Pre-Crowdfunding Marketing is Not Optional
Crowdfunding Advisors, FundRazr Team
Think of your crowdfunding campaign like a big project launch opening party. If you were throwing a party, you wouldn’t keep it a secret until the day of – if you did, no one would show up! Treat your crowdfunding campaign like an event that you’re selling tickets to – build momentum and get buy-in before your launch date. Spend at least a month building hype and anticipation for your campaign so that turning on your campaign is akin to opening the flood gate to your dream. You can see why pre-launch marketing is hugely important to your campaign!
Before you’re off and out of the gates tweeting up a storm, it’s important to note that marketing a crowdfunding project is different from your usual marketing activities and can be a bit more difficult as a result. Usually, the focus would be on finding your target audience and running ads about your business to that audience. Crowdfunding introduces a tricky variable into the mix; you not only have to find a distinct audience who will like your idea and be interested in crowdfunding, you are time-bound.
No Day But Today
The hit musical Rent totally has it right, there is no day but today and you can’t wait till tomorrow to launch your pre-crowdfunding marketing efforts. Most people mistakenly wait until they are ready to launch their campaign to launch their marketing. We recommend starting 2-3 months before your debut. Give yourself buffer time to discover what does and doesn’t work. Give yourself time to find the audience and start pitching media in advance of your launch.
Creative Ways to Kick it Off
A lot of other sites will tell you that you should spend 30% of your project’s goal on pre-crowdfunding marketing, but we would argue that this is a bit problematic and sort of defeats the purpose of crowdfunding. You can reduce this 30% by getting a bit more creative and thinking outside of the box. Get involved in events around your area that are relevant to your cause or project that will help you spread the word.
Give several different approaches a try and pretty soon you’ll start to see a trend within your audience as to which aspects of your project and marketing draw the best response. Based on your early stage results, where do you see the most user engagement coming from? This information will be your Northern Star and immensely useful when it’s actually game time. You do not want to spend time, effort, and maybe even advertising dollars on a tactic that is simply not effective in garnering user engagement from your audience, especially under a time limit!
In Summary
Pre-crowdfunding marketing is essential to not only finding your target audience, but also discovering what kind of marketing will be the most effective when it’s show time. More importantly, it helps you build the audience so that once you hit ‘launch,’ your campaign will have a following of invested supporters.
You can’t afford to wait until just before your crowdfunding project launches to start getting the word out to people. Besides being ineffective, you’re just going to be unnecessarily stressed out and leave your marketing disoriented. Start marketing your campaign a couple of months before going live so you have time to evaluate what works and what doesn’t.
