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Crowd101: Guide to Crowdfunding Success I want to thank you for subscribing to the email list on Crowd101. I have reviewed and coached crowdfunding campaigns for years and am excited to be able to share what I’ve learned. Crowdfunding is opening up a whole new world for raising money but the sorry fact is that nearly two-thirds of the campaigns do not meet their goals. Worse still, 12% of crowdfunding campaigns don’t get a single dollar! But crowdfunding can actually be pretty easy if you follow a basic process along with your own personal touch. The passion for your project is yours, I can help with the process. As my gift to you for subscribing to our email list, I’ve included three great lessons picked up over the years. These are three of the most important topics in crowdfunding and I’ve talked to some of the best experts to share their advice as well. The guides below are not what I use in my step-by-step training course but they will get you started on your way to a successful campaign. Read through the guides but feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to talk about your own personal crowdfunding campaign. Thanks again, Joseph Hogue, CFA Crowd101.com PeerFinance101.com

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The Ultimate Guide of Crowdfunding Pre-Launch Steps Pre-launch crowdfunding is one of the most overlooked stages for most campaigns and a big reason for high fail rate of funding. That is why I have surveyed the best minds in crowdfunding to put together this ultimate guide for use in your campaign. I’m going to start with my own process but then we’ll hear from ten other experts and their best tricks for getting funded even before your campaign goes live. For best results, you should start pre-launch activities at least three months before you start your crowdfunding campaign. Why so much time? The biggest reason to starting your pre-launch crowdfunding efforts earlier is to save money. Building a following online takes time if you want to do it without spending money on advertising. You can put together a great website and get active on social networks but it will take time for people to get to know and trust you. It will also take at least three months to start showing up in internet searches which can be a huge source of visitors for your campaign.

Pre-Launch Crowdfunding Stages Pre-launch crowdfunding is typically handled in three stages: researching, outreach and community building. Within each of these stages, you should be focusing on the points listed but there will be some overlap later on in your planning. For example, your outreach and community building may turn up some ideas that you’ll need to research. Researching Even if your business has been operating a while, resist the urge to think you’ve done all the research you need. One of the great benefits of crowdfunding is that it forces you to reevaluate your marketing strategy and other parts of your business. Besides raising money, you might just uncover a few holes in your strategy that have been keeping you from being successful.

Research failed and successful programs related to your campaign. How much were they trying to raise? How many backers did they get and how much was the average amount donated? What rewards were they offering? What emotional or tangible needs did they address with their campaign page?

After “stalking” previous campaigns and finding out as much as you can, contact the crowdfunder personally. Most will be more than willing to talk to you about their campaign and offer any advice.

Pro Tip: Build a relationship with failed campaigns that are similar to yours. After you’ve gotten to know each other, it may be a good source for help on your campaign or even a list of potential backers.

Who is the target market for your product and for the crowdfunding campaign? They might not be the same audience. Your product or cause solves a problem or a need. Who has that need may not be the same as the people that want to support you in your cause.

Where does your target audience hang out on the internet? What hobbies do they enjoy and in what forums are they active? Your end goal with the audience research is to find out enough

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about your target market that you can do two things: target advertising and become part of the community.

Pro Tip: You can use websites like Moz Open Site Explorer to find people on the internet that link or mention your cause or product. Do a Google search for a keyword related to your campaign. Copy the top five blog articles that show up.

Use Topsy to find people that retweeted the link

Use MOZ Open Site or another website to find people that are linking about the article

These people are going to be your top influencers for your outreach program Outreach

Develop your master list of all contacts including business and personal. Some will probably not be interested in your cause or business but you should try to reach out personally to each. Just a quick call with your brief 20-second pitch to see if they have any ideas or would be interested in talking more. Follow up your phone call with an email the next day.

You need a website and a blog! If you have a business, you need an online presence anyway but even a short social project campaign needs a dedicated blog. Simple ones are pretty easy to put together and cost next to nothing compared to other crowdfunding costs.

o You’re website doesn’t have to be fancy or complicated. You need three basic pages: About, Contact and the Blog. Check around the web for ideas on your own page. This can all be done easily and cheaply from Wordpress. Resist the urge to pay for plugins or services just yet.

o You should be posting to your blog at least once a week for three months before your campaign launch. A blog is just a website page where you put articles (you’re reading one now). It does two very important things for your campaign. First, it forces you to research topics in your cause and sets you up as an expert in the field. Second, it builds your online presence through readership and improves the chances that people find you when searching on Google.

The process of building a relationship with influencers is very important but can take months. All the most important people you found in your research stage should be put on a strategic outreach program.

o Call first to introduce yourself and give your brief pitch o Follow up with an email or an introduction if you were not able to get in touch. You are

not asking for anything yet, just introducing yourself and recognizing them as an expert. Mention from where you saw their name and how much you enjoyed the article or advice.

o Regularly mention influencers in blog posts, retweets of their tweets and on other social media platforms. With each mention, be sure to reach out by email to thank them for the great post and let them know you will be writing about it.

