Tips for Marketing a Kickstarter Campaign
Tips for marketing a Kickstarter campaign? (Marketing General)
Kickstarter's past is riddled with many projects that have been transformed from ideas to startups and here's your chance to make the big leap as well. There are a few way to go about it but I will take a Case Study-like approach in response to your question. First, I will highlight one small startup whose campaign I think was a success. Even though they did not raise anything close to what fundraising giants like Pebble raised, I highly believe in their methodology. This startup is called Enda. Secondly, I will take you through their journey and you will see what works especially for a small project.Combining these two approaches and a bit of innovation and caution, I believe you can gain a bit of insight on how to proceed with your own project.  Enda Startup Funding Journey  Here's a link to the project whose funding journey was hailed as a success by its runners: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/... I like it because they paid attention to solid marketing indicators such as conversion rate, value and traffic. Enda ran its funding campaign between May 2016 and July 2017 that sought funds for manufacturing sportswear, precisely running shoes in Kenya for worldwide distribution. Enda attributes its funding success to cooperation between itself and its backers, volunteers and friends. The Enda Iten: Running Shoes   Key Lessons from Running a Successful Kickstarter Campaign  I gathered a few lessons from Enda's journey that I think can answer your question. Overall, Enda's team emphasized paying attention to and maximizing the following variables at all costs:Traffic -the amount of traffic that you can channel to your way is important. Think of the amount of traffic that you can derive from all sorts of platforms i.e. social media, emails, adverts and media coverage that you may ran into along the way.Conversion- The fraction of all the people you get to your funding page from all channels who eventually contribute to your campaign.  Remember that conversion rate varies depending on the source of traffic and a friend who receives your email is more likely to contribute compared to traffic from a media coverage. Value-The team at Enda poses the question: How much value can you get each person to contribute to your project?    A simple formula that can help you to calculate what you can achieve from your campaign is derived:  How to Approach these Variables  There is no one-size-fits-all approach to how you approach each of these variables and the tactics that you will employ largely depend on what your crowd-funding campaign seeks to achieve.   To maximize each of these variables, here are a number of tactics that Enda used. The methods were unique to the startup's crowd-funding goals but they are replicable to some extent.   Traffic  In preparation of initial traffic, Enda reckons that they not only solicited feedback from lots of people but also created relevant in-bound content as they built the company.  Considering Kenya's position in global athletics, Enda produced blog posts on Kenyan running, gathered insights from surveys from elite runners, upcoming runners and the public about their brand positioning. They argue that the importance of all this is that it helps build your project build legitimacy and a social media and email audience. Never underestimate the power of giving your early backers a discount. This startup offered an "early-bird" discount to enable the people who signed up early to snag a better price. Another important source of traffic comes from leveraging your existing audience to reach more people. The potential that can possibly come from messaging your backers to share your campaign is immense.  A referral rewards programme is one way to motivate those backers who can go an extra mile to recruit more backers to your campaign. Media traffic is another big contributor to Kickstarter traffic. The amount of traffic you can create from a single media post is quite significant. Enda gained immense traffic from press coverage. An article about the startup by Fast Company was one of the biggest media coverage that the startup got in its infancy stages.  The most important observation from Enda's media engagement is that you need to help journalists to tell your story as well as how to tell it. Do not bombard them with press releases.  Communicate with them empathetically and quickly help them to easily how your story will be of interest to their audience. Blogs, niche websites, and mainstream media are a soft strategic target for your campaign.  Of course it would be a disservice not to mention platform traffic. Kickstarter on its own is a traffic source through its editorial and algorithmic recommendations. It has a huge potential to send backers your way.  The amount of intra-platform organic traffic you could get from ranking as a 'Project of the day' or ‘Projects we Love' is enormous.   Conversion  The aspect of conversion on Kickstarter is rather a slippery affair. It is as much an art as it is a science and the scope of flexibility is very narrow. One thing you must remember is that you only have one landing page to work around. You cannot really carry out A/B testing to optimize for better conversion rates.  In that regard your conversion optimization arsenal is minimized to having a fantastic story to tell. From Enda and other startups' journeys, a video is close to the perfect way to tell your story.  Your video must:show personalityinspire the audienceconvince backers to want the productgive a sense of what the creation journey looks like   When it comes to connecting to customers, creating a high quality compelling video does almost half the job. Generally, projects that had a high quality video generally did better than those without one. Overall, your Kickstarter page ought to have as much information about your product as possible. People are always excited to take part in creating something new and always keeping them updated is something you will need to do.   Value  Kickstarter estimates that the modal rate of contribution stands at $20 and setting your reward at around that mark generally drives contributions.  Enda approached this point from a very interesting angle by offering an Enda bracelet for a small contribution and further a t-shirt and a bracelet for the cost of two bracelets.  But the real show of the campaign was on their main product-running shoes and while at it, they got people to order a pair -or two- and discounts on multiple pairs.   Other technical approaches to the fundraiser  The most technical approach that formed the core of Enda's strategy was maximizing the three variables.  However, along the way, you will often be met with tough decisions to make and more so, to the detriment of your funding journey. Here are a few decisions that border on a dilemma that you might need to make:  Hiring a PR Machine  Should you hire a PR specialist for your campaign? No, you must not. Depending on the magnitude of the campaign, professional PR certainly has its place. A relatively small campaign can make do without any outside PR help as its creator are perfectly in a position to manage a number of media contacts.  During the course of the campaign, your project will be bombarded by lots of PR and marketing firms with unsolicited services. Just keep these people are looking for business for themselves.  If you are going to use a PR or marketing firm, ensure that you settle on who you want to work with before the campaign starts to help you wade through the multitude of mid-campaign solicitations.   Advertising on paid social media  How should you proceed with advertising on paid social media? Which platforms work best at a shoestring budget? You can use some paid advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Putting up ads on the platforms had different results for our feature startup.  They observed that they got new followers on Instagram, practically nothing on Twitter and netted some sells on Facebook. They reckon that, if they had a larger budget, they would have directed it to Facebook as the audience there was converting to sales.   Honestly though, considering the time it takes doing this, you might find it is better to focus more on producing new and better content to engage your base and have them spread the message to their friends. Kickstarter campaigns are exciting, so word of mouth tactics can be especially powerful during this brief window of time.Just one more thing, do not forget to:Keep the momentumStay loudExperts are not always rightEverything takes time