Using Instagram for Crowdfunding? Don’t Forget to Do These 5 Things
Using Instagram to promote your crowdfunding campaign can be a smart move when trying to build awareness of your project and a strong community of followers. Despite this, many owners steer clear of using this channel and focus on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn only.
This may be because they are seen as more effective ways to deliver the nuance and complexity of your campaign to potential high-net-worth investors, through longer text-based posts. It might also be because when crowdfunding campaigns are in their earliest stages, you might have very few visual assets to support a robust Instagram presence.
While there's some truth in these assumptions, it’s clear that a strategic Instagram marketing plan can help you to engage with a huge number of users who could become integral to your community going forward. It does require more consideration of presentation and visual quality, but a few best practices and tips can help you achieve a lot on this platform in a relatively short space of time.
1. Set Up a Good Base
There are a few basic things every Instagram campaign needs to be effective, whether you’re crowdfunding or trying to make actual sales through your account
- A perfectly crafted bio – The short blurb about your campaign or product needs to be both concise and compelling. It’s also smart to include a suitable link to other pages or locations where people can keep learning about you and your mission. This could be a Facebook page, pre-launch website, crowdfunding page and video, or a link tree account where you can keep all your links in one place.
- Regular posts - When visitors land on your page, they’ll expect to see it populated with a decent collection of posts, with recent additions to show people that you’re currently active.
- Highlights that tell a story - Once you’ve uploaded a few great stories about your project, feature highlights on your account so that new users can quickly learn about your story and get involved. Ultimately, Instagram stories are just as important as standard posts today and making sure they are accessible for your users even after 24 hours is the best way to maximise impact.
As a crowdfunding video production company, we believe in the power of video. If you’re launching an Instagram campaign, we may be able to help you make the most of your video content for all your promotion activities.
2. A Diverse and Strategic Post Flow
In addition to seeing great posts from you, variation in your type and style is important too. People don’t want to see the same posts again and again. To vary posts, consider using a combination of the following to mix things up:
- Photos of your team with real quotes
- Photos of your products
- Candid behind the scenes action
- Videos as well as photos
- Collection of photos, not just single uploads
- A balanced visual presentation with consistent branding
3. Maximise the Power of Captions
Instagram is a visual-first platform, but it’s captions that will truly get people to commit to your cause. They’re a powerful stage in a typical user’s conversion journey, and having content that educates and engages with users is key to building on the initial engagement you receive.
Each caption should channel traffic to specific locations where you can continue to interact with your future customers. This requires smart calls to actions that request your followers to complete some sort of action after viewing your post, such as sharing, commenting, and liking, or visiting other pieces of the published content.
4. Engage with Users Directly
People will ask some great questions in comments and while replying to them can be time-consuming and tedious, it’s an amazing way to build trust with users. By engaging with people on your Instagram account, you can start to connect with them in a more direct way.
Some users may be on the fence about committing, and if you're able to answer comments in a quick and friendly manner, you can convert followers who simply need some reassurance before they make their pledge.
Don’t worry if you sometimes receive negative comments or feedback. Showing users that you are able to remain cordial, polite and helpful is what really matters. Everyone can view your comments and responses, so it’s best to address these issues directly and in a respectable way.
5. Create Great Instagram Stories
Creating great Instagram stories is a true art. Whether it’s short videos or photos, they give people a quick snapshot of what you’ve got going on, from your daily activities to snippets of your promotional video content.
When crowdfunding, so much relies on being genuine and establishing close connections with a community. Stories are a great way to invite people in to build trust between your brand and a future community who are invested in what you’re doing.
More Social Media Crowdfunding Tips
Get in touch with us to learn more about how you can maximise the impact of your crowdfunding campaign. We’re a crowdfunding video production company that can help you produce engaging, educational and attention-grabbing content, but we also draw from a deep well of marketing experience in helping our clients get the most from their campaigns.
Why Relationship Building Is Fundamental to Crowdfunding Success
We all know that relationships matter in life and business, but many of us struggle in this area. While we know it can have a positive impact on our endeavours, humans sometimes have a natural reluctance to build new connections with people, which has arguably gotten worse as we rely more and more on technology to facilitate our interactions.
In truth, the art of relationship-building is one of the most important tools for growing your idea into a fully-backed and anticipated crowdfunding project.
Relationships and Not Sales
We can all send out thousands of emails each week as part of a campaign, but this is not relationship building. Neither is posting self-promotion on your social media channels. While you might be able to drive awareness of your brand through high volume marketing tactics, crowdfunding marketing campaigns really call for a more personal and intimate approach, closer to good old fashioned face-to-face relationship building.
This is because so much relies on people seeing you as a genuine, likeable and interesting person for them to back you and become part of your community. Your legacy will ultimately be defined by how you leverage technologies and tools like your crowdfunding video to establish real relationships with people at scale.
This is also an area where one powerful relationship with the right person can do much more than several loose connections with multiple people.
Four Strategies for Building Better Relationships
1. Make Time
Trying to be too efficient can often lead us to spend too little time on the things that will have a greater impact on our lives. Ironically, this can be incredibly inefficient when you realise down the line that your time was wasted on menial tasks or low-impact outreach activities.
