Do you want to raise money with an equity crowdfunding campaign?
Then your campaign page is just about the most important asset for your offering. This is the page that’s going to turn visitors into investors. It’s job is to educate, persuade, and ultimately, convert.
You might have all of your ducks in a row. You’ve done all the paperwork for your offering. You’ve set up a sound marketing strategy. You have a few lead investors on board.
But… if you don’t have a page that effectively conveys the value of your offering, it’s all useless. You might get traffic, but you won’t get many investors. It’s a very common problem with crowdfunding campaigns as a whole.
With this article, I’m going to take you step-by-step through the process of creating a campaign that raises funds. This is the backbone of a successful crowdfunding campaign and it contains all of the key elements that are needed to turn lurkers into investors.
I reveal the complete launch process for an equity offering in my book, Equity Crowdfunding Explained. This book shares with you the proven techniques to raise capital from the crowd. You can pick up a digital or physical copy on Amazon.
1. Your Video Will Make or Break Your Campaign
Your crowdfunding pitch video is the first thing that potential investors see when they come to your campaign page. It’s your first impression. It’s everything.
No matter how sophisticated you think investors are, they are still human beings that are driven by emotions. Most of us have very short attention spans and in the back of our mind, we’re always wondering, “Okay, so what does this mean for me?”
Chances are that if you’re not able to communicate the benefits of your offering in a 3 minute video, the website visitor isn’t going to give you the chance to waste more of their time with the text below it.
My pitch video checklist reads as follows:
- Duration: Keep it under 5 minutes. Ideally 2 – 4. The video is a teaser. It’s not meant to convey EVERYTHING about your offering.
- Imagery to include: Your video is all about the vision you have for the startup. It should paint a picture in the mind of a potential investor. Show the product in action. Show people using the product. Show the trustworthy team behind the offering.
- Points to mention: Along with the standard points, I would also throw in credibility-indicators, social proof, growth opportunity, and what investors are joining when they participate.
- Story: A standard pitch is going to go through the product/solution and how it’s different. While you could logically discuss this it’s going to be more palatable if you embed this in a story. Why were you so determined to make this solution a reality?
Investors are humans and humans are not initially moved my logic. They’re moved by appeals to emotion. Suck them in with emotions and justify the offering with logic to get someone to commit to investing.
2. Image-Heavy Campaign Pages Win Out
The human mind is only capable of digesting a small amount of text before it gets frustrated and overwhelmed. You’ll quickly lose someone’s attention if your entire offering is comprised of text.
You can get around this dry or dull-looking page by including high resolution images, gifs, icons, and headlines that will break up the layout. This also will help visitors get a better sense of your company when they see more people using your product.
Don’t just do this arbitrarily, but use the images on the page to draw someone’s attention to a key benefit of the product or offering. It’s a simple exercise in branding and storytelling.
Let’s be honest, most people are gonna skim your page a couple of times before making any kind of decision. Their eyes will gravitate to the sections of the page that are easiest to read. None of us like doing a lot of work to digest information.
3. Effective Copywriting Will Boost Your Results
I have a great video on YouTube where I discuss how to write better copy. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking that the purpose of a campaign page is simply to convey information. Not true!
The best campaign pages are very similar to sales pages. When writing a sales page, you are not only educating about the product, but you’re also persuading the reader. You’re getting them to take some kind of action.
Copywriting is the science of using words to persuade customers or investors to take action. You can use copywriting techniques to evoke emotions, get someone revved up, and have them invest in your offering.
Replace your BORING business speak with personable language. Remember, you’re talking to retail investors, not venture capital firms. The average person is going to get bored listening to you rattle on about statistics. Try to spice it up and make it fun.
The EASIEST way that you can write more effective copy is to tell the story leading up to this moment in time and then paint the vision of the future. Why is this so effective?
- We instantly pay attention to good stories, because we want to find out what happens next.
- We empathize with main characters and the struggles they go through.
- Everyone wishes they were part of a good story. Now… they can be by becoming an investor.
Before anyone makes a purchasing or investment decision, they must first imagine themselves owning the actual product. In marketing terms, we call this future pacing. By painting a picture of what the future will look like, you’ll get them to imagine it themselves.
The more we tend to think about something in a positive light, the greater we come to want that thing. Eventually, that leads to action.
For example, let’s pretend that you just met an attractive girl or guy on the street. Without realizing it, you bumped into them while walking on the sidewalk. Oops!
After the initial confusion, you exchanged a few words. They seemed pretty cool (not to mention, they are good looking). Eventually, you got their contact information.
