Launching a Kickstarter campaign can be an exciting but unpredictable journey. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, things don’t go as planned, and your campaign falls short of its funding goal. But fear not, because in this article, we will show you how to turn a failed Kickstarter campaign into a successful relaunch.
The road to a successful relaunch starts with analyzing what went wrong in your initial campaign. Did you set an unrealistic funding goal? Was your messaging unclear or your rewards unappealing? Identifying these shortcomings will help you make the necessary changes for your relaunch. As you prepare for the relaunch, it’s crucial to refine your pitch and presentation. Craft a compelling story that resonates with your target audience, highlighting any improvements or updates you’ve made since the initial campaign. Utilize engaging visuals and concise, persuasive language to captivate potential backers. Additionally, take advantage of social media platforms to build anticipation for your relaunch. Engage with your audience, share behind-the-scenes updates, and create a sense of exclusivity around your project.
By building a community and generating buzz, you can increase your chances of success in your second attempt. Remember, a failed Kickstarter campaign doesn’t mean the end of your dreams. With careful analysis, improvements, and effective marketing strategies, you can launch a relaunch that surpasses expectations and secures the funding you need to bring your ideas to life.
Do you need help promoting your Kickstarter campaign? Pressfarm partners with brands to create quality content and help them gain the publicity you need. From writing winning press releases to designing memorable media kits and building custom media lists, our team has what it takes to boost your campaign.
In addition to creating this content, Pressfarm also uses a winning distribution strategy. By submitting your content to the right media outlets and startup directories, we can put your brand in front of the right eyes. Furthermore, this distribution strategy will ensure that your brand ranks in relevant search results across search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing!
Finally, by providing media lists and a database of over 1 million journalists, we can help you reach the best journalists in your niche. This way, you can continue telling your brand story long after we’ve wrapped your campaign at Pressfarm up.
With this in mind, let us first take a quick look at some statistics relating to failed Kickstarter campaigns.
Failed Kickstarter Campaigns and Learning from Mistakes
Did you know that less than 35% of kickstarter projects achieve their objective? Moreover, more than 12% of such projects fail to receive even a single pledge. Needless to say, even the prospect of getting noticed is daunting for creators and failure is always a realistic possibility.
Be that as it may, failed Kickstarter projects can prove highly useful when it comes to understanding what does or does not work. In this sense, you can identify what went wrong and avoid repeating the same mistake. This alone can prove invaluable to the success of a relaunched campaign.
In fact, countless creators have used the lessons learnt from their failed campaigns to achieve success on Kickstarter the second time around. Now you can learn to do the very same.
6 Steps to Relaunching a Successful Kickstarter Campaign
1) Lowering the targets
Setting a funding target is tricky and often the reason why many campaigns are doomed to fail. When creators set out to create a campaign for the first time, they don’t realize that even if the project falls just a tiny fraction short of the target, the funds raised to that point are never realized. With this in mind, your target should be high enough to make a decent return but not so high that it’s impossible to reach.
For example, when a popular nature photographer set out to raise funds for the National Parks Poster Project, Rob Decker had initially set the target to $27,000. Unfortunately, the project raised less than $5,000 and the campaign was deemed a failure. Having realized the exaggeration of his first target, Decker decided to reduce this amount to $4990 and go about relaunching his Kickstarter Campaign.
Indeed, the campaign quite easily reached the targets this time around. Decker went on to say that his main mistake was setting a target which was highly unrealistic given that his only real audience at the time consisted of family and friends.
Takeaway – Don’t be greedy, set realistic targets.
2) Reshaping the pledge system
You must already know about the pledge system on Kickstarter. Unfortunately, many creators do not realize how crucial it is to attracting the interest of backers. After all, the product might be amazing but every backer wants to know what they might receive in return.
We also assume that you offered a number of pledge rewards on the initial campaign but now is the time to reshape this system. For example, try to utilize or offer the use of your product as part of every reward. Needless to say, backers will not expect a free backpack for $1 but if you create posters like Rob Decker, you could offer these as part of every $20 pledge. Naturally, the minor details will depend on your project. However, as a rule, you should seek to make these rewards so enticing that potential backers cannot resist getting involved.
With this in mind, you can use the reward system as a sales funnel, in the sense that every last pledge is rewarded nicely. You can design a system where the more people contribute, the more enticing the reward is.
Takeaway – Make the rewards irresistible and genuinely valuable.
3) Consulting the professionals
As mentioned above, family and friends are sometimes enough to get you started with a Kickstarter Campaign. In reality, to reach a significant target, you will need to take a much more focused and alternative approach.
For this reason, consulting a PR firm is often the best way to ensure the best possible chances of success for your campaign. Although Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are always central to this process, there are many more outlets and mediums which you can use.
As you might expect, professional PR firms will know all the tricks and the best methods or strategies to use for each project. While professional guidance cost money, marketing and PR are the real reasons behind success on Kickstarter. Ultimately, this cost will be negligible compared to the return. Furthermore, the time you will save in the process will be invaluable, since investing in PR will allow you to focus on the product or service itself.
In case you might be asking yourself, a PR firm can take responsibility for all aspects of promoting your campaign and manual outreach is always part of this process. Manual outreach is a tactic used to source influential backers for the project. For example, Backer Directory is a database that can be used to find the most prominent and consistent backers for crowdfunding projects. When a PR firm has identified these backers, they reach out to them for assistance.
Takeaway – PR Firms give you the best shot when relaunching a failed Kickstarter campaign.
4) Evaluate the original response
Launching a Kickstarter campaign is a very effective way of getting feedback on your product. You can look at the comments section of your campaign to gauge what the original response to your product was. Reading what people liked and didn’t like about your product can give you hints on how to improve before your relaunch.
