Reginald Alango

How to kickstart your Crowdfunding campaign with proven strategies. In the age of the Internet and social media, crowdfunding is becoming an increasingly popular means of mitigating financial risk for creative projects. Raising capital for a startup has traditionally been one of the most difficult parts of getting your idea off the ground, but new technologies and platforms have given entrepreneurs a plethora of new ways to make that happen. The power of crowdfunding is that it gives creators a reason to ask for support, contributions, and sharing, because we’re not simply looking for sales (conventional presale), it’s a way of asking for help to turn an idea into reality. While you can reach a bigger audience for your fundraising ideas through crowdfunding, it hasn’t made convincing that audience any easier. You still have to get them to the page and explain why your project deserves their support Almost all of the major crowdfunding platforms make it clear from the off that promoting your campaign is your responsibility. Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the two largest platforms make it clear that they offer an amplification opportunity, but don’t guarantee anyone a funded campaign, or even a crowd. Good crowdfunding campaigns attract lots of publicity. Getting investors onboard, better branding, and new customers are some of the side effects of good crowd funding publicity. But many crowd funders get stuck when it comes to converting the publicity into actual sales: posting your campaign on Facebook/Twitter post just isn't enough. One needs smarter and creative ways to convert every bit of traffic into the pledge. But there is a secret that successful crowdfunding campaigns have got right. It’s the reason successful projects often get funded well beyond their funding goal while others languish in oblivion with barely a single pledge. Pre-launch crowdfunding is one of the most overlooked stages that most people overlook. This is the critical period for posting your crowdfunding campaign where you drum up support for the project and build momentum. The pre-launch crowdfunding has three essential stages that you have to consider before launching a successful campaign: pre-launch, actual launch and sustaining your launch. The most crucial part is by far your pre-launch stage, as it entails a lot of planning to reach your goal. Below are some of the proven strategies that you can use to kickstart your pre-launch crowdfunding campaign. 1. Pick Your Platform As you’re getting started with your fundraising and crowdfunding goals, the first place to start is to pick the platform for raising your funding. Before you can even begin your crowdfunding venture, you have some important decisions to make. Chief among them is deciding exactly how you will fund your project through public support. Use an existing crowdfunding service, such as Indiegogo, Kickstarter, RocketHub, Ulule, and 33Needs, Spot.Us, Community Funded, Crowdcube and Peerbackers. 2. Reach out to existing networks and form new ones. Counter to popular opinion, you need to bring a bit of your crowd if you are going to succeed in the crowdfunding arena. This means that it’s vital you re-connect with old friends that you may have forgotten to reach out to lately and to begin networking with influencers, organizations, and other creators in your target market. Also, keep in mind that it’s best to reach out to these groups before you begin your crowdfunding campaign. Individuals in your social network can bring a lot more than financial support to the table. Many crowdfunding videos can be produced by friends, colleagues, or friends of friends who are helping out the person raising money pro bono. Remember that each friend also has their social network, which can exponentially increase the number of people that see your crowdfunding project, should they choose to share it. 3. Create a simple landing page. The best strategy for having success on how is by using a landing page to inform your audience and gather as many subscribers as you can before the initial campaign launch. A landing page or website will allow you to capture email addresses of interested backers, supporters, or journalists as you lead up to the launch of your crowdfunding campaign. It should also direct potential supporters to take no more than three actions: Share on Facebook, tweet and watch the campaign video. Have a mailing list so as to encourage people to sign up for your mailing list. The more people you sign up early, the more support you will receive when your crowdfunding campaign goes live. You can try the services offered by MailChimp, which, is of course, free to the first 2,000 subscribers. But depending on the project you have if it requires a large sum of money then it would best to increase the number of subscribers ranging from 5000 to 20,000 people. Make sure you offer something in exchange for people to sign up. Be sure always to make a follow-up email after people have signed up for your project. This helps to reinforce your message and gives another people also a chance for sharing with their close friends and relatives 4. Setup a viral blog. The biggest reason for setting up a blog is that it will add legitimacy to your campaign and serve as an extra means of capturing interest. Not everyone can afford a custom website, but sites like Wordpress and SquareSpace offer clean, professional themes that won’t break the bank. The blog that you create is a great way to provide useful and relevant content that appeal to your audience. Provide articles that appeal to the needs of your audience, articles that motivate them, and articles that give solutions to their problems. You can also contribute guest content to the blogs that your target market reads, and invite bloggers to contribute to your blog. Once you’ve established a bit of an online presence via the above tactics, you can start reaching out. A basic website and blog should be all you need to get the message out for a crowdfunding campaign. 