Obviously, you should still be strategic in how you spend your time, but make sure you allow enough capacity in your schedule to build stronger relationships. This could mean direct calling a few potential backers and telling them more about your vision, running a virtual Q&A session for your community, or simply reading your social media comments and replying to them personally.
People can tell if you’re rushing things and if instead, you give someone the time of day and develop a personal connection with them, you’ll be able to create a stronger foundation for your project, built on people who are more invested in you and what you’re trying to achieve.
2. Don’t Forget About Your Friends
We all take for granted the people in our lives to some extent. And in the world of crowdfunding, it’s easy to get carried away with searching for new backers, rather than nurturing the relationship we already have. However, when you’re trying to build a strong community of followers and backers, it’s risky to neglect those who have already pledged support.
Rather than having people drop off, it’s best to find new ways to bring your most loyal and long-term backers and partners into the fold more closely. The ultimate goal should be for individuals to become ambassadors for your brand, and keeping them involved can lead to new opportunities for brand awareness and community building.
3. Don’t Automate too Much
Even if you’re trying to make the most of your time, this doesn't mean that generic communications and marketing automation should make their way into your strategy. People require personal contact and interaction for relationships to truly grow and you won’t be doing anyone a favour with non-personalised marketing or comms.
4. Be Present
Even when you don’t think you really have anything interesting to say to people, it’s important to let them know you’re there. Regular communication with your community or individual backers can help them to feel included in what you’re doing, helping you to build a stronger connection with them.
Looking for More Tips?
Let us know if you’re looking for more tips and advice to improve your crowdfunding marketing campaigns. As well as experience producing engaging crowdfunding videos for our clients, our team at Wow Your Crowd has a wealth of expertise about promoting your campaign to the right people, we’d be happy to share this with you.
What Kind of PR Strategy Works Best for Crowdfunding Campaigns?
Behind most successful crowdfunding projects is a strategically planned and executed PR campaign. However, the process of getting highly authoritative media outlets and reporters to feature you in their content isn’t simple.
While some founders might be naturally talented in this area, other crowdfunding projects will have to think very carefully about their approach when looking for coverage.
Why Does Press Matter?
- Credibility - Validation from an authoritative reporter is a key factor in generating trust with people and building your reputation. With good PR published online, an article written about your vision and journey from a respected publication is a sure way to improve your credibility.
- Raise brand awareness - A PR campaign with decent amplification will undoubtedly help spread the word about your campaign to a larger audience.
- Drive better traffic - Traffic that comes from a third-party post will yield much higher conversion rates than simply publishing the content yourself, with people more likely to trust your brand.
Why Is It Difficult?
The best PR is earned, not paid for. While you have the option of hiring professionals to handle your PR outreach activities or paying for access to various digital PR tools, you will have to ensure that you are still offering something valuable, original and genuine to potential publications and journalists.
Sometimes this is hard because you haven't made it to the final stage of product development yet, making it less appealing for journalists to cover your story. At other times, you may find it hard to reveal to people what is so groundbreaking and interesting about your project.
Having a niche product also makes it harder to appeal to platforms that cater to a more general market. For instance, if your project is deemed to be too specific, people might not want to cover you at the risk of too few of their audience showing interest.
In the end, media outlets need something that will interest and educate their audiences, so you’ll need to find a way of providing this. If you have a product that is truly groundbreaking, however, it should be more than possible to be featured by respected outlets with the right PR strategy.
Target Specific Outlets with Dedicated Content
While planning your outreach campaign, make a selection of outlets you want to target based on their proximity to your market and the kind of audiences they have. This will enable you to spend time where it matters, with news about your project having the potential of driving the most traffic.
Next, try to create unique content for each publication, rather than just generic information about your product. For example, you could offer individual interviews to writers in your industry. Remember that journalists want fresh content and are not interested in writing about a product that has already been covered by their peers.
If you have something very special to give away, such as new data about your product, news about a shift in your strategy or the fact that you’ve reached a crowdfunding milestone, save this information for specific publications that have a greater impact.
Establish Relationships Before Your Campaign Starts
It’s good to start working on your PR strategy and implementation a few months before you want to make a big push on this side of things. Waiting until one week before your launch of your Kickstarter could leave you with very little press when it matters the most.
If you are not hiring a crowdfunding marketing agency that already has established connections with a network of journalists, you’ll want to start building relationships as early as possible. You can do this quite easily on platforms like LinkedIn where you can tap into your professional network and look for journalists in your sector that could be willing to cover your campaign.
Remember, building relationships takes time and effort, but journalists are always in search of good stories so if you pitch the opportunity in the right way, there’s no reason you can’t get some prominent voices to speak about your upcoming launch.
Create a Solid Press Kit
A press kit contains must-have information that reporters should receive about your product and campaign. This helps entice them as well as gives them the basic facts that will help them write a story.
This should include things like:
- Bios of the key people of your crowdfunding campaign
- Facts and figures on the industry your project belongs to
- A comprehensive press release
Looking for a Crowdfunding Marketing Agency?
If you want to learn more about running a successful PR campaign for your crowdfunding project, get in touch with us at Wow Your Crowd. As well as helping founders create engaging crowdfunding videos, we can offer our expertise when it comes to the best ways to achieve good press.
