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One Of The Fastest Growing Areas Of Business
Crowdfunding, in my opinion, is one of the most exciting areas of business you can be in today.
The amount of dollars being spent on crowdfunding and the amount of people participating in these types of campaigns has been doubling year after year.Fortunately, due to my SEO background, my company was ranked in the top spot on Google for startup marketing.
A company hired us to manage their campaign and within two weeks we were able to double their funding. We’ve since gone on to help 100s of entrepreneurs and raise over 165 million in crowdfunding capital.
An interesting trend I’ve noticed in the crowdfunding space right now is that now B2B companies are jumping in and using it to test product market fit on SaaS software or products.
We’re often pre-selling products before they exist. Most startups just have one prototype and they need to test it out before they go to scale and produce it for the market.Opening themselves up to market feedback is a great way to cut down on mistakes and to really get in tune with what your best customers want to see from you.
It’s also a great way to create buzz and build a community around what you’re doing.
Not every product is meant to be a success in the market.
Is your product meant to succeed?
If you’ve ever seen Shark Tank, you know that a lot of people walk away without a deal and maybe even have their entrepreneurial dreams dashed.
We’ve now had over 16 clients on the show. We always start with the problem, solution and what we see the unique selling position to be. If we can build a groundswell of anticipation and excitement before our official launch we’re going to be ahead of the game.
When we’re getting started with a new campaign we first have to make sure we have our assets in place. Quality videography and photography make up the bulk of sales collateral these days.
We then need to understand our buyers and where we can find them online – especially if we’re trying to reach a niche community.
This means starting way in advance and giving value and advice wherever possible.
How To Test And Engage Pre-Campaign
There are many campaigns that don’t start with a community engagement pre-campaign. We don’t recommend this and we typically spend 3 to 6 months prior to our campaign just adding value to others in the space.
This allows us to also get a great read on their buyer persona, build up our email list, and make necessary changes in the product before hitting the market.
We also like to build in an element of shareability into our pre-campaign value offers.
Getting as much feedback early on is just so critical. It can really change the game in terms of getting the community to come out and back you up. We try to work backwards from our end capital goal to reverse engineer what our funnel conversions need to look like.
This also allows us to test out our creative, the copy, and our landing pages.
Once the product goes live it’s time to hit our audience with the ads we have targeted for their specific segment. Post-campaign we can either transition the product to an e-commerce site or go through Amazon.
Action Steps
- Get involved with your target market’s community online.
- Spend 3 to 6 months adding value to the community and learning about your buyer persona.
- Determine your end fundraising goal and reverse engineer your marketing numbers for conversions.
- Determine how many emails you need collectedbefore you launch the campaign.
- Consistently test copy, creative, and CTAs before you launch.
- When you launch, hit each segment of your audience with a targeted marketing message.
Result You Will Achieve
A stronger crowdfunding campaign by using that give tons of value to the community and allow you to refine your offer without losing resources.
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.