Common Myths About Crowdfunding Marketing Campaigns
Crowdfunding is a kind of social fundraising. It’s the new way to raise money, by leveraging your personal network to support your cause or campaign. Along with your network, you can use an online crowdfunding platform to raise the money you need to fund your personal or business venture.
Crowdfunding is an excellent option for startups, product creators, and developers to launch their ideas, collect funds and have a platform to build a community for their big idea.
When starting any crowdfunding campaign, you may need to keep these points in mind; you must be mindful of several misconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding crowdfunding to prevent any issues that could have a negative effect on your project.
Crowdfunding Myths
Here are some important crowdfunding myths:
Innovative ideas are not crucial to the success
Wrong! The most innovative ideas have the best chance of succeeding and raising the funding they seek. Along with being innovative the best ideas need a good plan and strategy to bring it to life, which requires adequate time and attention to implement successfully. First, find out which groups of individuals are likely to support your campaign and then work out a marketing strategy on how to share your campaign with them to gain their backing.
The real work starts when your campaign starts
I will urge you to initiate your campaign at least two months before the official launch date. This is the time required to construct an effective plan, including a mailing list, and to develop a strong backer community around your project. These are the two crucial factors needed for your campaign's success. It would help if you used this time to study, prepare ahead, collect a good team, identify positions, and arrange all the assets before the start of the project. Planning well in advance will set you to campaign up for success.
The concept that people are waiting for your idea and project launch is misleading. Although crowdfunding begins with close friends and relatives, it hardly finishes with them. Many of us are also aware of the importance of news and social media promotions for business promotion.
To get the desired support you need for your campaign, you must start using other networks to inspire people to spread the word to their networks to gain mass awareness. With the right effort behind the campaign along with a well-advertised promotion, you will give your campaign a greater chance of success.
A Significant following on Social media DOESN’T assure success
Do you know that one of the reasons for your campaign failure is to post completely about it in advance?
Although social media is a key factor in crowdfunding success, you need to be aware of the fact that the majority of the donations will come from people you know already, such as your friends, relatives, or e-mail subscribers.
Keep in mind that undoubtedly Facebook numbers are important! Quite a few people will already have over 10k or more followers on their Facebook and Instagram, which they believe will be enough to help raise the funds they require. Unfortunately, this isn’t completely correct. Its best to work out the figures. How many pledges do you need of a certain amount to reach your funding target? Once you know this number times it by 20, (which = 5%). This is the ideal amount of people you need to reach out to and convince to back your campaign.
For example: For a 5 % conversion expectancy:
100 pledges x £100 fee = £10,000 funding target.
20 x 100 pledges = 2000 people
Facebook & Instagram are a great way to reach more people and build up your crowd. Review the number of followers you already have and then decide how many more people you need to reach.
Many campaigns set up a marketing funnel to capture leads for their campaign. The marketing funnel can include Facebook ads, press releases, email marketing and other marketing strategies.
If you haven’t got a social following or email list, it makes sense to start building one as soon as possible. Ideally 6 or even 12 months before you launch! You want people to know who you are and what you stand for. If you don’t have that kind of time then use the time you have to the maximum.
The crowdfunding campaign is only for startups
Many people think that crowdfunding is predominately for entrepreneurs and start-ups to raise significant capital to support their innovative ideas. This isn’t correct and is a misunderstanding. Crowdfunding is for everyone, entrepreneurs, start-ups, individuals and established businesses. Recently many big brands have started to use crowdfunding as a way to test their new innovations, rather than launching them direct to the commercial market.
Finally,
Implementing a Crowdfunding Marketing campaign is a great way to build awareness, build a community of followers and overcome any financial obstacles you may have with raising capital with conventional methods such as banks, schemes, investors, and other financial institutions. Any entrepreneur or business with an advanced concept can use crowdfunding to raise money quickly and easily without giving away large amounts of equity in their business or spending large sums of personal money.
Pro Tips and Advice for Launching a Crowdfunding Campaign Successfully
In this article, we share some useful crowdfunding tips and advice designed to help you launch a successful campaign. These are ‘inside pro’ crowdfunding tips and come from our experience launching various campaigns successfully (and unsuccessfully) over the past few years. Crowdfunding can be tough and the more information you have at your fingertips the better placed you are to launch a successful project.
1. When is the worst time to launch a crowdfunding campaign?
The leading platforms will argue that there is never a ‘worst’ time to launch a campaign, however from experience, there are certainly times in the year that are likely to make a launch harder than others.
Probably the most difficult time to launch a campaign is in January, followed by August. Why these months? Well, January is one of the hardest months to crowdfund in as people have the less disposable income to spend after Christmas and many people are away for summer break during August.