As part of evaluating the original response, you should also review your traffic. This will give you an idea of where majority of your traffic came from. With this information, you can focus on your most effective platforms.
Takeaway – Pay attention to what people liked and didn’t like about your product.
5) Redefining your strategy
Many Kickstarter campaigns fail due to the fact that there is no actual strategy. On the other hand, they can also fall short when the strategy is too flimsy or lacking in direction. Here are the main aspects you should consider redefining when relaunching a campaign on Kickstarter.
Writing a Press Release
Yes, press releases are still effective. In fact, press releases are often mandatory for campaigns that wish to gain exposure in the media or with major organizations. Your press release should be professional and extremely well crafted. This is another reason why PR firms are so invaluable.
Creating a Media List
You absolutely need a media list and this should be compiled with precision. A media list consists of the names, emails, and phone numbers of media contacts. Who can help you get the word out about your project. Simply put, without this list, you are confined to a much smaller audience.
Expert Assessment
Even if you decide to take on PR and marketing, requesting an expert assessment can be money well spent. Crowdfunding experts can identify precisely what has gone wrong with a project and what you need to do in the future to prevent the same thing from happening again. Furthermore, this can save you an incredible amount of time when relaunching a failed Kickstarter campaign.
Interestingly, when Zach Supalla launched Spark Socket on Kickstarter a few years ago, the project fell drastically short of the target. However, by refining his strategy, Supalla came up with an alternative approach and raised more than $48,000 in just the first week of his relaunch. Although the product was now called Spark Core, the reason for this success the second time around was due to a more specific strategy and improved marketing techniques.
Takeaway – Strategy is everything and there should be no holes in this blueprint.
6) Researching successful projects
While you may not know what you did wrong, there is always an opportunity to know what you can do right next time. After all, the online world provides instant access to every successful project and creator from Kickstarter. For example, “the Coolest” is the most successful Kickstarter campaign in recent years. However, the project failed miserably on this same platform the first time it was relaunched, just one year before its success. In hindsight, the creator of the product said that he made very few changes to his approach but used the same tactics other successful projects had used in order to take his campaign to the next level. Here are just a few examples of how you can learn from this success and use it to harness your own relaunch:
Learning from successful campaigns
One of the most effective ways to relaunch a campaign on Kickstarter is to research successful projects and figure out what they did right. In many cases, you can simply search for blog articles or content relating to these campaigns and find the source of interest in this content. In other words, you can identify exactly what these blogs found interesting in the projects and then adapt this to your own campaign. Keep in mind, an easy way to find these articles is to use a backlink tool and insert the domain for a particular Kickstarter campaign. Having done this, you will now have a link to every website or blog which helped to promote the project.
Researching creators
Successful creators are always happy to share their knowledge and you should find that their tactics are also readily available online. Whether you find this on platforms such as Medium or Reddit, this information is invaluable as the creators are giving you a step-by-step guide as to what worked for their campaign. In most cases, you can identify what these projects have done, that you have not and this can save you a lot of time when you’re learning how to have a bigger impact.
Paying Attention to Marketing Tactics
Many of the most successful campaigns on Kickstarter will initiate a free giveaway in order to gain interest or traction. You should pay attention to this particular strategy and try to incorporate it into your brand. Similarly, you should analyze the social media strategy of these campaigns and check how they encouraged potential backers to interact with their posts. In most cases, successful campaigns have created a powerful community around their project and this is incredibly useful for gaining even more publicity.
Takeaway – Research takes time but it can save you from pitfalls and give you more guidance toward success.
7) Embracing social media and influencers
If you know of Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin or Neil Patel, you should also know that content marketing is the backbone of every business. More specifically, bloggers and influencers are currently the most lethal weapon you can have in your promotion arsenal. In other words, if you have influencers writing or talking about your project, this is the best way to gain traction online. Sure, exposure in mainstream media can take you viral. In reality, however, influencers are so much easier to work with.
With this in mind, you should have a list of bloggers and influencers. As with your media list, this should contain contact information for every individual and a little bit of background. With this information, you can create a personal connection when you make contact. Either way, establishing a relationship with multiple influencers will give you immediate access to a much greater audience.
Learning from influencers
At the same time, you must also learn from these masters and figure out the best way to connect with your own followers or connections through social media. Conventional emails are also effective, but the truth is social media is the most powerful and affordable way to reach your target market. If you have a PR firm, this will certainly help guide you in the right direction in terms of advertisements and content campaigns.
Alternatively, this is something you should seek to know and many online resources can teach you to get this important aspect of your Kickstarter campaign right the second time around. As already mentioned, PR is certainly the most time-consuming aspect of your campaign. Nevertheless, it will increase your chances of success. PR firms are not only highly experience in this field but they also have access to a network of bloggers who can get to work on promoting your project with immediate effect.
Takeaway – Influencers can relaunch your campaign to a much wider audience.
8) Develop a structured rewards system
Failure to develop effective reward tiers will result in your campaign looking unattractive to potential backers. For this reason, it’s important to think through your rewards system before you launch your campaign. You need tiers that can appeal to backers from any economic background. Even so, creating too many tiers might create complications when it’s time for your brand to deliver the rewards.
In order to develop an effective rewards system, you need to start by setting a price for your product. You can do this by looking around at similar products. Once you’ve set the base price, you can build different tiers as needed.
Takeaway – Develop a rewards system that appeals to potential backers and can be implemented by your brand.
Conclusion
As you know, Kickstarter is no walk in the park and requires immense effort on all fronts. That being said, PR and marketing is the real secret to gaining traction and turning a failed campaign into a major success. As already mentioned, you can certainly navigate this process using the steps above. For the best possible chance in a crowded market, consulting the professionals will give your Kickstarter campaign the edge it needs to succeed.