Social media is necessary but can be a lot of work. You should set up campaign profiles on Facebook, Twitter and possibly LinkedIn if your campaign is business-related. You will send your blog posts through these profiles and be sure to share them through your personal profile as well. Resist the urge to incessantly check in on these profiles because it will end up being a huge time suck. Check in every few days to ask and answer questions.

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Community Building Building community around your cause or business is not well used in crowdfunding, especially in the pre-launch phase. It’s too bad because having an active community takes a lot of the load off your shoulders and will get your campaign funded.

Actively post to two or three internet forums that are related to your cause or business industry. If you’ve got a business, you might try being in one forum for business owners and one dedicated to people that might be customers. Get to know at least a few people and talk to them about your project. It’s likely that they already share your passion for the cause. Keep them involved in the planning stage of your campaign and consider bringing them on as a team member.

You absolutely must respond to all questions and comments from your website and on social media. People don’t interact that much through comments. If someone is taking the time to post a comment or question, they’re probably interested in the campaign.

Pro Tip: There is no competition in crowdfunding and community building. Establish relationships with everyone with an interest in your cause or industry. Avoiding certain people because you’re afraid they will steal your backers or secrets will keep you from valuable advice and help. Before you are ready to launch your crowdfunding campaign, fundraise from your community for at least three weeks. Actively reach out to your network and ask for their support financially and with a simple task. This gives them an option and you will likely get some volunteer work rather than a straight no. Hold a special event to invite the most passionate in the network where you talk about the campaign and thank them for all their advice. Getting everyone together can be a great way to build enthusiasm before the campaign. I would start a crowdfunding campaign unless I had at least 5% of my funding goal pre-committed through pre-launch crowdfunding. Data shows that campaigns that start with no funding have just a 15% chance at reaching their goal while those with 5% pre-funded have a 50% chance at meeting their goal. Pro Tip: Try offering people the opportunity for conditional support. Their financial promise only kicks in if you raise a certain percentage, say 20% or 30% of your goal. This lets them know that you are committed to making the campaign a success and will work hard to get there. You’ll get through a lot of no responses with this strategy. Pre-Launch Insight from the Web Despite the fact that 60% of crowdfunding campaigns fail to reach their funding goal, raising money through the crowd can actually be a pretty easy task. Using crowdfunding pre-launch strategies is the most effective way of making sure your crowdfunding campaign is a success and these experts know exactly how to do it. The HWTrek website offers a twelve-chapter guide on crowdfunding and is extremely thorough. The pre-launch information is covered in chapter one through four and includes:

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Researching Failed and Successful Projects – I love this idea and haven’t seen it in many other lists. Even if yours is a one-of-a-kind tech gadget, you can still look to other technology crowdfunding campaigns to see what works. Get in touch with a few of the failed campaigns to see what they did wrong.

Researching Target Audiences – Depending on your stages as a business, you may already have an idea of who you want to reach. If you already have customers then talk to them about what they like to do and their interests. If you do not have customers, seek out other similar businesses or connect with previous crowdfunding projects. Ultimately, you want to understand three things:

o What do they look for on the internet – Do they read certain blogs or visit particular websites

o What do they need – Don’t overlook emotional needs that you can solve o What does your cause or business do for them

Establishing an Online Presence – Assuming that the 13 million monthly visitors on Kickstarter will just happen by your campaign is a big mistake. You need to draw people to your crowdfunding campaign and unless you get featured on the crowdfunding platform’s homepage, you need to do it with a strong online presence.

o Build a Website and a blog – It’s incredibly easy and very cheap to put together a small website with a blog. A blog is just a page on your website that you post articles to on a regular basis. These regular articles are key to building community with people that care about your cause or business and will help you get found when people search the internet. I would recommend you write something and post it to your blog at least once per week.

o Set up Social Media profiles – At minimum, you need social media profiles on Facebook and Twitter. I would also add LinkedIn if your product is targeted to businesses. You don’t have to be active on all of these everyday but try to check in once or twice a week to ask and answer questions. You will also want to post the articles from your blog. It will take time but you should have a good network by the end of three months.

Setting a Budget and Funding Target – I have covered budgeting and setting realistic crowdfunding goals in detail and there isn’t much new here. Understand that your budget and funding target may be different. Even if your budget is $100,000 for the first year, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to raise this much money crowdfunding. Set a realistic crowdfunding target and use later campaigns for other budget needs.

Building Marketing Collateral – Your campaign page must have a video and you should be in it. Campaigns with videos have a better than 60% chance at meeting their funding goal whereas those without have less than a 35% chance. You don’t have to describe your project in detail, just put together a professional-looking two- or three-minute video that hits on key emotional points.

o Focus on what your cause or business does for others! Unless it’s your close family or friends, people are not backing the project for you. They want to know how it will benefit them or a group they care about.

o You should post your budget, in as much detail as possible, in a separate handout or spreadsheet. Putting together a detailed budget helps people see that you are serious about the project and have dedicated the time to think it through.