This ultimately means if you plan to launch in either month you will have to work even harder to get people to support you and make your campaign a success. It’s not impossible, and launching in January may be vital to the success of your campaign e.g. delivering a product for springtime, but compared to if you launch at any other time of the year it will be harder.
2. What information should I include on my campaign page?
Your campaign page has 1 purpose, to convert people into backers. How do you decide what information to include on your page? Simply, think from the ‘backers’ perspective. Why would a backer desire to support your project? What needs and desires does a backer have that your campaign offers them? How will their support make them feel? What visual and written content do they need to see to help compel them to trust you and support you? What messaging is going to evoke the right response of support from them? These are all questions to think about and answer when designing your page.
Some simple tips to help increase conversion are:
- Make your campaign personal by including information about the team behind the project.
- Include lots of nice imagery and photos rather than long paragraphs of text. Make sure the photos you show are relevant. e.g if you have a campaign for a craft food stall, include photos of people enjoying eating food at your venue.
- Create rewards/perks that are simple to understand and choose between. If you have too many options this causes confusion and delay due to too much choice. This will inevitably make people go away to think about what to do rather than supporting you then and there. This will lead to missing out on vital sales.
3. What type of marketing should I use to promote my project?
One of the main principles of crowdfunding is to build a ‘crowd’ before you launch a campaign. For most campaigns, this means implementing various marketing strategies, which reach out to your intended audience and communicate your message.
The easiest and cheapest way for you to let a large number of people know about your project and what you are doing is to use social media. Setting up a Facebook, Twitter or any other social media account will be very beneficial to getting your message out there.
When using social media develop a strategy to release a post or number of posts each day, which give an insight into your project, the people involved and the problems your cause/project is solving.
Make your posts personal and this will help you to connect with your audience and make them aware of what you are doing. Remember people can only support you if they know about you. So mass, consistent communication will build up real momentum behind your campaign.
It's a good idea to set a team member who is responsible for arranging social media every day. They should write frequent, engaging posts with links and build momentum behind the campaign.
Other areas of marketing include ‘paid advertising campaigns’ on platforms like Facebook or Google Adwords. But you will need a separate ad budget to pay for the ads. This can be costly but also very effective at getting ‘cold’ leads and traffic.
If you launch an advertising campaign, direct the traffic from the ad campaign to a landing page, which captures the leads email address. You can then launch an email marketing campaign, which nurtures a relationship with the lead and entices them to support you.
PR can also be a great way to gain exposure about your project and attract interest, however, PR normally isn’t great at converting more sales, so if your budget is limited think carefully about how much money you invest into a PR strategy.
Optimising your campaign to be the best in can be is the best way to make it successful. Take on board the advice above to improve your campaign and avoid the pitfalls many projects make. If you are stuck and wish more guidance and support then consider hiring a crowdfunding marketing agency like Wow Your Crowd to help launch your campaign. An agency’s experience and knowledge can save you time and money in the long run. To your future success!
Crowdfunding 101 - How to Crowdfund Your Big Idea Successfully Part 2
In the past, typically only enterprise companies with large R&D budgets could bring a product or innovation to market. But today, crowdfunding has levelled the playing field and enables businesses and entrepreneurs to make their ideas a reality. In this blog, part of 2 of ‘How to crowdfund your big idea successfully we continue to explain the key areas of how you can launch your crowdfunding campaign successfully.
Marketing Campaign
Once you have your messaging ready now is the time to build your marketing campaign. At the heart of your marketing is a marketing funnel, which generates awareness of your campaign and attracts leads to support you.
The key areas of your marketing funnel are:
- Landing page
- Email marketing
- Facebook Paid Advertising Campaign
- Social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc)
- PR
Landing page - is a 2-page website, which has a ‘home page’ that works as a sales page and a ‘Thank you’ page. The home page is designed to showcase the launch of your campaign and request people who are interested in your campaign to sign up using their email address. Once someone signs up they are taken to the ‘Thank you’ page, where you can have additional messaging such as requesting people to join your Facebook page or community page.
Email marketing - Once someone registers their interest on the landing page their email address is added to your email list. You can then email the person on a regular basis nurturing a relationship with them. The idea is to provide them with relevant content about you and your campaign which entices them to back you when you launch. The whole idea of the email marketing sequence is to foster a relationship with the leads and get them to know like and trust you. This makes it easier to sell to them when your campaign goes live.
Facebook paid advertising campaign - is the preferred choice of traffic source. Running a Facebook ad campaign almost guarantees leads from your target market and is a very quick way to build up a large lead list. The only drawback is that is can be expensive, however, most successful rewards crowdfunding campaigns have used this strategy, understanding its important to invest money upfront in order to generate the leads required to make sales when your campaign launches.
