5 Crowdfunding Mistakes to Avoid So You Don’t Lose Money
Crowdfunding can undoubtedly be a key driver of your initial success, however, many people lose money on poorly planned and executing campaigns that do little to grow awareness of their product and build a community.
Major failures include selling yourself too hard or to the wrong people, and not focusing on sustainable trust-building and engagement strategies. To help you avoid this and other mistakes, we’ve outlined some steps to keep you on the right track.
Don’t Create too Many Reward Tiers
Your first initial challenge is getting people on board and interested in your project. You don’t want to confuse people with too many choices when it comes to rewarding tiers initially. People may be turned away because they’re not sure what they’re willing to pay for.
Create a low-level reward tier for a small value to bring on a good base of support first, then nurture your base so that they can change their pledge later on, once they’ve developed a closer connection to your project.
Don’t Forget to Nurture Your Community
Great crowdfunding campaigns are built on strong communities. Growing your total number of potential backers is important, but for them to be useful to your cause and goals, you’ll need to find ways to connect with them and get them excited.
Offering platforms for sharing and discussion will help individuals feel connected and more likely to support you.
Ultimately, people want to be involved and not left in the dark after making their pledge. One of the best ways to do this is to tell people what’s happening behind the scenes, regarding the development processes or milestones in your project. A few effective activities include:
- Live events and demonstrations of your product
- Educational content about your product
- Interviews with you and your team
- Generally being active on social media spaces
Don’t Sell Too Hard
Resist the urge to sell hard, no matter how much you think it's necessary. Often, the best way to sell your product is to simply share great, original content with your audience. Spend time finding out what people are likely to enjoy or the questions they have about your mission, and create content that is useful and interesting.
Don’t Launch without Laying the Groundwork First
Patience and timing are incredibly important when bringing a new product to market. Even with an amazing concept that you know people will love, you’ll first need to dedicate some time to community building so you have an excited group of dedicated fans ready to jump in on the first day and spread the word about your project.
As providers of crowdfunding marketing services and Kickstarter video production in London, we’ve witnessed the best campaigns exceed their goals within the first 24 hours. If you don’t think you’ll be able to do this yourself, consider what preparation you can make to improve your chances.
Don’t Forget to Be You
A crowdfunding campaign is quite different from a standard marketing or sales campaign for an existing brand or product. At the heart of it is the need to convey your personal vision and goals, and the great potential of your project to new audiences. This requires you to be genuine and authentic in your delivery of messages.
Showcasing who you are and why you truly believe in your project is one of the most effective ways to get people on board.
Start Promoting Your Campaign
Crowdfunding success relies on many things, including creating a dedicated community of supporters who will follow your company as it grows.
If you want help or advice on building your following, or would like to talk to us about Kickstarter video production in London, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
How to Choose an Influencer for Your Crowdfunding Campaign
Influencer marketing is a powerful tool that can be used for getting your project and products in front of more people and establishing connections with a new audience.
However, the hardest part of any influencer marketing campaign is finding the right individuals to become ambassadors for your brand.
The Role of Influencer Marketing in Spreading Your Message
- Leverage the existing trust of influencers
- Get people to actually take notice of your product and spend time learning about your offerings
- Promote the lifestyle appeal of your product through content that features your product being used by your influencer
- Promote your brand across more channels
- Tap into niche demographics with specific interests
- Influencers may be able to support other initiatives like your crowdfunding corporate video production, used to attract new users on multiple channels
What Does a Good Influencer Look Like?
The best influencers are not merely one-time-only channels that you can use to send out promotional content to vast audiences. A good influencer for your project is someone who is willing to form a strategic partnership with you, based on shared values.
An influencer is someone who has the power to affect people’s purchasing decisions, but the reason they can do this is that they have the admiration and respect of their followers.
Simply choosing someone with the most amount of followers within your budget isn’t going to actually help you build a community, especially when this individual's personal branding doesn’t match up with your own, or if they currently publish large volumes of sponsored content on their platforms from other brands.
Ultimately, you must find people whose influence is related to your product. A few things you can consider when determining someone’s suitability for your brand include:
- Relevance - does their audience match with your target profile?
- Alignment - do their principles and core values align with your brands?
- Reach - does their reach offer you good potential returns?
- Resonance - how engaged is their audience and how likely are they to interact with their messaging?
