How to Market Your Crowdfunding Campaign – Introduction
More small companies are using crowdfunding to raise funds as an alternative to traditional funding options. So knowing how to market your crowdfunding campaign is incredibly important!
How to Market Your Crowdfunding Campaign – Why?
Marketing your crowdfunding campaign is crucial to its success. This is because it’s the only way you can get your campaign out to the masses. Otherwise, it would become stagnant and would waste your time, and effort, in creating the campaign.
You’re more likely to reach your final goal when you market your crowdfunding campaign. This is because more people are aware and, therefore, are likely to invest.
How to Market Your Crowdfunding Campaign – Who?
There are mainly three groups that you target when you’re marketing your crowdfunding campaign:
- Personal network – your friends, family and other people you personally know such as co-workers etc.
- Intrinsic people – people who subscribe to you, follow you and any fans you already have.
- Extrinsic people – people that don’t know your company, the potential stakeholders.
Let’s break these down further:
How to Market Your Crowdfunding Campaign – Three groups to target!
- Your Personal Network
Using your personal network is great for marketing your crowdfunding campaign. It helps broadcast your campaign to new audiences instantly, after all, you may not know the people they do.
When getting your family and friends to support you; it’s easier to explain it to them because they may have seen your business or idea from the start. Getting them involved from the beginning is essential because they can provide you with valuable input. As a result, this helps you promote your campaign.
The support could cause a snowball effect, with more people finding out and spreading it for you. Also when marketing your campaign to people in your personal network, make sure that you genuinely have spoken to them. As a result, they will care to check out and promote your campaign.
- Intrinsic People
You should be marketing your crowdfunding campaign to people who are stakeholders in your business.
Similar to your personal network, these people already have a relationship with you and would tend to help promote your crowdfunding campaign.
Customers, shareholders, and fans would all want the business to continue to succeed as they have a relationship to the business, so reaching out to them could lead to increased awareness as they also would have their own personal network that they can tap into.
- Extrinsic People
When marketing your crowdfunding campaign to stakeholders, you need to reach out to them to see if they would promote you, or better yet, invest in the idea.
You should reach out to other businesses or groups that are attached to the market your looking to promote your idea. See if these groups would be willing to repost your campaign or post about you and your campaign.
It is important that you gain a foothold in these communities that are already somehow related to your crowdfunding campaign/idea so you can prove to new potential stakeholders that you already have a backing/following.
How to Market Your Crowdfunding Campaign – How?
- Word of mouth: Word of mouth is usually the first form when marketing your crowdfunding video, as it is the quickest and easiest method of marketing.
- Email – Email is a very useful way to market your crowdfunding campaign, as it has the potential to reach a mass crowd. Before starting your campaign it is important that you have a mail list, this may be of people who are stakeholders in the company and people who are in your existing network.
It would be of use to your campaign, if some of the people in your mail list had their own lists that had a lot of people on it that they allow you to use, with the aim of spreading the message of your crowdfunding campaign even further.
There are tools online that would make emailing more efficient for your crowdfunding campaign such as MailChimp, which allows you to optimise results as you’re able to customise emails.
- Pay-per-click advertising – Pay-per-click advertisement can help in marketing your crowdfunding campaign as well as your business in the long run. Using Facebook ADs or Google Adwords is an effective way to market your crowdfunding campaign because you can customise it to reach people who are actually interested in the market you are trying to appeal to.
Along with the ad, comes a ‘call to action’ that allows the viewer to go straight to your crowdfunding campaign, which makes it easier for them to invest/donate. - Social media – Social media is a great platform for you to market your crowdfunding campaign. It’s important that you already have a social media presence before trying to market your crowdfunding campaign on it.
Social media is useful because it allows you to target those that are in your personal network as well as those that aren’t in your personal network. Most crowdfunding campaigns use all possible platforms to optimise their reach, for example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit.
It’s important that you focus on making sure you make use of the social networks that you have a large following.
How to Market Your Crowdfunding Campaign – Conclusion
To conclude, making sure to market your crowdfunding campaign is essential to its success. Without marketing it, it will be hard to reach your target. This is because, potential investors won’t be able to come across your crowdfunding campaign.
There are different groups that you’re able to target, some are easier to engage with than others, but it is important that you try and engage with all groups to gain as much awareness as possible.
There are multiple useful ways to market your crowdfunding campaigns, such as social media and word of mouth, and it is important that you try and utilise as many forms of marketing to help ensure you reach your goal.
Do you need personal advice on your crowdfunding marketing plan?
We can help. Drop The Crowdfunding Studio are proud partners of Crowdcube and Indiegogo. We assist ambitious businesses in communicating their ideas, products and services with outstanding crowdfunding video production, campaign design, crowdfunding marketing and crowdfunding PR.
To learn more about us and our services, visit our website: drop.studio
Or book a free phone workshop today and ask us anything, like how to create a successful crowdfunding campaign or how to accelerate your business from zero to fully funded.