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o 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.

Crowdcrux posts 6 tools to generate a buzz before you launch a crowdfunding project and a list of six websites that can help to bring people to your campaign.

ThunderClap.it lets you create a profile to gain support from others on the platform. If your profile gains enough support before a deadline then the site posts your campaign to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I like the idea but am not sure an all-or-nothing type of marketing tool is helpful to many.

PitchFuse lets you post your campaign idea and get feedback from the community. The site does not have a ton of traffic but is a good resource for connecting with other crowdfunding campaigns to get feedback.

CrowdfundingPR offers free press releases as well as paid advertising for crowdfunding campaigns. The site has good traffic and may be an effective tool but you might want to wait for your campaign launch to do the press release.

Wordpress is not necessarily a crowdfunding tool but is where you will go to set up your website and blog. I use Wordpress for both my blogs and it is extremely easy to set up and get things moving.

Nesta offers crowdfunding pre-launch tips and one of the most well-known crowdfunding success stories that demonstrate the effectiveness of pre-launch community building. When author Seth Godin crowdfunding his book project, he used his huge internet fanbase to meet his crowdfunding target of $100,000 in just three hours. Less than 3% of crowdfunding campaigns raise more than $100,000 and he did it in three hours! Building community around your crowdfunding campaign means getting people involved and making them feel a part of the project. Throughout your pre-launch activities, involve others in the idea generation and design of the campaign. Give people a vested interest, through their time spent helping, and a reason to make the campaign a success. Entrepreneur.com suggests you do these six things before launching your crowdfunding campaign. The advice is built around the successful campaign of Nathan Resnick that raised $15,000 in three days for Yes Man Watches. Through a friend on Facebook, the company was able to get an interview on the biggest watch blog in the world. Within a day of the interview, the company’s social media pages blew up with almost 800 likes in a week. You really need to reach out to every possible contact and use existing social networks. It’s said that everyone on earth is connected to everyone else by six people or less. Use your network to increase your online exposure. Film-maker Nathaniel Hansen offers up a very detailed post on 7 things to consider before you launch your Kickstarter project.

Story – I like the use of the word Story here because you really need to draw people in with an emotional and compelling narrative. Running a cause or business is no easy task and you must

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have a passion to do it. Relate your story in a way that readers catch that passion and want to become part of it.

Fans – Put together a list of all your professional, personal, family and friends contacts. Nathaniel recommends you cut your list by the people that you think might be annoyed or put off but I say Call them ALL! You aren’t necessarily asking them for full support (yet) but just asking for input on the idea. If they aren’t willing to give you 15 minutes of their time then reassess whether they should be on the list at all.

Evangelists – You’ll also see the term Influencers used online. The idea is that some people have a seemingly natural ability to connect and influence others. These people are crowdfunding gold! They have huge social networks and are active contributors in projects for which they have an interest. Now, you just have to get them interested.

Write, Write and Write – I would add Talk, Talk, and Talk to this as well. Crowdfunding is all about building community and a network through communication. You absolutely must be reaching out to five or more people a day and sharing your passion.

Blog, Tweet, Facebook and Repeat – This goes back to the communication and earlier tips. Nearly three billion people are online and there’s sure to be more than a few that want to be a part of your story.

Research – A lot of crowdfunding campaigns do not take the time to understand their market, and pay the price by not reaching their funding goal.

o Know who are the top bloggers, social networkers and media people that talk about your cause or product. These are going to be the most likely to pass your campaign around through an interview or an article.

o You also need to research at least one or two internet forums about your cause or business. Actively engaging these groups is a great way to find people that are just as passionate about the project as you are.

Vision Launch offers a three-minute video of how Marissa Lippert of Nourish crowdfunded her food business.

Develop a high-quality presentation – Paying for professional video services is one of the few areas that I recommend spending at least some of your budget. Unless you already have the equipment and some skills in film-making, you’re going to find it very time-consuming and possibly expensive process to do your own video. It is no longer enough to have a video on your crowfunding campaign, it has to be a professional-quality video.

Use social media for updates – Social media is a great way to share visual elements of you campaign like pictures and video

Position yourself as an expert – Having a blog will not only force you to continuously research about your business but will set you up as an expert in the industry

My Crowd Rocks shares the value of crowdfunding pre-launch with two steps in the process.

Research similar projects – funding goals, rewards, videos and online marketing tactics

Planning – Put your research to work by thinking about what worked and what didn’t for the other campaigns. Don’t be shy, a lot of the previous campaigns will talk openly about their campaign with you.