Social media channels - use your social channels and your team’s channels to promote your campaign. Its best to start talking about your campaign as soon as you can, to build up the buzz and noise around your launch. Post about all topics to do with your campaign - the cause, the prototype, the team, experiences to date, campaign news, fun stuff etc.
PR is good for brand and campaign awareness. Not all campaigns use PR as it can be a bit hit and miss, with some industry stats indicating it is only responsible for generating 5% of campaign sales, however PR if done right is great generating awareness and building interest in your product and company.
Build a Crowd
Building a crowd of hungry backers before you launch, who are ready to support you, is vital to the success of your campaign. Its a fact, the more people you have on your email list when you launch, the more money you will raise. But building a list is not easy and you will need to work hard using various strategies to build your crowd.
Many people think the crowdfunding platform will send people to your campaign but unfortunately, unless your campaign reaches around £25,000 in the first few days of launching, platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo will not promote your campaign. Industry stats show that 75% of funds raised by campaigns come from the traffic they sent to the campaign page. So, how do you build a crowd?
Leverage your network - Your own network is the foundation for your campaign and the best place to start building a crowd is with your friends and acquaintances. Sit down with your team and create a spreadsheet, which lists all of your contacts, use your phone's contacts and platforms like Facebook to build out your list. Once you have your close contact lists build a list of your 2nd and 3rd tier of contacts like friends, people from networking, relevant and related people and business. Use Linkedin for help with 2nd and 3rd tier contacts.
You need your campaign to gain momentum early on, so leveraging your close contacts to support you is a tried and tested method for gaining early support and getting your campaign off to a good start.
It takes more work to build a relationship with a cold lead and get them to know like and trust you, so don’t be shy to let your friends and contacts know what you are doing.
From your and teams list of contacts choose 15 to 20 people who can help amplify your campaign. Reach out to them and ask for their support in advertising your campaign across their networks, directing traffic to your landing page or campaign page depending at what stage your campaign is at. The bigger your team the bigger the reach you have.
Some tips for using social platforms to build awareness of your campaign:
- Set up and use your Pinterest account to promote your project’s vision and “brand.
- Pin pictures of your product/rewards and anything else visually interesting that relates to your project.
- Pin images and videos that direct people back to your campaign.
- Post pictures documenting your product development and campaign journey.
- Post pictures of the team and events relating to your project.
- Tag your pictures with a link that relates to your campaign.
- Set up and use a personal & business Facebook page for your campaign to send regular campaign updates.
- Always include a link to your campaign whenever posting about it on Facebook.
- Set up a private group and get leads to join it. Ask them for feedback on your project and use their comments to build a stronger campaign.
- Use popular and trending hashtags to raise awareness for your campaign.
- Ask contacts for retweets to help spread the word about your campaign.
- Tweet at people (even those you don’t know) who might have a special interest in the subject of your campaign.
- Make sure your team also tweet to their contacts about the campaign.
Crowdfunding is a game-changer and has made it easier than ever before for you to launch your big idea. Use the information explained in both parts of this blog to help develop your campaign and launch it successfully. For more information about how Wow Your Crowd, crowdfunding agency UK can help support you with your campaign, get in touch today and arrange a free crowdfunding strategy success session. To your crowdfunding success!
Bespoke Crowdfunding Agency in the UK
Facebook Advertising has changed the way businesses advertise their products and services for good. No longer do companies have to rely on expensive Google ads or offline strategies like mailshots, leaflets or expensive advertisements in publications. In this blog wowyourcrowd will help you to learn how to master Facebook advertising and set up your first campaign.
Facebook advertising has changed the way business can target their target market and attract interest in their products and services. Prior to Facebook advertising if you wanted to attract interest in your marketing campaign you would have to implement various traffic strategies - online and offline. Google Ad Words (PPC) was the main online way to attract customers, but with Adwords most people are looking to buy straight away. When running a crowdfunding campaign particularly in the prelaunch phase you are looking for ‘audience interest’ with a view for the audience to buy when you launch. It turns out Facebook traffic is perfect for this.
If you haven’t already, your first step is to set up a Facebook business page. Once set up you can start to create your Facebook advertising campaign.
Step 1. To start go to Facebook business manager
https:// business.facebook.com/ads manager . Click on ‘create ad’.
Step 2 - Choose a Goal.
This is where deciding on a clear objective is very important. Choose the objective for creating the ad. For example, if you are seeking to build leads or sales the objective to choose would be ‘Conversions’.
