Top 5 Social Media Planning Tools for 2021
Crowdfunding success relies on a few major factors including how well the campaign is presented and how many people it reaches. And assuming you’ve nailed it in the presentation department, one of the best ways to reach more people is through social media.
As a Kickstarter video production company specialising in visual promotion, we understand more than most that having great quality content is only half the battle. Success is driven by the performance on various social channels used to draw attention from your audience.
However, beyond managing our own personal accounts, managing a business or crowdfunding project account can be taxing. You’ll need to regularly post quality content containing the right message, media and targeting parameters, as well as monitor performance and constantly optimise as you go.
As such, having a social media planning tool is a no brainer, whether you need help making posts, scheduling them or simply organising everything so you always have a bird's eye view of your social activities. We explore 5 of the best tools that can help you do this.
1. Canva
Most people know about Canva, but not everyone knows how useful it is for social media management. When you see all those great social posts from brands that have perfectly unified and consistent visual designs on platforms like Instagram, there’s a good chance these are made from Canva templates.
Canva is an excellent tool for anyone managing social media accounts to use. Even with the free account, which doesn’t give you access to all the templates, you can create designer-level marketing assets using any of the thousands of ready-made motifs, features, designs and other graphic elements available to you.
Most recently, you can now connect your social channels and publish or schedule directly from Canva!
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most established and popular apps for social media management and scheduling. You can use it to schedule posts, collaborate with your team and gather insights about your post's performance.
The fact that Hootsuite offers a free plan that can be flexibly upgraded, with the option of even trying out new features for free and then slowly upgrading to higher plans, as per your requirements, makes it a favourite among many.
However, if you’re on a shoestring budget and need some costly features, you might find this platform to be out of your price range initially, especially when many apps are now offering a diverse range of free features.
3. Buffer
Buffer comes with various social media features that allow business and individuals to manage their social activities and track performance, including a nice Chrome extension, which integrates itself seamlessly with your browser.
With Buffer, you have several options for publishing and scheduling content. You can schedule content directly from the desktop app or mobile app dashboard, or you can access it directly through an internet browser. All you need to do is choose the content you want to queue and add it to your publishing flow.
Buffer also shortens links automatically and makes recommendations for posts, based on what you’ve drafted inside the post creation box already. While sometimes off the mark, this can offer some great contributions to your social media content.
4. Loomly
Loomly packages itself as the complete scheduling tool for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Linked In, Google My Business, and more.
Users can easily maintain ideas and plan their social posts in advance, while also receiving live post optimisation tips and examine social media posts. Whether you’re managing a business or personal account, it allows you to oversee approval workflows and automate post scheduling.
Ultimately, Loomly is clean and easy-to-use with a simple dashboard that pretty much anyone can navigate and manage. Also, the calendar can be exported easily to send to clients or for company internal review and tracking.
5. Later
Later has always put a strong emphasis on Instagram. It started as an app dedicated to Instagram as a scheduling tool but has since added new components and features for other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
It is designed to help individual users and businesses of all sizes use the drag-and-drop interface to plan and schedule content such as posts, videos, and stories for Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest every month.
As mentioned, the app has a strong focus on visual content and unless you use Instagram as a primary marketing channel, it might not be the best tool for you. Some people also find it hard to manage the workflow in the app, which requires you to first upload an image as part of your ongoing grid of images, rather than starting with text first, as other platforms allow you to do.
Later has a free plan available that you can use forever, but as you would imagine, you can also get features such as analytics, saved captions, scheduled stories, and more for paid plans.
Why You Need Social Media For A Crowdfunding Campaign
A good crowdfunding social media strategy and smart planning tool will increase your chance of a successful campaign. If you need some more advice or tips on choosing the right tools and techniques to assist your campaign, let us know.
We’re a passionate Kickstarter video production company that loves to produce amazing visual content, but we’re also clued up on all things marketing, especially anything that can help you build awareness and engagement for your crowdfunding campaign!
