Johnathan Leow is the author of "The crowdfunded Kit." This post originally appeared on Insider crowdfund.
If there is a great lesson on crowdfunding I have learned over the past eight months, it is the pre-launch marketing can make or break your campaign. I went from knowing almost nothing crowdfunding, implementation of a successful Indiegogo campaign to a previous startup that raised $ 106.830 .
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Let me share with you our story.
When we launched Duet April 5, we had no idea what to expect. Can we cross even $ 5000? Donors want our product? All these fears lurking in my mind that I click on the button "Launch Campaign".
The first day saw $ 1,323 in orders ... orders that came mainly from our own personal networks. Then the two days saw a peak of $ 2,263 raised. This was mainly driven by orders from our mailing list.
Sales dipped slightly on the third day, and continued regularly with about $ 1000 raised daily. Day 4, we had already passed the 5000 $ brand, and we celebrated! And donors kept flowing.
Then on April 22, SlashGear has published an article on Duet, and that section alone reported more $ 14,000 the next two days. Sales then increased steadily to about $ 1.500 over the following days.
A second mysterious surge of traffic brought $ 11,000 on April 29. We found out later that we did for a feature in the Indiegogo Bulletin!
For many of the other weeks, sales were flat, and towards the end of the campaign, we have experienced a new push $ 10,000 . It was because we were featured on page 1 of the Technology category, and also "Projects Ending Soon."
What most people do not know is that behind the scenes these figures were five months of hard work day after day, slowly building up our core audience.
Now let's talk about you
A sure recipe for failure done by many crowdfunding campaigns is to invest a lot of time making videos and rewards the most amazing kick-ass ... to launch their campaign with a couple of Facebook and Twitter shares.
No wonder they start to go around halfway through the countryside to seek funding.
But you are different, because you understand that ". The success of any crowdfunding campaign lies in your traffic generation strategy long before you"
According to statistics from Kickstarter, only 43 percent of projects meet their fundraising goals. A think 12 percent do not even receive a single engagement.
Some of these projects are really promising and deserve to be uber-financed, simply because the market does not know they exist.
With over 9,000 projects running at any time on Kickstarter, the competition is more intense than ever. So knowing how to drive traffic to your crowdfunding page is an absolute must in basic skills. Otherwise, you will find difficulty to raise capital needed to launch the project on the ground.
This is how :.
Build your audience long before you
At the very least, be at least five months before
There's a secret that successful crowdfunding campaigns have been entitled. It is why some projects funded well beyond their fundraising goal, while others languish in oblivion with only a single engagement.
There is lever of power . Specifically, you'll want to take advantage of Kickstarter or Indiegogo vast audience base to generate traffic.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are amplifiers of traffic. If your project demonstrates the ability to do a good job raising money, these two titans crowdfunding will generously help you amplify the scope of your project.
Conversely, if your project shows that it is unable to raise funds, then the opposite is true: they will not broaden the scope of your project
.How both crowdfunding platforms amplify the scope of a successful project? Pushing your project to the class rankings, and if they really love you, they have your project in its weekly bulletin. And more exposure means more promises.
This is the holy grail of crowdfunding you should aim to unlock. Which is why you must build your audience (many of them), well before you actually start. And you will need enough time to do it.
following: So how did you build an audience
But how will you actually want on the construction of a public
start with? some basic steps. Most of them were the same steps I took to build a traffic generation strategy for a crowdfunding campaign in my previous company. Other measures that I have listed here as I have learned along the way.
Step One: Start with your target customers
List the specific segments of the people you target. The trick here is not to be too general, but not too closely with the specific description of these customers.
Say you have an innovative idea to take lunch box meal. People who like to eat is too broad a category as people who like to eat spaghetti bolognese with only beef is too narrow. white-collar workers in the city, and take their meals every day of fast food chains sounds much better.
Then you will need to make educated guesses to find out what their biggest problems are, and what they need most. I found that it helps tremendously to develop personas of customers, which are fictional models of your target customers.
Quick and easy way to do it is to go in the street and ask 10 people that match your target audience profile. If they bring the same problems as you guessed, and are actively looking for solutions, you have a winning campaign.
You get the idea.
Step two: Make a simple landing page to capture email leads
This was the landing page on Duet LaunchRock well before its launch. To be honest, the drawn layout, and it was not impressive at all. But this landing page was good enough to capture more 400 email qualified leads.
You do not really need to design a super-chic landing page. Just a simple and catchy one, with a cast advantage, will do.
The money is really in the email list. So you'll want to find a way to encourage people to sign up for your mailing list. There are many services out there that can help do this for you, but my personal favorites are MailChimp and ConvertKit Nathan Barry.
MailChimp is free for the first 2000 subscribers, while ConvertKit is very simple to use, and perfectly beautiful landing pages with your email list. Make sure you offer something in exchange for people to register. I find that giving away an e-book or a drawing contest draw for people to earn early versions of your product work best.
Third step: installing a blog
Do not settle for a cheap weebly.com watching blog, but a real, decent looking one. At the end of the day, first impressions do count, and you want people to trust you they are dealing with a legitimate entity.
WordPress, and Ghost are highly recommended platforms blogs. Investing money in getting a good domain name, web hosting, and a top model.
There is no excuse that it is difficult to install, because both blogging platforms are made to be simple to set up, you can start blogging within five minutes .
Step Four :. Start with 10 people in your network who might need more
This is the quickest and easiest method, you can start getting traffic
Think of your product for a moment. What is the value it offers, and who could benefit most from it? Think specifically the names of your immediate network. It might be your friends, or acquaintances that could very possibly need. Still can not think of 10? Stretch more people you met at an event, and former colleague, or even a friend of a friend, you may know.