Step 3 – Choose Your Objective and Target Audience.
We at wowourcrowd believe that it’s important to be specific about your target audience and their demographics when planning your campaign. Facebook will only display ads to the audience demographics you choose. For example, your campaign objective might be to collect emails via a landing page, this is what most people do when crowdfunding. In this case you will choose ‘Conversions’ as the main objective.
Then you want to confirm who your audience are. For example, our audience is male 26 – 46, who like dogs and are living in New York, and speak English.
Your ads will now be displayed to this specific audience. You can narrow the search by selecting the specific location, e.g. Washington DC, which can help better your results.
When starting your ads and carrying out an initial test you can set your ad budget low as $1 to $2 a day. You can also place limits on your ad spending if you are worried you may forget to turn off your ads, although this is unlikely to happen. For example, you can start your ads from as low as $1 a day if you choose to run ads without a set time frame. You can also set a start date/time and end date/ time if you want more control over your campaign. Its best practice to start your ad budgets low when starting out. The Facebook algorithm needs to learn about your needs and target audience, so it will be important to run campaigns for a number of weeks and months. You don’t want to blow all of your ad budget in the first few days. Typically the Facebook algorithm needs around 4 weeks to really understand your best target audience.
With thousands of businesses competing on Facebook for user attention , it's almost impossible for Facebook to place every ad out on the platform. So, instead what they do is put your ad into an ad auction, where those campaigns with the highest bids get their ads displayed across the network. The bid is the amount you're willing to pay to get your ads in front of your audience.
We at Wowyourcrowd feel that the other important areas of setting up an advert are the ‘Ad Spend Limits’ and the ‘Schedule’ option. When you are prompted to fill in the Ad Spend Limit, be sure to fill in the minimum and maximum amount you want FaceBook to use on a daily or monthly basis. This is part of what is called a budget optimization and helps you remain in control of your spending. If you don’t put in a fixed budget you could log in 1 day and find out Facebook has spent more than you wished, which is good for the bank balance.
In the Schedule option you can choose a time of day when you want to display your ads to the audience. Facebook will show you the time when your audience is the most active, so all you have to do is select a specific time and Facebook will take care of the rest.
Running a Facebook campaign to attract interest to your crowdfunding campaign is a really good idea. To find help to set up your Facebook campaign simply search Goggle using a keyword term like Crowdfunding Agency UK. Then select an agency like us that are experienced in using Facebook and have the credentials to prove it. To your success!
Product Positioning Statement is the Key
There are thousands of crowdfunding campaigns happening every day, so its vital that you can grab your audience’s attention and have them immediately understand why your offer is suited to them. If you don’t get their attention your campaign will fail. In this blog we at wowyourcrowd will help you learn how to create a product positioning statement that will set your campaign up for success.
Positioning is the act of defining why your product is the best at doing a particular thing and why the defined target audience cares a lot about it. Get your positioning statement right and you will knock the competition for six, making more sales and increasing revenues faster. Positioning is fundamental to all forms of marketing, from content written, to campaigns launched and sales pitches made.
Your product positioning statement lays the foundations to all of your crowdfunding, advertising, marketing and selling activities. Most businesses and start ups fail to develop a positioning statement and if they do make one, you can bet the attempt is fairly generic and doesn’t deliver what a well thought out and developed positioning statement should do.
The following 6 steps will help you to create an effective positioning statement which you can use for your crowdfunding campaign and beyond.
1. Competitive Alternatives
The competitive alternatives is what your audience would do if your product didn’t exist, what would they use or do instead? When developing your product its vital you are an expert on the different solutions on the market – list all of the advantages and disadvantages to the alternatives. Remember not all alternatives to your product will be another product – it may be the user doesn’t do anything or instead hires a student to carry out the arduous work.
Really understand what your customers compare your solution with.
2. Unique Attributes
Your products unique attributes are the capabilities or features that your offering has, that the competitive alternatives don’t have. They are your secret sauce; what differentiates you from the competition. The attributes can range from the features you offer, to the materials you use, the process used to produce the product, your team’s experience, a particular skill set, technology involved etc. List down all of your products attributes. When developing a product particularly for crowdfunding its important your product is completely different and unique to what has come before.
3. Value
Value is formed from your products attributes and the benefits those attributes provide. Value is the reason your audience will care about your products attributes. Be sure to explain the physical and emotional benefits your product provides and then back this up with proof. For example your product is a camera, which films in 20 mega pixels (feature) that provides sharp photo images (benefit). The value is how this relates to the user’s goals, i.e. images can be zoomed in or printed in large format and still look sharp.
