Menu
Crowdfunding marketing is the key to a successful crowdfunding campaign!
Crowdfunding relies on a ‘crowd’ of people who will donate or invest small amounts to fund your dream and make it a reality.
To reach that crowd, and engage and excite them, you need to promote your campaign!
Creating a community of people who believe in you and your new venture is the secret behind every successfully crowdfunded project.
So, how do you do that exactly? When do you start and what strategies do you use?
Today, we’re covering everything you need to know about crowdfunding marketing and how to promote your crowdfunding campaign!
We cover what it is, what the benefits are, and seven effective strategies for you to use at every stage of your campaign.
Let’s jump right in!
Crowdfunding marketing is a promotional strategy for before, during, and after your crowdfunding campaign.
Crowdfunding involves getting a large number of people to fund your project with smaller contributions, instead of approaching just a few big investors for larger contributions. It is usually done through platforms like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, and Indiegogo, with the help of social media and the internet.
The crowdfunding market size was $1.25 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $3.62 billion by 2030. Every single one of those dollars form part of a crowdfunding campaign that has to be marketed effectively to be successful, regardless of the crowdfunding platform used.
Take a look at this short video by SGXChannel for a quick overview of crowdfunding and how the different types of crowdfunding work:
Crowdfunding marketing is the marketing you do to raise awareness of your campaign, bring people on board to fund your campaign, and increase your chances of obtaining the financial backing you need to meet your goals.
Much like pre-launch marketing, the focus is on generating buzz, raising awareness, and creating a community of interested people who want to be a part of your success!
Trust is crucial when it comes to promoting your crowdfunding efforts. When you’re asking the public for financial investment, you have to be trustworthy and they have to believe in you, and your vision.
Trust is even more important at the close of your campaign and post-launch. Generally, post-launch marketing focuses on lead generation and sales. However, for crowdfunded projects, it needs to also focus on transparency – communicating where the funding went, how the project is doing and what your achievements are.
Done right, crowdfunding promotion will help you raise the funds you need, meet your goals, and hit the ground running with an interested and engaged audience that is primed to continue to support you as you begin your new venture!
TLDR? Crowdfunding Marketing in a Nutshell:
Crowdfunding marketing is the marketing you do to raise awareness of your crowdfunding campaign. Marketing your campaign helps you reach the right people and bring them on board to invest in your venture. It also serves as an early stage pre-launch campaign and allows you to create an engaged audience during the funding stage, so that you can hit the ground running with an established community when you launch your new venture.
Effective marketing strategies (more on those below!) allow you to get the most out of your crowdfunding and maximize the benefits!
So, let’s take a look at what the benefits of crowdfunding are:
The core benefit of crowdfunding is that it allows you to reach a diverse pool of people to fund your project.
However, there are many more benefits to this unique method of raising capital for your venture, including:
Crowdfunding gives you the unique opportunity to reach a massive audience, made up of investors from an equally massive range of backgrounds and interests.
This means potential investors may come from unexpected places, for a variety of reasons that you might not think to pitch if you were researching and approaching investors directly.
The sheer volume of potential investors you will reach, especially if you use social media, also exponentially increases your odds of meeting your goals.
As you promote your campaign and communicate with your audience through social media and email, you can create relationships and build a community.
You can use this portion of your strategy to create some buzz and build anticipation. As you do this, you can also generate traffic to your website, crowdfunding page, and social media channels. This lets you gather leads and build lists to connect with them later too.
Trust and confidence are key to successful crowdfunding. As you engage with your audience and potential investors, you can do so in ways that demonstrate your commitment and transparency.
Answer questions honestly, take suggestions, and implement any improvements to your ideas. This kind of interaction fosters trust and improves an investor’s (and a potential customer’s) confidence in you.
Crowdfunding through an online platform lets you reach a huge number of investors, potential customers, and advocates for your venture from one place.