5. Building Marketing Collateral You want investors to know your startup has momentum and growth potential, and it’s not a waste of time. Part of that confidence comes from seeing polished, well-produced materials like product mock-ups or photos, a corporate identity with your logo and branding, photos of your team and location, and customer testimonials with photos. A short video is perhaps the most effective and powerful way to tell your business’s story and sell your audience on the value of your product. This strategy works for you in two key ways: it caters to your audience’s short attention spans and is the piece of your campaign that you are most likely to share on social media. The most successful videos feature your company’s founder or core team, explain the unmet need that sparked your idea, detail your product and how it’s different than anything else out there, show (honestly) where your business is at right now, and hint at its bigger, long-term potential. In short, explain where you came from, what you need now, and how you’re going to change the world. Your campaign is what gets your niche in the market. The urgency of the campaign forces you go into marketing hyperdrive.Make sure that your plan is completely transparent to your audience and you have the whole internet holding you accountable to get your goal. Put together a flyer and a brochure that people can print off and use. Actively ask people to print your materials or email them to others. You can use all these marketing resources in the future so the upfront cost will be spread out. 6. Leverage your social networks. Social media — when correctly leveraged — is the most powerful marketing and brand amplification strategy. Chances are you’ll need to use social media, email marketing, and other communication tools to drive your community to your project on a crowdfunding site. Remember to pick the networks that best match your marketing and content strategies and where you can find your potential supporters. Don’t forget to customize your promotion to suit each platform. You can have the best campaign in the world, meant to support the best project in the world, but if you don’t have a way to spread the word, it won’t matter. Hence, you need to leverage your social networks. 7. You should submit your landing page to link sites. The next easy thing to do is to submit your landing page to link voting or weekly email lists. Some of the sites include Digg, BetaLi.St, GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, Reddit and Hacker News. 8. Do have an active promotion on the social media. Never forget to promote your project on social media portals. You’ll be amazed at the amount of initial support that will come from these channels. Through the help of your friends, they can help in sharing your Facebook page. Get deeply involved with the scene that you are in, and it certainly helps to build rapport with people in the same niche as you. Some examples of viral content include infographics and videos. Also, make good use of Facebook Ads. You can also come with a mechanism where you reward those who have shared your project on social media. You can also run a social contest, and it’s a good strategy for achieving a strong pre-funding subscriber boost. 9. Treat your crowdfunding like a campaign Pitching a project is the beginning, not the end, of your work. You need to drive people continually to your project page. Many crowdfunding sites use traffic and early success as indicators of which projects to feature. 10. Maintain a media outreach list. Media plays a very vital role in our world today, and you wouldn’t miss informing both journalists and influential bloggers about your project. Both journalists and bloggers wield very powerful influence and can help to broadcast and boost your project to a mass audience. Your aim here is to compile a list of these people’s emails, and then make contact with them.Follwerwonk and Klout are two very useful tools to find influential bloggers in your niche. Do bear in mind that you have to pitch a very good story for them to help you. 11. Financial Goals Having a reasonable, realistic, justifiable, and attainable goal is also important. Obviously, you don’t want to make promises and not be able to meet them. The goal that you have says a lot about your confidence and the ambition of the project. 12. Credibility For a pre-launch to take place, you need to establish an integrity and credibility. Let potential supporters know about your credentials. This will establish the credibility and confidence needed to gain their trust. Solicit experts in your field. If you can get an industry expert, celebrity, or political leader to support your idea, it will enhance your credibility. Include testimonials, endorsements, interviews, and petitions if available. Cite credible sources. Conduct research to support your cause; this can be published research or surveys you’ve conducted or both. The Internet is a great place to start. The more data and facts you have to support your idea the better your argument. But don’t bore them with too much information. Stay on point. Cite a few credible sources that will prove your main point and strengthen your case 13. Focus on delivering incredible value. Before you kickstart your crowdfunding campaign, you must provide enough content so that your visitors can fully understand what your campaign is all about. You will achieve this by keeping your audience updated with posts on the project and its progress because people have a short attention span hence you need to remind them. A few days or weeks to your crowdfunding launch, be sure to update your landing page to reflect the date of your campaign launch so as to keep your audience informed. This is also going to attract a lot of traffic due to the anticipation of your audience. In conclusion, it is indeed true that preparation is a key to a great campaign!