1. Measure traffic
If you’re going to be working hard to drive traffic leading up to your project launch and also throughout the actual campaign, then you need a way to measure how effective your efforts are.
Yes, you could use Bitly to track traffic, however, it can be a pain to remember to use Bitly links every time you want to let someone know about your Kickstarter campaign.
Instead, you could create a landing page and install google analytics (see how at the end of this post). With google analytics, you can set conversion goals, gain insight into geographical data, and even see results in real-time.
In addition, if a blogger decided to link to your Kickstarter campaign, although that may provide some value throughout the 30-60 day campaign duration, after your Kickstarter is over, it would be a worthless link.
Any SEO value that the link passed would go to Kickstarter, not your personal website or business. Yes, people may continue to find your campaign from around the web and decide to check out your business link provided in the campaign page, but wouldn’t it be great if you could hold onto that SEO value that you accumulated during the marketing phase?
This way, you can tailor messages based on the stage of your campaign or direct them to a sales page post-Kickstarter. Learn more about this below.
2. Controlling Visitor Flow
By using a landing page, you can customize the information a visitor sees and, depending on the phase of the campaign, display different calls to action.
For example, if you are in the preparation phase of the campaign, you could use your landing page to direct your supporters to a ThunderClap.It campaign, where they can pledge their social support so that your customized message will be tweeted out upon launch.
If you are in the final days of your Kickstarter campapign and need existing supporters to spread the word about your campaign, you could change the landing page so that it’s easy to share your campaign on a variety of social networks. You could then direct them to that landing page in a Kickstarter update.
Finally, when your campaign is over, you can turn your landing page into a pre-order page or use a customized URL with Shopify to turn the landing page into an ecommerce store.
3. Conduct AB Testing
From what I’ve noticed, there are a large number of successful physical products on Kickstarter. Selling physical products via retail outlets or other distributors is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but the incredible thing about online marketing/sales is that you can have access to real-time data about how people interact with your website and gain in-depth insight into their buying behavior.
It’s easy to think once you’ve had a success on your hands that you have the magic touch. I’m more guilty of this than anyone else! Yes, having a vision is important and sometimes this means going against the immediate trends. However, it’s crucial to let real-world data drive everyday business decisions, not your ego.
You can AB test your landing page to determine what types of wording and layouts yield the best conversions (click throughs to the campaign page or social sharing).
In the past, I’ve used Unbounce as a quick and easy way to set up an AB testable landing page.
How do you create a landing page?
It all depends on your level of coding ability. If you have no coding ability what so ever, I’d recommend using a company like Unbounce or LeadPages, as they offer out of the box solutions.
If you are familiar with website design, you could use a free or paid wordpress template coupled with google analytics. A quick google search yields: “10 Best Landing Page WordPress Themes.”
You could also use the famous “Hacking Kickstarter” landing page. The open source template is available on GitHub.
My question to you
Do you think creators should use a landing page for their Kickstarter proejct? If not, why? Let me know if you’ve had a good experience with any other types of landing page software providers.
