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!
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.
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.