Then write:
1 .____________________________________
2 .____________________________________
3 .____________________________________
4 .____________________________________
5 .____________________________________
6 .____________________________________
7 .____________________________________
8 .____________________________________
9 .____________________________________
10 .____________________________________
Note: The listing of these 10 names is super important. Do not jump!
Once you have them, email listed and reach out to every person on your list and share with them the link to your landing page.
Step Five: Hang out in online communities of your target audience
Long ago in the ancient Middle East, the guys who were looking, future wives potential would often hang out in the common city well into the evening. Indeed, the evenings were the time of day when the unmarried girls in the village came to draw water for their families and livestock. And what better place to pick up a girl, and when she was drawing water
You can start by asking the following questions :?
- What online sites do often read my audience?
- What search terms do they use?
- Which social media sites do they hang around?
at the very least, you should at least reach all relevant Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ communities in your target audience. Then explore related forums they roam.
You can do this quickly by going to Google and typing:
forum: Niche
Thus, for example, crowdfunding niche if you type in:
forum: crowdfunding (make sure you type in "forum" and not "forums")
.So sign up for an account in these forums, and focus on making yourself incredibly useful. Do not look immediately to promote the landing page of your product, but learn to listen and help others with their problems first. Remember, always better to give than to receive.
Sixth step: Submit your landing page to link sites
The next easiest thing to do is submit your landing page to link the electoral rolls or by weekly email. Even if your message does not hit the home page of Hacker News, it can still take some traffic to be on the new page (I got it up to 30 subscribers only this).
You can also try to contact the owners who run weekly mailing lists by subject, such as the weekly bulletin iOS Dev led by Dave Verwer.
Find the sites relevant to your topic. Here are the binding sites, you can start with:
- Hacker News
- Reddit (there subreddits on almost all subjects)
- Inbound.org
- Digg
- BetaLi.st
- GrowthHackers
Seventh step: do not forget to promote offline
! Although much of the population in developed countries has at least one computer at home, it does not mean they are glued to their screens all the time. They also attend social gatherings, barbecues, relaxing in pubs, gather in religious places and play sports together. It certainly makes sense to promote your campaign offline!
In fact, promoting your offline campaign is still one of the best ways to get people interested in your campaign. This is because nothing proves the authenticity of your campaign more of a conversation face-to-face.
This does not mean that you go around harassing people as a pesky salesperson, but you need to get the word as widely as possible.
The trick is of course to be yourself, and when someone asks, "So what did you do" - Just follow from there to share about your campaign?
step Eight:. actively promote on social media sites
Do not forget to promote your project as social media channels If you. do not already have a Facebook page or a Twitter account for your project, start one! you will be amazed at the amount of initial support will come from these channels.
Get deeply involved with the scene you are, and it certainly helps to build relationships with people in the same niche as you They may be some of your biggest supporters;. help you share your Facebook page, for example,
If you have the money for. to, invest a little money in the creation of highly shareable viral content. "Some examples of viral content include infographics, videos and pictures 9gag.
If you want to increase the speed of your generation efforts, I think the intelligent combination of using Facebook Ads Suggested Post Boost with viral content can dramatically increase traffic to your landing page.
Step Nine: Develop a media mailing list
There are two main groups of people in the media industry you want to learn about your project . They are: the influential bloggers and journalists. The two groups of people exert a very powerful influence, and can really help spread the project to mass audience.
Your goal here is to establish a list of these emails peoples, then contact them.
influential bloggers: Followerwonk and Klout are two useful tools to find influential bloggers in your niche, depending on their settings influence index
.Journalists :. Press Pass, and Help A Reporter Out (HARO) are two great ways to start looking for journalists to obtain press
Other good places to search their email are newspapers and editorial sites. I also find a free plugin Rapportive be, and very useful to help find Gmail emails you want.
Do keep in mind, you have to live up to a very good story, or help them out first (as in the case of HARO), to obtain the press advertising . After all, why should they help you, a stranger, when there is nothing for them?
Tenth step: Focus on providing incredible value
and when you have done all the above, you only have to focus on to be incredibly helpful and useful to your audience. It's time to really deliver value to them. Here are some ways you can add value often include writing useful content that is tailored specifically to your target audience.
Write articles that address their pain, concerns or frustrations. Also spend time learning to craft catchy title titles, as this will increase the chances of your content being shared.Then post that content on your blog, as well as the playlist.
What if you are lost for ideas and do not know what to write? A great way to find out is to go to one of the forums, and seek a search tool, or a search field that lets you search for certain terms that people wrote in forum posts.
Some forums allow visitors or customers to search without registering, while others require you to register.
Then, in the search field, type in some the following terms and see what you come up with:
- "advice"
- "I hate when "
- " I need help "
- " can someone help me "
- " I'm looking for "
- "really bad"
- "desperate for"
- "can not find"
- "have no idea"
- "newbie"
- "matter"
You can also try other search terms that are related. Some forums do not allow regular search words such as "help", "question", so you have to get there a little creative with your search terms.
There are chances you will find someone in need of help for something.
When I did a quick search on a crowdfunding forum, here were the son that were raised:
- How do you get more users to visit
- How do you get the attention of bloggers
- seeking advice ... ..Please help!
- Can I ask for advice on how to improve?
There you have ... ideas for your next blog post.
If you have done all very committed about 1000 list of email subscribers correctly at this stage, you should have at least gathered above.
Is that day after day for five months, and you are ready to finally launch your campaign crowdfunding with a good start
What a crowdfunding platform? is good for your startup