Bryan Vadas, co-founder of iPledg, shares his tips for crowdfunding success through pre-launch marketing. Through talking with crowdfunding project creators that failed to meet their goal, Bryan finds

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that the lack of pre-launch crowdfunding is almost unanimously the problem. Campaigns that start with no funding at launch have a success rate of just 15% but spend a little time in pre-launch crowdfunding and your odds zoom higher. Crowdfunding campaigns that launch with just 5% of their funding goal already in place have a 50% chance of success. Getting people onboard with your project early is not only about funding but also provides a lot of social proof to other potential backers. The internet is still a very uncertain and untrusted place for a lot of people. Seeing that you already have a lot of people that believe in you and your project will go a long way in establishing trust. Crowdfundraiser offers 12 ways to prepare and assess your campaign through crowdfunding pre-launch activities. I like that they use the word “assess” as well because pre-launch crowdfunding can be a great tool to find the challenges in your campaign before you put it out there in front of millions.

Prepare presentation materials – Don’t stop at a video and brochures. It’s pretty easy to convert your materials into a slideshow presentation. The slideshow can be uploaded to websites like Slideshare.com and attract more people to your campaign. A slideshow presentation is a great way to show the visual side of your cause and reach out on an emotional level.

Perfect your pitch – After you’ve engaged your contact list and found a few people that are willing to help out with a little time, talk to them about your campaign and develop a pitch. You should have multiple pitches, shorter ones around 30-seconds and one-minute for quick interactions and longer ones around five-minutes and 20-minutes for longer presentations.

Plan your rewards – Rewards planning is one thing I haven’t seen in other posts so it’s good to see it mentioned here. Rewards fulfillment will be a big part of your crowdfunding budget and you need to build in all costs including time and shipping.

Stuart McKeown, co-founder of Gleam, details 15 pre-launch growth hacking strategies for startups. While the post is not specifically about pre-launch crowdfunding, it is a very detailed article and applies to crowdfunding as well as starting your own business.

Run a Contest – This is a common strategy and can be affective but there is a caveat. You want to offer something that attracts a large audience and is valuable but try to make it something related to your business or cause. Attracting a thousand people that will ultimately have no interest in your crowdfunding campaign may not be worth your time.

Build a Free Plugin – Free applications or plugins are a great incentive for people to sign up to your email list or register on your website. There are a few websites that make it fairly easy and you don’t have to be a tech guru. Check out ibuildapp.com for their free service.

Make a Pre-Launch Video – As long as you are making a video for your crowdfunding campaign, you might as well make a few. It should not be that much more expensive to make a series of videos than it is to make one. Make one video as the main teaser for your campaign. Make several other videos that address problems or needs served by your cause or business. The great thing about videos is they can be posted to YouTube for even more online presence.

Include an Email Signup Link in your Signature - A lot on the list speaks to building an email list for your business. In crowdfunding, your email list is money in the bank. Make it easy for people to follow you by posting a link to your email list signup form everywhere. There are several email list sites on the web but MailChimp and Aweber are the most popular. You can use MailChimp for free up to 2,000 subscribers which is likely all you’ll need.

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Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding Marketing Strategy Even with pledges to crowdfunding campaigns nearly doubling every year, most campaigns are disappointed to find that there really is no crowd in crowdfunding. Without a crowdfunding marketing strategy, you are likely to join the 60% of campaigns that fail to reach their funding goal. That is why I have compiled this guide of marketing resources and how to get the best bang for your crowdfunding buck. Social media is all the rage and a lot of people spend their entire budget but it’s still some of the old school resources like offline marketing that bring the most supporters to your crowdfunding project.

Crowdfunding Marketing Resources for your Campaign The marketing resources and sites below do not include project fees or fulfillment costs for your campaign. Those mandatory costs need to come out of your budget before deciding how much you can spend on marketing services or applications. Services can be hired to manage all the resources below or you can manage them yourself. There are a few important things to remember here.

Building a true community will take at least a couple of months and trying to rush it through expensive third-party providers will not necessarily pay off in more backers.

Your time is valuable. It may be more cost effective to hire out an expert to manage one or more resources than having to learn and do everything yourself.

We all have our favorite web hangouts and sites so it’s best to spread your advertising budget around to several areas rather than focus on one specific website or resource. The starter package for advertising through most resources includes most of the benefit you’ll need and will reach your most targeted audience. Resist the urge to buy into larger and more complicated offers even if they only cost a few dollars more.

Social media Facebook is the Holy Grail of social media. With more than a billion users globally, the site is seemingly universal in some social circles. Unfortunately, you won’t be the first to push your campaign through the site and people have grown immune to many requests for support. Rather than run your crowdfunding campaign through your personal profile, set up a separate page to focus and build community. You’ll still want to share all the updates through your personal network but your campaign page will help you target your community building around the campaign. Facebook offers advertising to promote your page and specific posts and the ability to target your advertising to specific groups and geographic areas like the United States. Be warned though that there is a whole industry built up around clicking on advertisements to collect commissions and the ‘likes’ you receive through these campaigns may not actually translate to real action. In fact, these fake likes may actually hurt your outreach on Facebook. The site only sends out your updates to a sample of your followers. If those followers click on your update, Facebook figures the update is newsworthy and sends it out to more of your network. Those artificially generated likes are less likely to click on updates which may stop those updates from being sent out to more of your network.

