{"id":18978,"date":"2020-10-08T16:01:13","date_gmt":"2020-10-08T23:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backerkit.com\/blog\/?p=18978"},"modified":"2022-04-18T13:29:05","modified_gmt":"2022-04-18T20:29:05","slug":"marketing-for-kickstarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backerkit.com\/blog\/marketing-for-kickstarter","title":{"rendered":"Marketing for Kickstarter: How to Smash Your Funding Goal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you wondering how to drive more pledges to your campaign? It all starts with <\/span>marketing<\/span><\/a>. Let’s take a look at how marketing for Kickstarter and Indiegogo works and the strategies the top creators rely on to raise more funds during their campaigns.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reaching potential backers<\/h2>\n

As a crowdfunding creator, you can classify the people you\u2019ll be marketing to into two groups: (1) People who already know about your project and are invested, and (2) people who you haven\u2019t reached yet. You\u2019ll need to take two distinct approaches when connecting with these groups.<\/span><\/p>\n

Convert your existing audience<\/h2>\n

Experienced creators likely already have a community of people behind them who trust them and are excited about their upcoming project. If you\u2019re setting up a crowdfunding marketing budget and wondering where you should spend your first dollar, start with this existing audience. When marketing for Kickstarter, it\u2019s a lot easier to get people you already know to visit your campaign page than it is to acquire new backers, so your money will go further with this group.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This community will help your campaign build momentum. Their pledges, particularly when those pledges happen early on in your campaign, serve as social proof, convincing other people to back your project. When someone sees that your campaign is doing well, they\u2019ll want to jump on the bandwagon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Activating your community<\/h3>\n

To mobilize your community, and make sure you\u2019re reaching them with the right messages at the right time, develop an <\/span>email messaging strategy<\/span><\/a> for your Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. In terms of your timeline, you should be sending email messages at a few crucial moments pre-launch and during your campaign. These moments include, but are not limited to: a week before you launch your project, launch day, a few days after launching, and right before your campaign ends.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In each email, you\u2019ll not only need to encourage your audience to pledge early but also drum up excitement for your campaign. Tell them what problem your product solves. Give them a behind-the-scenes look at your product development or prototyping process. Offer early-bird specials. Create a sense of urgency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If you struggle to come up with email marketing messages or just want to make this process easier, <\/span>BackerKit Launch<\/span><\/a> can help. Launch is an email platform built specifically for crowdfunding. When you’re still in the early stages of your campaign, you can use it to create a landing page to collect email addresses and build your community. Once you’re ready to start promoting your campaign, you can use templates designed to be sent at strategic points throughout your campaign, and receive guidance on what to say and when to say it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike a standard email marketing platform, you\u2019ll also be able to use Launch to refine your messaging as your campaign progresses. Launch allows Kickstarter and Indiegogo users to track pledge progression in real-time. Using the platforms segmentation tool, you can divide your community into groups based on whether or not they\u2019ve pledged. After segmenting your audience, you\u2019ll be able to send targeted messages to people who haven\u2019t pledged to encourage them to do so while also ensuring that you don\u2019t over-message people who\u2019ve already pledged.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You can also import past Kickstarter or Indiegogo projects directly into Launch to see how many people on your email list pledged to previous campaigns and the percentage of pledges that came from past backers. With this data, you\u2019ll have a sense of how many people from this group are likely to pledge to your campaign based on their past behavior and whether or not you have enough built-in support to have a strong first day.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Once you\u2019ve started connecting with your existing audience, that\u2019s when you can scale up and start spending money where there\u2019s more of a risk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finding new backers through social media and paid marketing<\/h2>\n

You may choose to reach new backers through organic social media and email marketing. Posting regularly about your project and participating in conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in relevant communities can help you build an audience. Tools like Buffer<\/a>, Trello<\/a>, TweetDeck<\/a>, HootSuite<\/a>, and MailChimp<\/a> make it easier to plan out social media posts and build emails, so you can consistently engage your target audience. To see how effective your organic efforts are, you can track traffic sources using Google Analytics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While organic marketing is an important part of your overall acquisition strategy, investing money into outreach can give your backer count a much-needed boost. Paid marketing encompasses a whole spectrum of activities. Each of these activities varies in how effective they are in targeting the people most likely to be interested in your campaign.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Brand marketing<\/b>: The goal here is to build brand awareness and tell a compelling story. Think about Super Bowl ads \u2014 they\u2019re not very targeted, and it\u2019s difficult to measure the results, but they reach a lot of people. Brand marketing is not going to be a good fit for a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