For the rest of the day, you can’t stop thinking about them. You keep imagining what it would be like to take them out on a date, and where you would go. The more you think about them that week, the more you imagine other scenarios, like getting married or what kind of life they lead.
When you’re young, it’s pretty common to feel this way about someone else, and it’s called having a crush. Your imaginings cause you to actually like them more.
The same principle applies to marketing. The more you can get potential investors to think about your company in a positive light and wonder about the future, the more they will fall in love with your team, your product, and the opportunity.
4. Ground Your Pitch in Reality With Numbers
In the beginning of this post, we mainly discussed ways to evoke emotions in your potential investors. This is extremely important, because everyone makes decisions based on emotions. However, they then justify those decisions based on logic.
If you don’t have a strong appeal to the logical side of the brain in your pitch, then you’re not going to close many people in the funding round. People might get all excited, but they won’t take action for fear of making a bad decision.
To get investors to take action, you gotta give them sound reasoning as to WHY this is a great investment decision. You do that with:
- Numbers: How much money are you making? How many users do you have? Numbers ground your pitch in reality.
- Statistics and Research: How does the overall industry stack up? What do independent firms say about the niche, technology, or market? What about customer behavior?
- Percentages and graphs: How fast are you growing month over month? What is your retention rate?
- Case Studies: What are your real success stories? Who demonstrates and makes the story more concrete?
These are some easy ways to add more credibility to your pitch and ground it in reality. Some of your investors will be more rational-minded and they’ll LOVE that you have all this data.
Honestly? Other investors won’t care as much, but they will still like to see it because it confirms that they are making a good decision. You’ve clearly done your homework.
Eventually, investors will only be able to evaluate the opportunity based on the numbers you give them in the form of the minimum required investment and the shares they’re getting for that.
5. Your Team is The Only Thing That Matters
Newer investors are more likely to believe that success in the startup space comes down to “having a good idea” or a “good market” to go after. Not true!
Of course you need an amazing product, but if you really think about how that product comes into existence, it’s because a team gets together and creates it.
We can talk strategy all day, but when it comes down to it, your startup team is actually what’s going to execute on the plan. A company is just a team of people that are organized and working towards a common goal.
A great team is:
- Talented: The quality of the product you create is directly tied to the skill level of the team members. The more talented the team, the better the quality of product and thus the overall organization.
- Hungry: You can have talented people, but if they aren’t hungry, they are pretty useless. Startups require long hours every single week. You gotta have a team that is hungry and obsessed with the result, just like an olympic athlete.
- Resourceful: Your’e going to run into problems. You aren’t always going to have the ideal amount of funding. You need people who can solve problems and be resourceful/creative.
- Cohesive: Lastly, you can have a few all stars on your team, but if they don’t work well together, then their usefulness will cancel each other out. You need complimentary skill sets and people that can actually work together.
Experienced investors are far more likely to pay attention to the quality of your team in the early stages of a company (rather than the idea or market). In later funding stages, more emphasis will be given to the product-market traction and overall growth potential.
With your crowdfunding campaign page, it’s your job to illustrate why your team is uniquely able to tackle this problem and provide a world-class solution. This will help people believe you can actually achieve what you set out to do.
6. Equity Crowdfunding Page Checklist
While we could talk all day about the design of a campaign page and the various elements that are going to cause someone to make an investment commitment, I want to give you a quick and actionable list of items that you can use to get together an effective page.
The checklist below is not exhaustive but it will put you on the right path for getting started with your project page. I know there’s a lot of information to consume and things to do leading up to the launch of your offering. I hope this list helps to make all that easier!
Before you launch, you’ll need:
- Crowdfunding Pitch Video
- Problem/Product/Solution. USP (Unique selling prop)
- The Team
- Your Company Story
- Business Model/Growth Engine
- Vision For The Future
- Statistics/Market Research and Potential
- Case Studies/Product-Market Traction
- Offering Details
- How You’ll Use Funding/Exit Strategy
Listing all of that out, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.
Remember, your campaign functions as a SALES PITCH. Not everyone is going to read every word. Some investors will scan to the statistics/market section and others will be more interested in your vision for the future.
You should also form an elevator pitch that you can use to succinctly communicate what your startup is about and why people should care. This can be used when you’re doing podcast interview or other media appearances. It’s also great for networking.
I hope you find this list to be helpful. If you’d like to discover the secret behind a successful crowdfunding campaign, I’ve put together a guide for you called Equity Crowdfunding Explained. You can grab a copy here.
Always keep in mind the rules that you must abide by with your offering. You should always be 100% accurate, truthful, and transparent. For more info on the rules, see this article.
