Essential Tips for Promoting Your Crowdfunding Project

crowdfunding promotion marketing resourcesPromoting your crowdfunding project funded is not rocket science…but it’s also not a simple feat. Competition for support can be high for certain ideas.

No matter how great your idea is, you will only get an edge by following these tips and being creative with your marketing and promotion. This will drive traffic to your funding page and raise the necessary capital to get your project off the ground.

Before you start, make sure your campaign promotion is divided into 2 stages:

1. PREPROMOTION:  The goal of the prepromotion phase is to engage your initial contacts to help build momentum and spread the word out about your upcoming launch.

2. PROMOTION:  The promotion phase is when your campaign goes live – think of it as a grand opening where everyone is invited


TIP #1

Join the online communities of your target audience.use twitter for promoting your campaignIt is highly recommended that you sign up to sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin to connect with online communities where your target audience is most active. Find out who your key influencers are and develop relationships on your social media platforms as you want to use their audiences as springboards to bring more traffic to your campaign. Don’t be afraid to focus in closely on one or two social media platforms versus all of them.  You can also include top niche related forums and community sites such as Hacker News and Reddit.


TIP #2

Create a ‘Coming Soon’ landing page and/or campaign page.

You’ll want to create a place for gaining interest and capturing emails of those interested in your campaign, before it launches. It is a critical piece of your marketing campaign and is relatively simple and inexpensive to do. This can include a landing page (a single website page) or a ‘Coming Soon’ campaign page on your crowdfunding platform.
These needs to be set up properly early, before your campaign goes live so that you have sufficient time to collect leads. This will allow you to have backers ready to go for campaign launch. A landing page and ‘coming soon’ campaign page should have a compelling headline, contain valuable information about your product, collect email addresses via an email capture form or follow’ button, as well as high-quality and persuasive images. You can start a ‘Coming Soon’ campaign page at https://readyfundgo.com/start/.


TIP #3

Create a global list of all contacts.

While you need to tap your personal contacts for support, real crowdfunding success depends on your reaching out and building a community focused around your project. Start by creating a simple introduction and build a global list of people that might be interested in your campaign. Support doesn’t start and stop with financial backing so you may want to offer multiple opportunities for your network to support the campaign.

Divide this list into 3 parts:

  1. Supporters
    Your closest personal network is probably your strongest supporters. You can also ask for feedback as they are more likely to be honest in
    offering their criticisms and advice. Start with your list of family and friends and don’t forget to encourage them to share your campaign with their respective circles.
  2. Influencers
    The perfect influencers have relevant audience and substantial readership like blogs, popular websites and industry experts. Focus on the most relevant and work on a smaller list so
    you can dedicate more time in creating the perfect pitch. You can use tools such as Buzzsumo, Klout and Traackr to find influencers. Keep in mind that identifying influencers is not enough – the hard part is how to build relationships with these influencers and get them to support your project. It might be in a direct meeting.
  3. Media list
    Press coverage is one of the most important factors for your campaign’s success but it is also one of the hardest to get. Most of the people you reach out to in this list will most likely ignore you so you have to have a solid basis for reaching out. Is your product within the industry the media covers? Has the writer written previously on other crowdfunding campaigns? Make your pitch brief and to-the point. You can also offer incentives such as a media kit or an exclusive on the story

If you'd like to see more of our essential tips for managing and promoting your crowdfunding project, you can grab our Guide To Crowdfunding here.

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About ReadyFundGo

ReadyFundGo is a crowdfunding platform and community of social entrepreneurs, business owners, change makers and innovators who have a great idea they want to get off the ground or grow. If you are interested in the world of innovation and ideas, or want to find strategies for raising funds for your own project or expansion, ReadyFundGo can help. To begin your own crowdfunding campaign, start your draft here.