PR\/influencer marketing: <\/b>Here, you\u2019ll identify people who may be social media influencers, bloggers, or other popular creators who produce content that is adjacent to the project category you\u2019re working in and can help spread the word about your campaign when it\u2019s live. This strategy can be helpful. However, it\u2019s most powerful when used in addition to other promotional techniques.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Demographic and interest-based Facebook Ads<\/b>: Through <\/span>Facebook Ads<\/span><\/a>, you can effectively target people interested in technology, design, gaming, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and any other demographic that your \u201cideal customer\u201d may fall into. You can also measure the results reasonably well through Facebook. This is something that you can do on your own.<\/span><\/p>\n

Behavioral targeting<\/b>: This type of targeting is the most precise and is achieved through <\/span>performance marketing<\/span><\/a>. Rather than merely targeting people who resemble the kinds of backers you\u2019re hoping to attract, you\u2019re targeting people who have performed actions or behaviors that would make them good prospects. Using behavioral targeting, you can connect with real people who have supported projects like yours and recommend your project to them through ads. This data makes your marketing dollars go further, which is why this type of marketing for Kickstarter is so popular with the top creators.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Targeting with brand marketing is the least effective for crowdfunding creators while behavioral targeting is the most effective.<\/p><\/div>\n

Although behavioral marketing has the strongest targeting capabilities, you can only access the audience data that you have personally collected to date, limiting the number of potential backers you\u2019ll be able to reach. However, you can increase that audience by teaming up with a marketing or ad agency.<\/span><\/p>\n

How marketing agencies work for Kickstarter creators<\/h2>\n

A marketing or ad agency that employs behavioral targeting will recommend your project to prospective backers through highly-targeted <\/span>Facebook Ads<\/span><\/a>. And while you\u2019ll find many different ad agencies and <\/span>marketing services<\/span><\/a> out there, crowdfunding creators must work with partners that have experience running ads for crowdfunding projects. Agencies that specialize in marketing for Kickstarter and Indiegogo not only understand which techniques work best for crowdfunding projects, but also have access to the audiences that are most likely to pledge to your campaign.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BackerKit, for example, has sent 17 million backer surveys in the eight years since its launch. A certain percentage of those people have opted in to receive recommendations. As a result, BackerKit has a deep well of backer data. We know when these people back projects and what their behavior is in BackerKit. Our <\/span>marketing experts<\/span><\/a> can then use this information to put together the most relevant group of people for your project. Just as a service like Spotify recommends music to people, connecting listeners to artists, we\u2019re recommending crowdfunding projects to people, connecting backers with creators on Facebook.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You can\u2019t achieve this level of targeting on your own. You have to work with an agency with access to your campaign\u2019s most relevant audience and deep insights into how they behave.<\/span><\/p>\n

Measuring success<\/h2>\n

To ensure that you\u2019re getting the best return on ad spend (ROAS) \u2014 that is, the money you\u2019re getting back for every dollar spent \u2014 you\u2019ll obviously have to track ad performance. One common misconception that creators have is that they need to optimize for efficiency if they want to have a successful Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. For example, they may think that every dollar they spend on ads needs to return $10, otherwise it\u2019s not worth their time. While it\u2019s important to look at efficiency, chasing those super-efficient returns doesn\u2019t have to be your primary focus. But that super-efficient ROAS is only meaningful if it\u2019s able to scale. <\/span><\/p>\n

Why it\u2019s important to think about scale when marketing for Kickstarter or Indiegogo<\/h3>\n

To understand how to measure your success on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, let\u2019s take a look at two different scenarios.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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With the first option, you’re getting a 10x ROAS after spending $100, which translates into $1000 in pledges. So if you have a 50% margin, you\u2019ll earn $500 before ad costs. Once you subtract the $100 ad spend, your profit is $400.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the second option,<\/span> you\u2019re only getting 4x ROAS after spending $1000. This brings in $4000 on Kickstarter. With that 50% margin, you\u2019ll make $2000 before ad costs, and $1000 after paying for advertising.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the second example, you\u2019re spending more money, but you\u2019re getting twice as much back in pure profit. On top of this, you\u2019re going to benefit from Kickstarter\u2019s networking effects. When you\u2019re able to drive more pledges to your campaign through ads, you\u2019ll experience a boost in organic traffic because Kickstarter\u2019s algorithm ranks projects that are doing well higher. This means that you\u2019re going to get a lift that you don\u2019t even have to pay for. It\u2019s best to get your Kickstarter campaign as big as it can be as quickly as you can because everything will compound to bring more attention to your campaign and help you reach your funding goal.<\/span><\/p>\n

When does running ads make sense?<\/h2>\n

Paid customer acquisition doesn\u2019t work for every type of project. To make sure that you\u2019re using your marketing dollars effectively, you should only consider working with an ad agency if you meet the following criteria:<\/span><\/p>\n