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Through your campaign’s page, you can schedule posts for different times of the day. Take advantage of this feature to constantly connect with followers

Like all social media networks, real community starts with a personal plea. Spamming out a request to all your ‘friends’ to join your Facebook page will usually be met with disappointing results. Reach out at least with a personal email or preferably with a phone call to your contacts asking them to join your page and regularly share posts.

Check out Facebook’s 5-step process for using the site in business marketing If you’re crowdfunding campaign or product is business-related, LinkedIn may be just as important to your efforts as Facebook. There are more than 300 million users on the business networking site and I’ve found the groups much easier to use than those on Facebook. The site offers subscription services that allow you greater access to search and messaging. Use the free month offer to try out the site but the free membership is all I have ever really needed.

Make sure to reach out to colleagues for a testimonial on your profile to build social proof in your abilities

Detail your profile with as much information as is relevant and include a professional picture

Even if your crowdfunding campaign is not business related, LinkedIn can help to connect with influencers in different industries

LinkedIn offers the essentials and best practices for marketing on its site Twitter is probably the most recognized social media tool after Facebook and an easy one to use for your crowdfunding campaign marketing. The site is limited because your tweets can only be up to 140 characters but you’ll be surprised at how much traction you can get from each post.

Downloand the Buffer app to schedule up to 10 tweets throughout the day.

Research the number of searches for different hashtags relevant to your campaign through sites like hashtags.org and include one hashtag in each tweet.

Create a list of influencers in your industry and their Twitter @ name. Calling out to influencers or news retweeting users within your tweets will help increase your reach.

Don’t just tweet out your own posts. Keep a regular schedule of your own updates and relevant or interesting tweets from others to help build community.

Twitter basics offers a few key points to growing and using your audience Video Production and Editing Your crowdfunding campaign marketing video is one of the few places I would say you will definitely want to spend a little money. Unless you have the video equipment and experience, it is usually cheaper to hire out some for these services than to do it all yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to spend thousands on a series of quality videos but a budget of a few hundred will go a long way.

Produce a series of short videos at once instead of having to hire services for multiple shoots. You will use your intro video for your main campaign page but the other videos can be uploaded to YouTube for super-charged viral marketing.

Put just as much thought into pre-production writing and rehearsal as you can to save time and money during the video shoot.

If your campaign is focused on the local market, include local backdrops and influencers in your videos.

The Fundrazr blog offers some more detail on video production from pre-production through the editing process.

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Online Advertising Online advertising includes a range of resources but can get really expensive. I have found the best success in Google Adwords and press releases. Before you blanket the internet with ads, spend some time thinking about who you really want to come to your website or crowdfunding campaign. Resist the urge to buy keyword advertising for high-volume traffic that may not really be interested in your cause.

Focus on a couple of keywords and set a really small budget first to see how well the advertising leads to traffic and support on your campaign. Make use of the geographic targeting available on the advertising platforms

Press releases can be cost effective and go out to a wide audience but you need to be more strategic than simply spamming out your release. Develop a rapport with key journalists by reading their articles and responding before your release. If they know you by name, they are more likely to recognize your press release when it comes out.

Content is king and can be the most effective online advertising but can also take months to build an audience. If you have the time, i.e. several months before your campaign launch, set up a blog and start writing about the cause around your campaign. This will help set you up as an expert in the field and build your community.

Online Forums Forums on websites related to your cause or company may actually fit under social media but the idea is so important and often overlooked that I wanted to call it out separately. Find two or three forums that relate to your campaign and spend a couple of months contributing and getting to know the most active contributors.

Active forum contributors will be your most enthusiastic supporters because they are already interested in the cause

Spending time on forums will help learn the biggest issues and questions people have in your cause or industry

Offline advertising may be the most cost-effective resource if your cause or business is local in nature. Online social networks have grown so crowded and impersonal in some ways that it is getting increasingly easy to ignore the advertising. Reaching out to people on a face-to-face level may be harder than a few mouse clicks but you’ll build community for your campaign much faster. Check out Indiegogo’s review of the Red Lipped Rebellion’s campaign that raised $5,000 through grassroots crowdfunding promotion. The biggest shock for most campaigns is the amount of time it takes to build community and support the ongoing interactions with backers. Regular interactions, online and on a personal-level, are the most important facets of a campaign. Taking more than a day to respond to an email or not reaching out regularly risks losing any momentum you’ve built in other marketing resources.