Running an Email Marketing Campaign for Your Crowdfunding Project? Don’t Forget these Basics!
An email marketing campaign can be effective in more ways than one. And when it comes to crowdfunding, it’s all too often an underutilised tool. Perhaps a reason for this is that founders don't feel they have a substantial subscription base for email marketing to be cost-effective, or that they think this strategy is more suitable for businesses and brands that already have existing and past customers.
However, the truth is that emails are just another way for you to stay connected with your potential investors, partners and whoever else is part of your world.
You don’t need to be selling or promoting anything at all. Some of the best email marketing campaigns are designed to educate and entertain people, giving them useful snippets of information so that they can stay involved in the brand's narrative.
That’s what it’s all about — staying in the minds of your audience and giving them something meaningful and useful so that they keep strengthening their positive opinion of you and what you’re doing.
Based on our experience as a leading crowdfunding marketing agency in the UK, here are a few other things to keep in mind when considering your email marketing for crowdfunding strategy.
1. Build a Targeted Email List (It Doesn’t have to be Huge)
Highly qualified email lists are better than huge ones containing too many people that don’t care about you or your brand. If you start with a small group, that’s completely fine. You can use this as a base and employ various tactics to grow it.
The best way to build a targeted email list is to convert your website visitors into subscribers. This guarantees that people will already be interested in who you are. As 80% of people will leave your site for good after just one visit, even if they like the look of who you are, it’s important to capture their details before they’re gone.
Exit-intent popups are perfect for converting those abandoning visitors into subscribers and fans. After all, many might be in a rush or looking for something slightly different. By giving them a way to stay connected, you could also be doing them a favour.
2. Know Your Goals
Different businesses and brands will have different aims for their email campaigns. Therefore, before you go borrowing any templates or styles, define what it is you want to achieve.
For example, you may be very familiar with email newsletters from fashion or shopping sites like Amazon, but your goal is completely different to theirs as a crowdfunder, so you won’t want to replicate their product-focused campaigns.
Instead, focus on nurturing your leads and potential investors with engaging information about your project, what your values are, and what you’ve been achieving recently. This could be news of any developments or updates from your industry. You could consider giving people insights into your team or letting people know about your crowdfunding milestones.
Always keep in mind the main action you want subscribers to take, such as signing up for an event, following you on social media, or spreading the word to others.
3. Choose the Right Email Type
There are a few key email types.
- Promotional emails talk about offers and sales
- Relational emails give subscribers something you’ve promised, like a weekly newsletter, a free gift, access to the user-only media asset, or other relevant information they can use
- Transactional emails include things like subscriber signup confirmations, welcome messages, order or purchase confirmations and acknowledgements
4. Know Your Audience
Write emails based on what you know about your audience. If you’re just getting started, you’ll have to make some educated guesses but do your best to base your strategy on real data and insights. Google Analytics and your social media profiles might be able to help you get a better picture of your audience's demographics.
5. Find Tools to Help You
The days of manually executing an email campaign are long gone. Today, the best approach is to find a reliable tool or platform that can help you build great emails and send them out to a curated list, all with minimal stress and time wastage. Look for features like:
- Easy campaign creation and automation, including templates
- Ways to segment your audience
- Integrations with the software you already use
- Performance insights
6. Craft Your Subject Line
The subject line plays a crucial role in getting people to open and click your emails. It has to get attention so people actually want to read on. Most subject lines range from 41 to 50 characters and simply tell people what they can expect to read inside the email.
7. Craft Great Emails
In terms of length, think more pamphlet or print advertisement than blog or article length. Also, keep in mind that it’s not the kind of email you would write to a friend or colleague. You're going to need a combination of visuals and text, not long essay-like prose that will immediately turn readers off.
Remember to do these things:
- Always offer value to readers
- Avoid pitching your offer too early
- Address subscribers by name
- Personalized emails based on user needs and expectations
- Be human and try to make an emotional connection
- Choose a CTA that reflects what you want people to do when they’ve read your email
8. Focus on Design
If your emails look terrible, it doesn't matter what your text says. This will reflect badly on you and your crowdfunding project and can actually do more damage than simply not sending out any emails at all.