Types of Influencer by Audience Size
When thinking about influencers, remember that bigger is not necessarily better. Large audiences with low engagement are pretty useless when you think about it. Many of us follow social media celebrities with huge audiences but don’t actually give them much notice when we see their sponsored or promotional posts pop up on our feeds.
There are four main types of influencers to consider:
- Mega influencers - These are people who are often celebrities of some kind, with followings of more than a million people. However, they tend to have lower engagement with their posts. They can also be very expensive to work with.
- Macro influencers - These influencers may have between 100,000 and 1 million followers and have usually built their popularity based on specific activities or themes, such as fitness, travel, food or other common interests.
- Micro-influencers - With between 10,000-100,000 followers, most influencers fall in this category, which is the most popular type for brands seeking partnerships and ambassadorships. One major reason for this is the audience size offers good amplification while engagement is still high. They tend to bring decent returns when carefully chosen for your project or brand.
- Nano influencers - There’s nothing wrong with an influencer with under 10,000 followers if they have strong engagement from their audience and interests that align with your brand values. They are more likely to be free agents and open to collaborations, as well as more selective in their promotion of certain brands. As such, they’ll have strong trust and loyalty from followers and can be the most impactful influencers to work with.
Tips for Finding Influencers
- Search social media platforms for relevant terms and hashtags to find people who are posting interesting content in your field and to communities that you want to target.
- Consider all platforms, including those you may not be that familiar with. Channels like TikTok may be able to offer you a lower entry cost with higher engagement, especially if you’re targeting younger demographics
- Grow your LinkedIn network in your field to discover people who are influential in your sector. You may find people already posting related content.
- Check the kind of influencers that competitors are using for a better idea about the content that performs well.
- Keep in mind that an influencer can also be a blog or news source dedicated to your field, rather than a person.
Need Help?
If you’re looking for ways to reach new audiences we might be able to help. We offer a range of crowdfunding marketing services, including crowdfunding corporate video production.
The Power of Kindness in Your Crowdfunding Project
There’s a lot of talk about kindness in the business world these days. Many brands are now realising the benefit that promoting kindness through internal practices and brand marketing can have.
This doesn't just apply to the way people feel and are motivated within the workplace, but also how brands interact with customers and connect with them on a genuine human level, ultimately helping organisations to generate better profits.
As a crowdfunding and Kickstarter video maker agency, this component of kindness is especially interesting for us because we see the way different businesses and projects leverage it to interact with new potential investors, fans and partners.
Within the context of crowdfunding and the need to deliver direct messages and CTAs to your audience in a personal way, there’s arguably a greater need for you to convey your self and your small team as kind, friendly, and personable people who care about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
As such, we explore the role of kindness in crowdfunding and brand marketing.
What Does Kindness Look Like?
- Showing people that you care about the world
- Promoting certain social or environmental issues
- Having strong company values
- Interacting with people on a human level
- Offering people value without an agenda
It’s What Consumers Want
People want much more substance today from the brands and businesses they support. There’s now a huge premium on kindness and what companies can do to show people that they care about something, whether it’s specific social issues or company values like equality and diversity.
Many consumers will continue to combine morals and money by making values-driven purchases and looking to spend their money in places that are less damaging to the planet.
As this trend continues, tapping into this aspect of the consumer mindset is something that can help you grow a strong following early on. When you’re trying to inspire people to get on board and make people care about your project, you must show them that you truly care about something too.
Attracting Impact investors
Many investors have money set aside for projects that focus on having a positive change in the world. When raising funds so that your business can grow, consider that investors are much more likely to back companies that align with their own values.
Illustrating certain passions, beliefs and goals for improving things in some small way can help you to connect with like-minded people who will be more likely to back you. Furthermore, these individuals are more likely to develop a long term relationship with your brand and can become a vital part of your community going forward.
This isn't to say that simply stating that your business is committed to having a positive contribution to society and the environment will get you more money. It means that when you compliment the soundness of your concept, business plan and project vision with the intention to do some good, people are much more likely to support you.
Making Your Values Clear
If you haven’t already, try to achieve some clarity about what your values are as a business. To attract investors who align with your own values you'll first need to be sure of what those values are.
This can help to define your vision for the future and makes it easier to convey through your crowdfunding marketing campaigns that you’re committed to achieving specific goals. The aim of this process should be to crystalise why you do what you do and what you and your business stand for.
Showing Humility and Transparency
Being transparent about the small tangible efforts you are making to improve the world and spread kindness, even within extremely small areas, is better than making bold claims about changing the world (and not following through).