This is another one of the areas where I recommend spending a little money but you need to find someone that is just as passionate about the cause. Instead of hiring out a part-time worker, you might try reaching out to current supporters with a small weekly stipend to help out.

Build your community through a couple of your most enthusiastic supporters, preferably pre-launch, to get them onboard with a few hours of outreach support each week. In the first week, each of you should focus on a few of the more enthusiastic supporters that will also commit a

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little time. With this team of outreach specialists, you can start focusing on reaching out for financial support.

The Best Bang for Your Crowdfunding Buck A lot of crowdfunding success comes down to the time you are willing and able to spend on the campaign. Planning your resources and campaign at least two- to three-months ahead of the official launch can save you a ton of money because it allows you time to build community within the free resources instead of having to speed up your marketing through paid services. Within my own experience with marketing resources, I’ve found pretty good results through conservative budgets on the social networks and Google Adwords. If you start a blog or website for your campaign, something to definitely consider if it’s going to be an ongoing business or cause, then you’ll usually get a few hundred dollars worth of free advertising credits when you pay for your website. The idea is not to build a huge following through advertising but to just draw a few targeted people to the website or campaign. It is through this first group of supporters that you will work through to reach others but you’ll be able to do it with your community than with advertising dollars. Breaking your crowdfunding campaign into several smaller campaigns will help you test crowdfunding marketing resources on a smaller scale first. Plan on raising seed funding for your cause or idea first and budget a small amount to the most essential marketing resources. You are more likely to be able to hit your target for smaller campaigns and you can use the marketing information in your subsequent campaigns. Crowdfunding Marketing Tips from Around the Web I want to wrap-up the topic with insight from seven experts on marketing and share their very best advice on how to get people to your campaign through marketing. Cash from the Crowd Sally Outlaw provides some great tips from her book Cash from the Crowd on crowdfunding marketing. Sally focuses on three groups that you should approach in your marketing.

Existing personal network – Sally brings up a good point in contacting your existing network. Don’t send out the same message to everyone. Separate your contacts into lists of friends, family, business and acquaintances. You may be able to use a similar message for everyone on a specific list but you’ll still want to personalize it a little.

o Know the influencers on your list, those people with large social circles (both online and offline). Reach out more personally to them and enlist their help.

o Try asking for advice on your campaign before you go straight into a sales pitch. Talking to your contacts on a personal level first will help gauge their interest in your campaign.

Social Media followers – Besides your own social media network, look at the network of other businesses or groups related to your campaign. Try contacting the other group to see if you can guest post on their blog or if they can give you a shout out about your blog or campaign.

New audiences – Remember that social media isn’t really supposed to be a one-way conversation people use to spam their message, though many only use it for that purpose. You need to be engaging social media followers with questions and a conversation. Only with this

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engagement will you be able to build a sense of community and convert ‘followers’ to supporters.

The Best Marketing is in Pre-Launch Chris Dyson of TripleSEO offers a three-phased approach that includes some pre-launch steps.

Build your Audience encompasses a lot of the pre-launch steps we talked about in the previous posts like understanding who is most likely to support your campaign and building a blog to reach them. Even with more than two billion people online, only a miniscule fraction are going to be interested in your product or social cause. Spending your time or money marketing to the rest is a waste of time. It’s ok though, even the fraction of people that will be interested could be tens of thousands of eager supporters.

o What do your potential supporters do online? Are they on specific blogs or forums? o Creating a blog is much easier than you probably think. You really only need a few pages

that describe your campaign and to which you can post regular updates or thoughts. Chris gets a little detailed with some of his suggestions, diving into what colors represent emotionally, but it’s definitely worth a look for ideas and guidance.

o Besides posting something to your blog at least once a week, you need to reach out to other blogs as well. The blogs where your potential supporters hang out already have an audience, why not reach theirs?

Setting up your Funding Campaign encompasses some of the campaign description and marketing material that will go on your crowdfunding page. This is really still part of your pre-launch stage because you’ll want to test the ideas with friends and family before you put them live on the ‘net.

o Even if your campaign is for a social cause, you’ll want to offer some kind of reward to supporters. If your crowdfunding campaign is to produce a product or business, then you can offer different levels of your product. If your campaign is an emotional plea for a social cause, get creative with your rewards.

o You absolutely must have a video for your campaign, I would recommend a few. Crowdfunding campaigns with videos have a much higher success rate and you can use these videos on YouTube as extra marketing.

