Crowdfunding campaigns can boost the chances of your product surviving and even thriving in the market. Nevertheless, a successful crowdfunding campaign takes work. You need to think through all the aspects of your campaign before you launch it. However, that’s not all it takes to be successful.
Very few crowdfunding campaigns raise more than $100k. Depending on your goal, you have to develop a unique approach to publicizing your own campaign. Below are important tips for building an effective PR strategy to ensure that you achieve, and even surpass, your goal:
1. Start your PR early
The best campaigns invest in getting the word out there early. The best time to start is 3 months early before the launch of your campaign. Do not make the mistake of beginning your PR efforts on the day of the launch. You want people to anticipate the launch of the crowdfunding campaign beforehand.
The most effective way to generate news about your upcoming campaign early is by building an effective media list and getting in touch with the reporters on this list quite early. This gives you time to reach out to media contacts and bloggers who might have an interest in your product. If these people like the story you are telling, as well as your company’s vision and mission, then you are off on a good path.
Do you need help building a media list for your brand? Then you should consider signing up with Pressfarm. The Pressfarm PR team is skilled at building curated media lists for brands, containing media contacts in their specific niche. In addition, each Pressfarm client gets access to a comprehensive media database with over 1 million journalists across industries. When combined with the personalized media lists, this database is designed to help you connect with the best journalists and influencers to tell your story.
In addition to connecting you with journalists, the team at Pressfarm is skilled at helping brands create quality content to share with these media professionals. By writing winning press releases, developing engaging feature stories and designing creative media kits, Pressfarm can help you build a memorable brand image. With this quality content, Pressfarm ultimately helps you to boost your online visibility by helping you feature in relevant search results across different search engines.
2. Reach out to Influencers
Influencers are the people who are most prominent in your target audience. These could include authors, social media personalities, and experts in your industry. It’s advised to develop a list of about 30 influencers. In order to use this list effectively, you should reach out and build relationships with these influencers before your campaign launch. Once you’ve established a relationship, you can then pitch your crowdfunding campaign to your target influencer.
3. Review copies
All social media influencers like to try the product before they endorse it. The same goes for journalists and bloggers. Before going out to create the buzz about your product, have a few samples to give away to the journalists and influencers who get back to you after that email pitch.
However, be sure that the product works before sending it out. Test each of those review samples to ensure that the product actually works. If you send a substandard product to a prominent blogger or journalist, then they won’t hesitate to give a very bad review. That could spell death for your campaign.
4. Have a budget
The whole concept of crowdfunding is that you don’t have to spend money, right? No. On the contrary, developing a budget is an important part of any successful crowdfunding campaign.
It costs money to design your campaign, create appropriate lists, demo videos, Facebook ads, review copies of your product, copywriting, etc. The minimum recommended budget is about $15,000.
Arguably, you can spend close to nothing by creating a buzz of your upcoming crowdfunding through social media, and distributing press releases to other channels online. However, if you are looking to get into the 2% of campaigns that raise over $100k, it will cost you some thousands of dollars. Spending some money will polish your campaign, and help it stand out from the crowd of campaigns on crowdfunding platforms.
5. Press Kit
A press kit will help you send the necessary information to journalists and influencers who might request more information. You want to have this information ready to send whenever it is required.
The press kit should include every piece of data and every metric that you believe will enhance your story’s credibility. Additionally, it should have the story of how you came to develop the product and what problems you are solving. Be sure to include the biographies of your founding team, fact sheets, high-quality images of your product, and a link to your demo video.
Is there anything else I’ve left out? Let us know by reaching out to us on Twitter @pressfarmpr.