By now we’re all familiar with the Kickstarter phenomena. One day, you can be a struggling inventor or game designer, toiling away on this project you’ve been pouring your heart and soul into for the past year. Prospects are grim. The funds are running are out. You have one shot to make this dream a reality.
You finally get up the courage to press “submit” on the Kickstarter dashboard…and against all odds, in a month you are “internet famous” and have thousands of new supporters eagerly awaiting your product to ship out.
How cool is that? Democratized project funding and crowdsourced invention.
So how do you get in on this new crowdfunding revolution? Well, first, I’d recommend reading about some of the common mistakes creators make with their kickstarter and indiegogo projects. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to get serious about planning your campaign.
In my experience, being able to anticipate the road ahead is the hallmark of being successful at a any new endeavor. It’s time to get a complete understanding of just where and how people will be able to find your Kickstarter campaign. To begin, check out the infographic below, put together by Prefundia, a website that showcases projects about to launch on Kickstarter and other channels.
In the infographic above, Prefundia gathered the data for the top 3 traffic sources via the article, How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days (Includes Successful Templates, E-mails, etc.). I’ve included a snippet of the article below.
“To discover the top referral sources, we gave our VA a list of Kickstarter projects similar to ours and asked her to list the referrers for each project. Almost without fail, the order of top referrers was:
1. Facebook
2. Direct traffic (primarily via email)
3. Twitter
4. Kickstarter
5. BlogsBased on this data, we decided to focus all of our attention on just two goals:
1. Getting coverage on the right blogs
2. Activating our networks to create buzz on Facebook, Twitter, and email”
Growing your pledge base from the bottom up.
Many creators that I speak with have a top-down approach to marketing their Kickstarter campaign, saying things like “If I could only get on TechCrunch, my project would be funded.”
To put it bluntly, it can sometimes be embarrassing, scary, and make you feel a little awkward to ask your friends, family, coworkers, previous customers, and anyone else in your social network to pledge first to a campaign. However, it’s 100% necessary to start here first.
Phase 1: Kickstarter Itself & Your Social Network.
As we talked about in the last article, there is a honeymoon period (when your project can be found in the recently launched area) that may help jumpstart the fundraising process. However, in order to fully take advantage of this period, it’s imperative that you have the majority of your social network pledge on the first two days of your campaign.
Of course, not everyone in your network will be able to meet this deadline, but at the very least, you should aim to have 20-30% of your fundraising goal lined up to be pledged in the first week.
Each member involved in your campaign should actively participate to make the most of the honeymoon period. If you’re raising money for a film, get your actors, writers, and photographers on board to be involved in the campaign process. If they are going to benefit from seeing the campaign funded, they should be involved.
Quick Tip: When engaging friends/family, you will see the best return from your efforts if you directly Facebook message and email every single person and explain the project, why you are doing it, how they will benefit if they pledge, and answer any of their questions. Pick up the phone and call them if possible.
Don’t just post it on Facbeook and hope people will pledge or send an email blast CC’ing all of your friends. Be proactive.
Phase 2: Kickstarter, Blogs, Social Bookmarking Sites
At this point, the majority of your social network has pledged. You should have encouraged your backers to leave comments to begin a discussion around the project. Potentially, your early bird specials are almost out. If people have pledged from the Kickstarter website, that’s a very good sign. It means that strangers like your rewards/video.
You should have already begun forming a relationship with social bookmarking sites (Reddit, Forums, Social Media Groups) and blogs that write about topics in your category or write about similar products/campaigns. It’s now time to begin outreach here along with outreach to your own fan base that you should have been building up in preparation for your campaign.
The cardinal rule for social bookmarking sites or self-promotion is be useful or contribute to the community 90% of the time and promote 10% of the time. Check out how this other creator used Reddit to attract pledges or how some of these campaigns encouraged pledges in the early days of their campaign.
The ultimate goal is to be 40-50% funded in the first week to be in super good shape and to maintain your Kickstarter rank from the honeymoon period. There is definitely a lull that occurs with most campaigns, where they see the most interest at the beginning and the end of their campaign. However, some campaigns do exhibit more of a linear growth path.
I’ve already written a bit about blog outreach tools, how to get on a reporter’s radar, and how to frame your pitch. We’ll discuss this more in the next section. I would begin pitching your media list (starting with bloggers) while in phase 2.
Quick tip: Now, your traffic will begin to diversify away from just your social network. If you’re doing a good job of maintaining interest and driving traffic that converts, you should continue to see pledges from Kickstarter.
Phase 3: Media Outreach, Evaluate & Keep the Engine Churning.
When you reach this phase, you’re going to need to start thinking creatively. You should have already crafted a media pitch that highlights the selling points of your project. Now, new variables may come to light that you could use to update the pitch (funds raised, comments, any other PR you’ve gotten).
It’s time start your media outreach or following up with connections you’ve already gotten. Debatably, you could have also begun some media outreach prior, but in my experience, journalists tend to get more interested as they see the project is taking off, but this also depends on the angle you are using for the story.
It’s also time to evaluate the actions that you have taken to date. What sources are bringing you the most traffic and pledges? In case you didn’t know, you can put a + a the end of your Kickstarter short link to see where the clicks from that Url are coming from.
For example, these guys recently posted on our forum and included their Kickstarter short link (http://kck.st/1jwxCyT)
If you add a “+” to the end of their short link, it will take you to the analytics for that link: http://kck.st/1jwxCyT+
This link had a total of 9 clicks (2 were direct, so I didn’t include them in the screenshot above. It received 5 clicks from our forum and 1 from Facebook. You can use these analytics to get a better sense of where people are clicking through to your campaign.
When You Get PR
When you do get PR, whether it’s a blog post or a news story, it’s vital that you begin pushing out that article on social media. Use relevant hashtags and mention other news networks/bloggers in that niche. As illustrated in the infographic at the beginning of this post, this is the best way to attract new backers, as they will find your project from a trusted source!
My Question For You
Did you find this article to be helpful? Can you share your Kickstarter project short-link below an add the “+” to the end of the url so that we can check out the traffic analytics for your project?