Campaign is Live – After your campaign is online, you’ll want to really step it up with your marketing strategy.

o Keep guest posting through the end of your campaign. This is really the best and cheapest way to bring people to your crowdfunding campaign page.

o Keep your community informed through tweets and other social media updates. Reach out personally to the most enthusiastic and see if you can get them to volunteer some time for the campaign

Traffic Tips from a $100,000 Campaign Johnathan Leow draws for the success of the Duet campaign on Indiegogo for his crowdfunding marketing rundown on CrowdfundInsider. The Duet campaign set a goal of just $5,000 which was easily beaten in the first few days of the campaign. It eventually raised more than $100k from 2,752 backers. Building your audience – I feel like a broken record here but the fact is that pre-launch marketing is your number one source for crowdfunding success. Johnathan suggests starting at least five months before your campaign. This may be tough for a lot of crowdfunders but I would say you need to start at least three months early at a minimum. The article brings up an important point that the crowdfunding

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platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are traffic amplifiers. If your project is doing well, it may rise in the category rankings or even get featured on the home page, leading to a huge boost in traffic.

Targeting Customers – Again, you need to know who is most likely to support your campaign. What are their needs and how does your product or service help meet those needs. Resist the urge to point to the most obvious need satisfied by your product. While the most direct need may be helping someone find their phone through an app, the deeper need could be an emotional one like a sense of security and staying connected. Tap into these emotional needs within your marketing.

Johnathan also recommends a landing page to get people to sign up to an email list. A landing page is basically just a single webpage with one focus, getting people to sign up. If you set up a blog then you can set up a landing page through your site or go through a provider like Launchrock. For the email list service itself, you’ll need another service provider. I use MailChimp because it lets you use the service for free up to 2,000 subscribers.

Stalk your target audience – Ok, you’re not stalking anyone but you definitely need to know where your target audience hangs out and then ‘casually bump into them’. Johnathan shares a cool Google syntax trick to find forums for your niche. In Google search, type:

Forum: crowdfunding This will run a search for crowdfunding forums. If your niche is technology applications, you might try forum: tech apps or another search. This will put you in the places where your target audience hangs out. Get active in the forums and get to know some of the people there.

Put together an outreach list using Follerwonk for social media contacts and Help a Reporter Out for journalist connections. These influencers are your source for free publicity that could reach thousands in your target audience. After putting together your list, send out a brief introduction email. Share the content they post and become a regular follower of their information.

Putting together a Basic Marketing Strategy Melinda Emerson offers some basic tips for putting together a crowdfunding marketing strategy.

Leverage Social Media – Melinda echoes the need to start early with your social media strategy and engage your network. She offers the idea that you should be sharing other people’s content four times as much as your own content.

Make a Compelling Video – Videos can really distinguish your campaign and drive traffic. I’ve recommended making a series of short videos and posting them on YouTube.

Make it Easy to Share – Include your social media buttons on all emails and other marketing. Make it easy for people to share your tweets, updates and whatnot with their network.

Blogger Outreach – Surprised this keeps coming up? Unless your own blog is more than a few months old, you are not going to have much traffic. Go to where the traffic is and guest post or offer to be a reference to other bloggers.

Your Email List is Key – Another one that keeps coming up in marketing tips and as a blogger, I can vouch that your email list is pure gold. If people are interested enough to subscribe to your email list, they are interested in being a bigger part of your cause.

8 Strategies You Haven’t Heard of Catherine Clifford outlines eight crowdfunding marketing tips you might not have Heard of before in this post on Entrepreneur. I’ve included some of the more surprising below.

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Researching similar projects is something we talked about in pre-launch steps. Not only will these campaigns help to see what works and what doesn’t from a crowdfunding perspective but the campaign owners might be able to connect you to their own community. Offer something up of your own and people will be quick to share.

Don’t try to win over everybody – Focus your crowdfunding campaign message on your target audience and their needs. Most successful campaigns have less than 1,000 backers so really speaking to that small market is all you need.

Set your goal as low as you can manage – Remember, 72% of successful Kickstarter campaigns raise less than $10,000 and well under a percent raise more than $100,000. Consider crowdfunding an initial need that is a part of your overall project. You’re much more likely to raise the smaller amount and you can build on that success in future campaigns.

Start your tangible rewards at a lower level. Would you donate $10 for just an email reward? Your email “Thank You” reward should go out to smaller contributions like $1 while higher donations should actually get something more.

From the Crowdfunding Professor Richard Swart brings up an interesting topic in the need for larger corporate brands to use crowdfunding as a marketing tool. The idea is that not only can you use marketing to drive your crowdfunding campaign but you can also use your crowdfunding campaign to drive marketing. I talked a little about this one in our previous marketing post on the site. Dodge got more than one million social media mentions for its DodgeDartRegistry campaign. This provided the company with a huge resource of customer data. Your own backer contacts are a priceless source of information. Reach out to every one of your supporters.

How did they hear about your campaign?

Which message most stuck out to them and lead them to contribute?

What is their personal experience with the type of product or cause?

Are they part of any groups that are related to the type of product or cause?

