Key Strategies for a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign in 2018

Crowdfunding is a fantastic way to gain capital for a startup or idea.

If you’re in the prototyping phase or ideation phase, it’s a good idea to see what your industry has done on Kickstarter. Crowdfunding is a great way to earn money for a product or personal venture that has a vision and a strong community behind it.

More than 14,000,000 people have invested $3.4Billion since Kickstarter’s inception and over 130,000 projects have been successfully funded.

Crowdfunding is not a fad anymore, it’s an economy that’s ready to be tapped. An even more stunning statistic is the fact that of the 14M investors on the platform, 4M are repeat investors. Meaning that Kickstarter is a community as much as it’s a platform for transaction.

There’s a wide range of projects that get funded on the platform, from medical devices to family picnic carriers. There’s something for everything on these crowdsourcing platforms.

Savvy marketers and SMEs should be able to reach out to their customers via these crowdsourcing solutions and get access to one of the largest consumer focused communities in the world.

What were some of the largest game changers for the crowdsourcing field?

Pebble raised over $20M for its first smartwatch, thereby skyrocketing the brand for future success. The funny card game “Exploding Kittens” reenergized a dying industry with more than 100,000 backers investing in its vision.

Here are 6 key strategies for a successful crowdfunding campaign –

#1 Research your industry –

If you haven’t already done some amount of research, then conducting it on major crowdfunding sites is a good idea. You might also get some great insights from studying indie-crowdfunding websites that are industry specific and aren’t available to the general public.

You should be able to figure out what the overall saturation point for your industry is and how much money you should be raising for your venture.

#2 Choosing the correct website –

Whether its Kickstarter or Indiegogo, you must choose the right crowdfunding program for your specific needs.

If Indiegogo has strength in the British markets and your target audience resides in the European Union, then it might be a better idea to raise funds via Indiegogo.

You can research how your industry has performed in these websites and get a general sense of how they can benefit your product and brand. While some websites also promote your product on their email list and social media, it’s a good idea to publish accordingly

#3 Know your target audience –

You should do a deep dive into who your target audience is and what they like in terms of content, trends and any overarching insights that you can recover.

Knowing your target audience is half the battle, the war is won when you’ve figured out how to communicate with them. Understanding the methods of communication including video, text and audio are imperative to the success of a crowd-funding program.

In many diverse fields, the audiences have a strong “BS-meter”, which allows them to weed out the pitches that seem too “salesy” or too “corporate”.

Your audience may engage more with your authentic self and create a better bond with the mission overall.

#4 Develop pitch materials –

You want to start with defining a brand and ensuring that you have all the brand assets in place.

This starts from a unique website that showcases the information necessary for backers to take the pledge. Because the pledge mark needs to be hit 100% or over, your marketing materials must indicate the rewards clearly.

You should create the appropriate logos, videos and hero shots of the product, game or idea, so that your marketing materials are on-point.

Create a brand appeal for your innovation so that backers can get a good idea as to what they are receiving for their investment.

#5 Set appropriate milestones –

A mistake that many crowdfunding campaigns make is that they set their goals too high or too low, and don’t get enough traction going.

Founders should estimate their costs correctly as well, as many highly publicized products get bad PR for not delivering on time. Even though it may seem like “free money”, you shouldn’t treat it that way as your name could be tarnished in the long-run.

Set the appropriate delivery date, and set fun and interesting rewards for backers that pledge a certain amount. When calculating your total costs, add a 20% margin of error to it so that you don’t get overwhelmed when the orders start piling up.

Many times, economies of scale drive costs down, but labour costs go up significantly when dealing with mass order shipping.

#6 Edit, course correction and analysis –

After 24 hours of your campaign going live, you need to recheck on your statistics and analyse the problem.

Campaigns that gain a lot of traction fast get bumped by the algorithm so if it didn’t take off and isn’t showing signs of picking up, start a new campaign and optimize it.

You may wonder where you went wrong and how exactly your project didn’t pick up.

It may be helpful to email your backers and ask them about why they pledged.

This will help in gaining some key insights that can help drive more backers the next time around. You also want to talk to community members of your industry and talk to them about what their thoughts are.

Conclusion

Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc are crowd-funding platforms to make your dreams come true.

However, what they’re not is an easy setup to receive money for an idea. You need to demonstrate that your concept works and that it has a potential movement behind it.

The founder of the movement also must appear knowledgeable and prepared to handle the immense requirements of the backers when they pour in. A campaign needs to be marketed well, must have the right audience in mind and must create significant value for its investors.