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.