All your social media, content, and email marketing efforts can be focused on that centralized campaign. This streamlines the whole process of obtaining funding. You’re no longer relying only on the individual investors you have reached out to; you have a whole crowd of potential investors!
Crowdfunding marketing involves several promotional strategies that you can use at every stage of your campaign. Your marketing should include communication and marketing for:
This is your opportunity to share your vision and turn it into a reality! For some insight and expert tips, check out this video by Salvador Briggman:
With these expert’s advice in mind, let’s take a look seven proven strategies to help you build your community and reach your financial goals:
Crowdfunding promotion is all about finding and reaching the right people for your venture. Knowing who they are, and where to find them, is the first step to take.
Everything else builds on that foundation, as you tailor your campaign to best engage your audience.
Create a Buyer Persona of your ideal investor and your ideal customer. This will help you work out where best to reach them, and how to frame your communication with them.
It is always a good idea to research your competitors and see where they’re connecting with their audience too.
The sooner you can start communicating with people, the better! Start in your immediate circle and work your way outwards from there.
Your family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances are likely to be your most passionate and vocal advocates, to begin with – arm them with content to share and ask them to spread the word in relevant places.
This initial push can get the ball rolling and establish your presence, especially on social media and through referrals and in-person networking.
Timing is everything! Make a timeline that sets out which marketing strategies you will use when.
Your crowdfunding advertising campaign begins well before your crowdfunding itself, when you start to build your audience and generate interest in your offering.
This timeline by Indie Game Girl breaks down your crowdfunding marketing campaign into four distinct stages:
Through each phase, you need to use a variety of marketing strategies to reach your audience, build a community and get people engaged and excited!
Creating a great landing page on your crowdfunding platform is key. Include video, graphics, and simple but compelling copy to get your message across quickly.
Your landing page is where all your marketing efforts lead, so don’t leave it to the last minute.
The Kickstarter page for Van der Waals (a speaker with a ferromagnetic visualizer) is a great example of well put together landing page. They used video, visuals and clear, simple text to get their message across:
Their video is short, touches on their passion and why they have developed their product, as well as the details of the product specifications.
You also need to get all your social media channels set up and ready to go. Creating a content calendar and preparing the content in advance will help you stay on message and see your campaign as a whole.
Blogs are also a great way to connect with your audience, you can start your own or you can contribute as a guest writer on other blogs in your niche.
It’s also important to get your email sending programs ready, the lists you have, and methods for adding new subscribers set up in advance.
Getting all your different channels set up, and creating some cohesive and compelling content is an important part of the process. This is the foundation that all your marketing communications will build on.
QUICK CHECKLIST:
When you’re communicating with your audience, you need to reach them in the right places and the right ways. Put some time and effort into working out where best to connect with them, and then create great content for that platform.
In all your content and messaging, focus on them. Tell them why it should matter to them, what they will get out of supporting you, what their contributions will achieve. Make it human and make it relatable.
Tell your story, not just the facts and figures about your product – those are important and should be easily available, but the story is what will capture people’s hearts and minds!
It is also important that your content includes a lot of interactive content that allows your audience to interact with you, the project, and the final product.
Live videos, Q&A sessions, polls, yes/no votes, team member interviews… Let your audience talk to you. Social media provides all these tools to you for free – use them!
Keep your content thoughtful, relevant, and personal. And make it about them, as much as about you.
There’s no better tool than social media for your crowdfunding marketing!
Here is how to make the most of it:
Social media is where you will spend the most time and energy, so make sure that you’re doing it efficiently and effectively!
Raffles are one of the simplest and most effective ways to increase the reach of your campaign while generating buzz and collecting leads to target and retarget.
Platforms like Upviral integrate with your landing pages and your social media channels to make it super simple to run a raffle and collect contact information from qualified leads.
You can offer any kind of prize, from a discount when the product/service launches, a free product/service, or even just early access and VIP status.
