a lot of things, such as:
- You can provide your visitors the latest updates about the progress of your project.
- A blog can serve you like an archive where your potential contributors can find important and relevant posts. In this way, you can help your visitors to track the history of your project.
- The blog serves as the base of your entire content marketing strategy for your crowdfunding campaign. With the help of your blog, you can draw the attention of a huge social media audience.
Build Useful Networks on Social Media
Social media is one of your most effective weapons. Start with as many social media platforms as you can manage. Even a hundred followers can take you nearer to your goal. Therefore, it is really important to integrate your campaigns with effective channels like social media.
Don’t Forget to Submit a Press Release
Launch your campaign with a press release. It will help you make the brand visible and authentic. Apart from this, you will bring referral traffic. Even after the launch, you can submit press releases on several occasions for marketing your brand or product.
Go for Email Marketing
Email marketing greatly energizes marketing. You can promote your contents, coming events, or any special deals through email marketing. First of all, build a list that can lead you to some potential subscribers. You can also rent an email list to trigger interesting and informative contents in the form of email.
Launch Your Campaign at the Right Time
If you want to make your campaign successful, you should choose the time of launching your campaign discretely. If you are in a hurry, then there is no option but to launch it immediately. Otherwise, you can reap some benefits of scheduling your campaign in the near future. For instance, you can avoid overlap of your campaign launch with any other event. On the other hand, you can choose a special season or time as well. For instance, if your project is related to weight loss activities, you can pick January or other festive months when people look for weight loss desperately.
You can Use Apps for Your Crowdfunding Campaign
Popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter have made their apps run open source on android and iOS devices in order to help entrepreneurs or campaign creators. Kickstarter has made its app open source and introduced a lot of exciting features. Its screenshot directory is able to hold almost 500 screenshots of various screens in different languages, and devices. For instance, when the creator of a crowdfunding campaign is looking at his dashboard in French, a baker can view the same in German. This crowdfunding app development feature makes it easier to reach more customers of different states and languages. There are many other exciting features that can help you market your campaign properly.
Some Valuable Content Development Tips for Crowdfunding Campaigns
From the above discussion, it should be crystal clear to you that content is the key to making a crowdfunding marketing strategy successful. Everything, from your proposal to the blog post or email marketing, depends on well-drafted contents. So, here are some valuable tips to generate excellent and engaging contents.
- Draft your content with logic. Provide your audience with reasons they should contribute to your project? Your content should answer all the possible questions the contributors would like to ask.
- Your content should let the readers understand the scope and objective of your project.
- Provide a glimpse of your full plan in your content.
- Try to spark the power of emotional words in a logical way.
- Each of your blog posts should tell an interesting and relevant story or your own experience to the readers. Interact with the readers directly.
- Draft guest posts keeping in mind your target readers. With each post, try to write for different target readers.
A Final Overview
Advanced technology and marketing platforms like crowdfunding have made funding quite easy for businesses. Today, there’s no need to put as much effort into achieving your goals as the spider in the story at the beginning of this article did. Be discrete, choose the right crowdfunding platform, execute an effective crowdfunding marketing strategy and turn your dreams into reality. And keep the spider in the story always in mind and never give up.
Business Team Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “How to Launch a Crowdfunding Marketing Campaign: A Step by Step Guide” was first published on Small Business Trends