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Setting Realistic Crowdfunding Goals The most common questions I get from crowdfunding campaigns are, “How much can I raise?” and, “How do I set realistic crowdfunding goals?” While there are no hard-fast rules for every campaign, there are some good rules of thumb to follow to help make your crowdfunding campaign a success. Setting a Realistic Crowdfunding Campaign Budget Coming from a the investment industry, I’m often amazed that people put so much thought into marketing and the write-up for their crowdfunding campaign but fail to really think about how much they need. Your crowdfunding campaign budget needs to be as detailed as possible in order to set realistic crowdfunding goals, not only to know how much you need but to show supporters that you’ve put some time thinking about all the costs.

Include both campaign and project marketing expenses – Are you going to need to advertise your product or service after the campaign? While you can crowdfund without spending anything on advertising, it helps to have a budget for campaign outreach.

Administrative expenses – Crowdfunding can be a ton of work and it may be cost effective to hire someone to do routine jobs. Don’t forget to include a budget for any supplies, rent and utilities for your campaign.

Budgeting for rewards fulfillment means not just packaging and shipping expenses but budgeting for your time as well.

Platform fees are the most common expenses that get overlooked by campaigns. These can approach nearly 10% of the money you raise so pay attention to the fine print on the crowdfunding platform. Check out my post on the Top 6 Crowdfunding Platforms for Creative Campaigns for detail on the different sites and fees.

Once you’ve budgeted out all your expenses, I would normally recommend you increase it by 10% for miscellaneous expenses and surprises. Crowdfunding is hard enough but running out of money before you fulfill your campaign promises will make it even harder to raise any more money in follow-up campaigns. Reality meets Budget Needs After you’ve put together a detailed budget for your project, it’s time for a reality check. Sure, the Star Citizen video game campaign raised $2.1 million but what are your chances? Of the 76,931 successfully funded projects on Kickstarter, 72% of them raised less than $10,000 and only 85 have raised the legendary $1 million or more. The graphic below shows just how tough it is to raise the big bucks in crowdfunding.

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The good news is that if you can raise at least 20% of your goal, odds are that you can reach fully funded. Nearly four-fifths (79%) of the campaigns on Kickstarter that raised more than 20% of their target ended up being successfully funded. There are two important tips when deciding how high to set your crowdfunding campaign goal:

If possible, try an initial campaign where you just raise money for idea development. Raise money for market research, legal filings and development of a prototype. This will give you a much lower target at which to aim and will be easier to fund. You’ll also have a successful campaign to show potential supporters in follow-up campaigns and you will learn a ton about what it takes to run a successful crowdfunding project.

Let your pre-launch success help determine your crowdfunding campaign goal. Campaigns that raise no money before their launch have an average success rate of just 15 percent. For campaigns that raise 5% of their goal, the success rate jumps to 80 percent. Raising funds pre-launch helps to show social proof that people already trust you and the campaign. Try raising money for a month before the campaign. Setting your funding goal at less than 20 times the amount you raised pre-launch means you’ll start with a good chunk already funded.

Crowdfunding platform Seedrs reports on its blog that once a campaign reaches 30% of its funding goal, the odds of success jump to 90% compared to just a 50% chance across all campaigns. More than Money The success rate for projects on Kickstarter is 39% so your biggest goal is probably just going to be reaching your funding target. There is another important goal you should consider for your campaign, traffic and outreach for your project. One of the biggest benefits to crowdfunding is the marketing exposure you can get for your business or cause. Nearly 15 million people visit the Kickstarter website every month, potentially leading hundreds or thousands to your business. This is something I’ve detailed on the blog before with Raising More than Money with Crowdfunding Outreach, but it fits with goals as well.

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The crowdfunding platforms don’t release statistics on the average number of visitors to a campaign. I’ve talked to just over 40 crowdfunders since I have been running the blog and the average seems to be somewhere around 2,000 views and a conversion rate of around 5% of those that actually end up supporting a campaign. Other data shows that the size of your social network is related to the odds of your success in crowdfunding. For campaigns where the founder had just 10 Facebook friends, the odds of making a $10,000 funding goal were just one-in-eleven. For founders with 100 friends, the odds jump to one-in-five. Of course, this doesn’t mean start adding random people to your Facebook friend list but be an active engager of others on social media. Setting traffic goals can help you focus your marketing efforts and really get the most benefit out of your campaign. Work on your social reach before launching the campaign. Engage with people already in your social network and try to reach at least 100 active contacts across the different social media websites. After launching your campaign, set weekly visitor goals for the campaign page. Most crowdfunding campaigns start really strong but then momentum fades after two weeks. Aim for around 1,000 visitors during the first ten days of your campaign and 750 during the second ten days. You will want to adjust your goals depending on your funding goal. For example: The average amount from a supporter is around $75 so you will need about 70 backers to meet a $5,000 funding goal. If you can convert 5% of the visitors to your campaign into backers then you’ll need about 1,400 visitors over the life of the campaign. Your funding target and traffic goal are just two of the milestones you’ll want to set for your crowdfunding campaign. What other goals have you set for your campaign? Please use the comment section below or drop me a note on setting goals.