People are ultimately tired of grand gestures that fall flat. For example, if you want to plant a thousand trees to offset your carbon footprint, dig deeper into how this activity will fit in with the local ecosystem and promote biodiversity for the future. Anyone can plant trees.
Also, long-term commitment to small achievable projects is always much better than generic goodness campaigns or one-off donations to charities.
It’s Good for Your Too
Running a project and business with greater integrity and values does more than just help you to collect more followers and grow. It can also be fundamental to your motivation when developing your organisation, whatever it may be.
If you want to explore how you can convey your core values and beliefs through your crowdfunding promotional content, we’re a Kickstarter video maker agency that would love to help you showcase your beliefs and ideas to your audience.
Storytelling - The Power of Narrative in Crowdfunding
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools you can harness during your crowdfunding campaign.
There’s nothing quite like it when it comes to getting investors and future customers on board, connecting with them through compelling and captivating stories about your brand and what you hope to one day achieve.
Why Is Storytelling So Important?
- Helps people relate to you and connect on a more emotional level
- Taps into the values and passions of your crowd
- Allows people to visualise your journey as a business
- Illustrates the vision you hope to achieve in more detail
- Makes you appear more genuine and human
Understanding the Types of Stories Audiences Love
Telling your story in the right way is an art. And when you want people to back your concept, there are a few proven ways to make your story resonate with your audience. Below are a few archetypal story techniques that might help your Kickstarter.
Personal Stories
People need to trust you before they back you. They also need to understand that they’re dealing with a genuine human who is committed to specific values and goals. Without this, it can be incredibly hard for people to part with their money and actually invest in you emotionally.
By making your story personal, you can overcome this trust barrier and connect with people on a human level. Conveying who you are as a person with real character traits and flaws will give people a better understanding of who they’re dealing with and the risk they’re taking when they invest.
This can involve sharing with people the major drivers behind your motivation to build your business or project. Knowing that you’re in it for more than just the money will allow people to believe in what you’re doing.
Overcoming Adversity
Everyone loves a story of overcoming adversity. Whether the monster in your tale is an actual person or just a difficult circumstance, we all love to see characters fight against hardship and evil forces to eventually come outstanding.
You might not be comfortable portraying yourself as a hero in your own story, but this can be an indelible powerful tool in getting people to back you. Alternatively, you can create the sense that your project or even the investor or customer is the hero who is battling adversity.
Or perhaps you can combine everything and describe your project and all the people behind it as the hero who is taking on an industry or sector that ultimately evil or corrupt.
Fear vs Happiness
Two of the most powerful emotions to leverage during speeches, talks, crowdfunding videos and pitches are feelings of happiness and fear.
While happiness can inspire someone to feel good about your project and the chance of doing good through backing you, fear can be used to motivate people to get involved before it’s too late and they miss out.
One of these things might be more suited to your brand and personality, but understanding the role that emotions like these have in your storytelling is important.
Tragedy
Obviously, you don’t want to leverage the tragedy theme as a motivator unless there is actually a real tragedy to convey, to avoid the risk of losing integrity.
However, if you’re launching a project that aims to improve society or support damaged communities after a natural disaster, for example, tapping into genuine tragedy can be a key motivator that gets people on board.
Real-life stories from the people you are trying to support or case studies about how businesses or communities have suffered can help people to realise your project can help to alleviate some of the suffering and damage caused by a tragedy.
How to Tell Your Story
You might have a lot to say, so keeping things logical and concise can help you to make your crowdfunding story more compelling and digestible. Here are some basic best practices you can try to follow.
- Start with a personal introduction
- Explore the challenge and adversity you face
- Offer your solution and the potential benefits your project will have
- Provide specific examples to improve the emotional connection
- Keep your story short and concise
- End with a call-to-action
Always End with a Call to Action
Your story should end with a call to action so that you can actually achieve a tangible goal. This could simply be for people to invest or for them to subscribe to your social channels and share your content with as many people as possible.
Whatever it is, your narrative should conclude with you requesting that people do something that can contribute to the progression of your story.
Inspiring Crowdfunding Videos in London
If you’re looking to tell your story through inspiring crowdfunding videos in London, get in touch with us at Wow Your Crowd and we’ll be happy to explore your own narrative and how we might be able to present this to your crowd to create stronger connections with your audience and drive support.