4. Target market characteristics
Generally the value your product provides is relevant to a large amount of people but as a start-up particularly when crowdfunding your advertising budget is likely to be minimal, so its vital you target an audience who are ready and hungry to buy your product straight away. Your positioning statement should clearly identify who these people are. Your ideal audience are the customers who buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts and tell their friends about your product.
5. Market Category
Market categories help users to understand what they don’t know about your product as they will naturally associate your product with other leading products on the market. For example you say your product is a luxury men’s sports watch – people automatically think of a brand like Tag Heuer. The positive (or negative) connotations of Tag Heuer’s brand will automatically help the user to position your product in their mind. Choose your category wisely and this will have a very positive effect on your brand.
6. Relevant Trends
Positioning your product with a certain market category is very beneficial, however what is even better is also associating a ‘relevant trend’ to the product. This has the effect of making your product relevant now in your customer’s mind. Use Google trends to research what trends are in fashion and see if one fits with your product.
We at wowyourcrowd believe that a well thought out product positioning statement will help you with your crowdfunding campaign whether you are making a crowdfunding video or planning the marketing for your project. Use the above tips to help create the best positioning statement and skyrocket your product’s success!
Wowyourcrowd - Crowdfunding Marketing Agency
The foundations to any product launch or crowdfunding campaign is built upon a well defined ‘communications plan’. Your ‘comms plan’ outlines a number of key areas about your product and forms the strategy for which your campaign will follow. With this blog, Wowyourcrowd will help you to develop your campaign’s strategy.
When launching a new product or running a campaign for a new offer, It’s vital that you have a strategy and create a plan before you start any marketing. This holds true for any type of marketing, for example, whether you are using social media, print, TV, or picking up the phone to call people. The companies that achieve great results from their marketing efforts do so because they leave no stone unturned in their quest to achieve their marketing goal. They put in place a strategy, which is based on research and analysis, and then stick to it across the campaign, testing and measuring as they see results come in. Improving their campaign as they move forward.
We at wowyourcrowd have experienced that when using Facebook to launch your product and boost your crowdfunding campaign is no different, you’ll need a strategy in place and follow it to a tee. Your marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or require you to spend too much time creating it. It can simply be a few slides from a presentation or a document that includes the following:
- Your Product Positioning Statement
- Your Target Market – and the different Ideal Customer Personas.
- List the Value your product provides users.
Your product positioning statement - is a one liner, your elevator pitch, which clearly explains in a nutshell what your product is, what it does, who it helps and the benefits it provides. The 1 liner shouldn’t be longer than a paragraph and be deliverable in 15 – 30 seconds – the amount of time you would have in an elevator lift! The positioning statement will be used as the foundation to all of your marketing and sales messaging now and in the future.
Your target market - clearly defines who your key customers are likely to be. For example you are selling a new ebike – so the overall target market is white and ethnic males from 25 – 55 years old, who live in major cities and enjoy cycling. This target market although is slightly defined it is still very broad, with a wide range of different types of personalities. So, we need to funnel down more and go more niche by creating Ideal Customer Personas from the target market. A well-thought out buyer persona can really help you find that type of person on Facebook due to the platform’s extensive collection of personalised data on users.
Try to visualise your ideal user, you can give each persona you create a name, note what job they have, where they live, how much they earn, what are their interests, what do they like, dislike, their life experiences, education, family etc.
By creating a number of personas it is not just a good way to take advantage of Facebook’s excellent targeting system (and not waste your ad spend budget targeting the wrong people) but it also makes it a lot easier to create and write marketing content to target that particular type of user.
For example you are selling an ebike and an example of your ideal persona is:
David, 55 years old, Lives in London, is an IT Director who earns 60k a year. He Is married and father of two children who have now left home. David enjoys cycling at weekends as a hobby and cycles to work in the week. He’s a fan of the Tour de France and likes motorcycles. He used to ride a motorcycle but struggled to park it in central London so stopped.
How do you get the right information to create a buying persona? Research competitor companies, speak to your target market in focus group meetings, find out about them and then build your personas.
This will take a bit of work but understanding this is the type of person who will be best suited to buying your ebike makes it so much easier to target them on Facebook and get the sale rather than go after people who will never be suited to your product offer. Its worth the work!
Understanding the ‘value’ your product provides users is vital if you want to make the sale and out muscle your competition. Value is formed from 2 areas the ‘features’ of your product and the benefits the user receives when they use the product. Benefits come in two forms – physical benefits and emotional benefits.
We at wowyourcrowd believe that when launching your product or crowdfunding campaign your crowdfunding marketing agency will require information about your product. So use the information outlined above to create a strong ‘comms plan’ and form the strategy for your campaign.
