If you aren’t running Facebook ads for your crowdfunding campaign, you’re leaving money on the table!
Without a doubt, Facebook ads are the fastest way to get new backers for your Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. Even notable marketing agencies have sprung up just to run these types of ads for your campaign.
When you know what you’re doing, Facebook ads are extremely profitable and easy to deploy. However, if you have no idea how Facebook works, you’re gonna waste a lot of money advertising your campaign.
I want to help get you up to speed quickly so that you can begin getting more backers for your crowdfunding campaign.
I’m going to go through some of the proven strategies for running profitable ads. These tips are best used for product-centric campaigns.
At the same time, as we saw with the last election, you can also use Facebook ads to get people to take action in a number of different industries, whether it’s for a cause-related, political, or nonprofit crowdfunding campaign.
There are a few different variables when it comes to Facebook advertisements. There is:
- The creative. This is the image that you use to convey your message on the platform.
- The copywriting. This is also part of the message that users see. It should persuade them of the value of clicking on the advertisement.
- The audience. Who is going to see this advertisement and how are they connected to you. Are they cold leads or warm leads?
- The offer. This is the value you’re offering users. This is the overall reason they should click on your advertisement.
In the points below, I’m going to be hitting on several of these variables and how you can employ a strategy to get the most bang for your buck.
1. Custom Audience: A Profitable Approach to Ads
I’ve found that advertising to a custom audience tends to be the greatest ROI for my ad spend. This could take the form of website visitors or a look-a-like audience, but I’ll get into that later.
At the moment, I’m referring to the option where you can upload a list of email subscribers and Facebook will advertise to those individuals on their platform.
You might say to yourself… why would I want to do that when I could just send them an email?
Good question!
The reason is that not everyone is going to open your emails. Depending on the size of your email list, you could be getting anywhere from 20 – 50% open rates. This will also vary depending on how receptive people are to you and your message.
If you have an email list of 2,000 people, that could be 400 – 1,000 people who are not receiving your messages!
You could create a custom email list of people who are not opening your emails and upload it to Facebook. You could also just upload the entire list.
The great thing about this approach is that individuals who have signed up to your email list are pre-selected to be interested in your offer. They’ve already taken the time to give you their email address.
This is why you’re going to tend to see more of a profitable ad spend when you create a custom audience in this manner. People already:
- Know who you are.
- Are interested in what you have to offer.
There are a lot of different types of email lists that you can upload, including:
- A list of blog subscribers
- A pre-launch list
- A list of previous customers
They’re warm leads.
If you don’t have an email like like this, go and check out my article on getting email subscribers.
2. Retargeting Ads: Taking Custom Audiences A Step Further
Now that you’ve uploaded a list of leads that you’ve generated from your marketing, it’s time to take your Facebook advertising a step further.
Another way that you can create a custom audience in Facebook is with your own website traffic. You can target people who have come to your website in the past.
Since SO MANY people use Facebook (1.15 billion mobile daily active users), it’s likely that they’re also going to be on Facebook. You might have visited a website or looked into a particular product and then noticed that you started to get ads on that product in your Facebook feed. This is the power of retargeting ads.
Of course, if you want to do this, you’re going to need to install a Facebook pixel on your website. You gotta let it collect data for a little bit, then you’ll be ready to go!
When you create a custom audience of people who have visited your website, I’d recommend identifying key pages that segment your website audience .
For example, let’s say that you have a page on your website with information about your upcoming Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. Awesome!
Anyone who visits this page is clearly interested in learning more about your product, so this would be a great audience to re-target.
Now, let’s say that you wrote a blog post that’s not related to your product, but instead shares some of your own thoughts at this stage in your life. This would NOT be a good page to retarget website traffic from. It’s not relevant to your current product offering.
Similar to drawing from your pre-existing email lists, retargeting ads have a few different benefits:
- People already know you or your company, as they visited your website.
- People have a vague idea of what you’re offering.
- People have qualified themselves as being semi-warm leads, meaning that they’re more likely to convert into backers than cold leads.
These are the key reasons why retargeting ads tend to be low hanging fruit. They’re a profitable way to begin to get more crowdfunding campaign backers.
3. Lookalike Audience: Advanced Custom Audience Technique
A third way that you can begin to get more backers for your crowdfunding campaign using Facebook ads is to take advantage of lookalike audiences.
Here’s how it works. Facebook will create a list of users that have similar attributes to those that you’ve designated. They use their proprietary algorithm to do this. This algorithm has gotten pretty good over the years.
You can create a lookalike audience from:
- Your email list
- Your website traffic
- Other custom audiences you’ve built.
Seeing as these users will be similar to the individuals you’ve designated, they’re going to be more likely to be interested in your offer and take action on your advertisement. This is the reason lookalike audiences tend to be more profitable.
Along with creating a lookalike audience, you can also designate other ways to narrow down the potential audience. You could pre-select that people must be interested in key topics, like ecommerce, Kickstarter, or Indiegogo.
There are a lot of different variables that you can choose from to make sure this audience is highly relevant. You can even target people who follow key individuals or pages.
Up until this point in time, there were only a few variables that you could play with to affect your conversion rates. This included your image, copywriting, and overall offer.
Now, you can play with many more variables to get better conversion rates. This is both good and bad. I’d try to run one test at a time, and see how it affects that results you’re seeing in term of the click through rate, sign up rate, and overall engagement.
4. Target Cold Users on Facebook
A “warm” user is someone who has already interacted with your brand in some way. A “cold” user is someone who has no idea who you are and what you’re offering. They haven’t expressed any kind of interest in your offer.
Lookalike audiences are a form of cold traffic that you’d be sending to your campaign. A step beyond that is to simply check the boxes of the various interests that you want to target on Facebook.
For example, if someone has expressed an interest in fashion or shopping, and you checked that box, those individuals would receive your advertisement.
This is where most beginners start, but it’s the least effective way to get bakers for your crowdfunding campaign. You’re really shooting into the dark and unless you have a stellar offer, you’re likely going to get less of an ROI.
I would engage in this strategy last, as it’s the most risky. Still, you can always throw $10 per day at Facebook ads and test it. It’s not going to break the bank.
When you have all of these four pillars of Facebook ads working successfully, you’ve reached the crowdfunding holy grail. You’ll be able to confidently say that you can turn $1 into $4 using Facebook ads.
Where to Go From Here
The process of learning how to use Facebook ads to get backers for your campaign isn’t going to happen overnight. This is one reason I recommend that you start with Facebook ads before you launch on Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
You can use Facebook ads to build up a pre-launch email list, which will introduce you to a lot of these different strategies.
Overall, it’s all worth it. Once you get a profitable advertisement that resonates with the audience, you’ll see a massive jump in pledges. You can keep re-investing the difference back into Facebook ads and grow your overall funding meter.
It’s powerful stuff.
If you’d like to learn more about marketing strategies that you can use to raise money with crowdfunding, I invite you to join one of my next webinars. Get on my email list and watch out for an invitation!
I run killer webinars that will seriously upgrade your marketing game. Hope you enjoyed this blog post. Until next time!