Gamify the process and make it fun (and easy!) for people to play and win by spreading your message and bringing in more leads. Reward them with higher value prizes the harder they work.
You can award points or entries for every time a participant shares the raffle on social media or directly with a friend and bonus points if a friend signs up.
In this way, you’re able to get your participants to share your raffle and spread awareness of your campaign, while also referring relevant leads to you. If those leads sign up, they’re showing themselves to be genuinely interested in your product – and a good person to target with more personalized marketing.
Every entry into your raffle gives you their contact information, which allows you to add them to your email list and promote your campaign to them there too.
Raffles and social media work perfectly together and together they can exponentially increase the reach, engagement, and impact of your marketing campaign.
Email marketing cannot be overlooked when it comes to your crowdfunding campaign. It is still one of the cheapest and most effective methods you can use!
Invest in a simple email marketing software like MailChimp or Brevo and create a series of emails for your subscriber list.
Make sure you have pre-prepared welcome emails for new sign-ups and subscribers, thank you emails for donors, update emails that track your progress, and thank you emails for when your campaign closes.
In the pre-promotion stage, when you’re building your audience, you can test out different formats, subject lines, ways of addressing your readers, and visual content to see what gets the highest open rates and the most responses.
Email is the best way to make one-on-one, personalized contact with your audience. It has been around for decades now and there is a reason it is still so widely used – it works!
PRO TIP:
Recycle content from your social media channels for your email marketing. Use what has been most effective on social media, in terms of images, video, and the information shared, to craft great email campaigns without having to create new content from scratch!
In conclusion, promoting your crowdfunding campaign using crowdfunding marketing strategies is critical for the success of your campaign.
Effectively marketing your campaign will help you reach the right investors, build the hype and create an engaged community to support your funding drive and your venture when you have met your goals.
The strategies we have discussed today will help you plan your marketing campaign from end-to-end, and promote your crowdfunding effectively every step of the way!
Crowdfunding marketing refers to the marketing strategies used to promote a crowdfunding campaign. Promoting a crowdfunding campaign effectively is critical for the success of the campaign and meeting funding goals. Check out the full guide for more on crowdfunding advertising and the best strategies to use.
Crowdfunding marketing strategies are the marketing techniques used to promote a crowdfunding campaign. These often involve social media, content marketing, email marketing, rewards/referrals, and raffles, contests or giveaways. These strategies aim to raise awareness, create hype, build a community and drive traffic to the campaign page where people can donate to or invest in the project. Check out the full guide for the best strategies to use.
The sooner the better! Pre-promotion should begin several months before the crowdfunding campaign goes live in order to build an audience, generate some buzz and get people interested and engaged. This takes time, and it needs to be done long before the campaign is live so that when the campaign goes live, channels to drive traffic to it are already established. Check out the full guide for more on how to plan your crowdfunding promotion.
The crowdfunding market size was $1.25 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $3.62 billion by 2030. Read the full guide to learn more about the crowdfunding market size and how to effectively promote your crowdfunding efforts to gain all the traction you need to achieve your goals.
Business News Daily: What is Crowdfunding? Types, Rules, Challenges Benefits & Tips for Success
Forbes: How to Promote Your Crowdfunding Campaign
Fundera: Crowdfunding Statistics (2021): Market Size and Growth
Hubspot: How to Run a Successful Kickstarter Campaign: Insights From RingSafe
ResearchGate: Crowdfunding as a Marketing Tool (PDF)
Statista: Crowdfunding – Statistics & Facts (2021)
Affiliate marketing trends show it has become a key component of successful digital marketing and is...
The world of advertising has become an intricate maze to navigate in today's fiercely competitive di...
Many businesses pour money into radio and TV advertising but don't generate their target profit. The...
Enroll in our free 5-lesson email course today!
Free for limited time only.
We created P2P to provide free resources to brands that believe in the power of peers to promote their service or products.
© 2019 P2P Marketing All Rights Reserved.