Also, with more people reading emails on mobile devices, make sure your content is 100% optimized for this. You can easily find great and responsive email templates on platforms like Mailchimp.
9. Test and Track
Like all good marketing campaigns, you should be testing everything to make sure your output is as good as it can be. This means creating different versions of a design, layout, marketing copy, subject lines and CTAs. You can also consider testing between different segments to see who responds better.
Monitor things like open rates, clicks, unsubscribes and forwards. And remember, it’s better for email marketing open and click rates to have fewer active subscribers than large numbers of inactive ones.
Building a Crowdfunding Marketing Campaign?
If you’re looking for new ways to engage your audience and build followers, consider working with a leading crowdfunding marketing agency in the UK that can help you tailor your marketing activities to grow a bigger and stronger base of followers. Get in touch for more tips and advice!
4 Things to Keep in Mind when Choosing a Brand Ambassador
Brand ambassadors are a powerful tool for any company. They’re effective at cutting through the noise in crowded spaces, lending you some credibility and generally getting the word out there among the groups that can really make a difference.
However, when you’re engaged in a collaboration with a brand ambassador of some kind, whether they work with you on a formal or informal basis, you can’t work with simply anyone. As well as being closely related to your sector, and with a suitable audience, they need to share similar values and attitudes with you.
Poor alignment between a brand and an ambassador will only lead to a loss of credibility on both parts and potentially damage your reputation. Based on our experience as a creative crowdfunding video maker agency, we’ve seen how great ambassadors can really make campaigns come alive. We explore a few things that will help you choose the right person for the job.
Understand the Role of Brand Ambassador
A brand ambassador is a person who helps increase brand awareness for a specific product, service or organisation. Often receiving financial compensation for their efforts (but not always), they engage in promotional activities on behalf of the brand to spread awareness to their existing audiences.
This group of people are sometimes quite distinct from social media influencers as the relationship between the individual and brand is often more natural and organic. Also, ambassadors are often more closely connected with the brand itself with relationships that can be long-term, over the course of many months or even years, rather than just working on standalone campaigns.
For example, a campaigner for certain social issues or causes may take on an ambassadorship role for a brand that shares the same values. They may have even been a past customer and could be willing to work for free.
Having said this, there is certainly overlap with paid social influencers who will receive rewards of various kinds for featuring a product or service on their channels.
Many different types of brands use ambassadors for several reasons; such as humanising an organisation, exemplifying brand values and core identity; or building trust around a brand with niche target demographics, who would otherwise be hard to persuade.
How to Find Brand Ambassadors
The best way to find an ambassador is to know what you're looking for. While you may be able to work with a talent or influencer agency to connect you with the right person, there’s no reason you can’t find an ambassador yourself, through your own network.
For example, you could review your existing followers on your LinkedIn account and look for potential candidates for ambassadors, before reaching out to them directly. You might even be able to do some searches around your industry to see who is actively publishing content, and then get in touch with these people for “collaborative opportunities”.
A few things to keep in mind when evaluating potential ambassadors are:
Clear Values and Principles
The individual has strong and clear values on topics and issues related to your brand. They should honestly believe in their convictions and will be able to stand by them, even after your collaboration is over.
Have a think about what your brand stands for and look for ambassadors who could be a good representation of your brand and are passionate about the same things.
Do they already use your product or service? Will people be able to make the connection easily between your brand and the individual?
Trust and Influence
Your brand ambassador should be someone whom people trust. Far more than sheer follower numbers, trust and engagement with a specific audience is the most powerful tool that an ambassador should have. This can be thanks to their reputation for being honest, clear and unbiased, or perhaps due to their professional credibility.
Professionalism
While passion and enthusiasm are great, your brand ambassador needs to be highly professional too. You don’t want your relationship to come down to contracts and financials alone, but you must have a good foundation in place before you move forward together.
This includes set expectations about conduct and deliveries. If you expect them to show up to certain events or publish content on certain days, they should be able to stick to their promises.
Looking for Other Crowdfunding Marketing Tips?
As a passionate crowdfunding video maker agency, our team has a wealth of knowledge about many aspects of the crowdfunding promotion and marketing process. If there’s something you can’t find on our blog or if you have some specific questions about your upcoming campaign, get in touch!
Pre-launch Product Survey Advice for Crowdfunders
Gathering essential feedback before you launch a crowdfunding campaign is always helpful. The more you do, the closer to the target you'll hit. This will also help you plan your campaign and gather credible data that you can showcase to potential investors.
However, when your project is at such an early stage of development, you might not think that extensive product surveys are possible, or even necessary. Should you conduct product surveys at all before launching your crowdfunding campaign or should wait until you have something prototyped first?
While it’s true that pre-launch surveys are very different to post-launch or soft launch activities where customers can actually trial your products themselves, there are still many ways you can gather key feedback, opinions, advice, and general input before you set your crowdfunding campaign live.
Based on some of our experience offering marketing and crowdfunding video production in London, we’ve outlined our advice on the right approach and techniques for gaining maximum feedback.
Start Conversations on Social
Before you actually send out a survey to anyone, your own social platforms are good places to get a general idea about whether people would be interested in your future product. As long as you don't give away any secrets about your brand, you can probe people to let you know their thoughts and feelings on your new concept.
Obviously, you need to apply some strategy here regarding where you post, who you’re targeting and the way you phrase your questions. For instance, simply posting onto your Instagram account which only has a modest following won’t give you much data and the information you do get will be distorted by the fact that those reading your post will already be familiar with what you're trying to do.
What you want to do is reach completely new audiences on platforms that foster exploration and discussion. For example, the increasingly popular Clubhouse could be a great place to soundboard your idea within a designated room.
The clubhouse also has the benefit of potentially putting you in touch with people in your industry who may be able to offer industry-related advice or potential collaboration opportunities. At least in the earliest days, it was known as a platform heavily frequented by SEOs and company leaders.
Send Newsletters
If you're lucky enough to have a growing email list, whip up some newsletters to get people to take a product survey. Contacting your subscribers and asking for product feedback will not just help you get valuable data but will also add more credibility to your campaign, with more people recognising that you’re actively engaged in forwarding your project and taking on board the feedback of your audience.
Hopefully, your subscribers will understand your eagerness to design a fruitful campaign and potentially pass on the survey to someone else. However, you can increase the chance of this happening with simple incentives.
Look for Forums and Online Discussion Platforms
Reddit’s topic-based forums can be a good place to put the feelers out there. This is one of the top places for crowdfunding campaign creators to get insights into their customer's preferences as these spaces harbour large numbers of people who are keen to share ideas, critique and contribute to various topics with strong and valuable opinions. Obviously, it’s hard to discern the background of who is actually giving you feedback or what their motives are, so take any serious criticism or opinions with a pinch of salt.
Tips for Creating Survey Questions
Asking the right questions is just as important as finding the right people to ask. Below are some tips for squeezing out the right nuggets of information that can help inform your process going forward.
- Don’t ask leading questions - Try not to put your own opinion into the question prompt, otherwise you risk distorting your survey results. You want to get as true and genuine an opinion as possible.
- Define a clear goal - Set out clear, attainable goals so that your survey information will actually be actionable and practical. Do you want to understand why certain customers don’t love your product as much as others? Are you unsure about specific features?
- Focus on using closed-ended questions - For larger-scale survey campaigns, questions that use pre-populated answer choices for the respondent to choose from, such as multiple choice or checkbox questions, are easier for respondents to answer and much simpler to quantify when it comes to organising the data and analysing it.
Learn More
For more great tips and advice about smashing your next crowdfunding campaign, get in touch with us at Wow Your Crowd where we can help you with your crowdfunding video production in London or other aspects of your Kickstarter campaign!
