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Part 1 — Preparation

This chapter covers the preparation required before even starting your crowdfunding campaign. How to find product-market fit, how to conduct preliminary research, how to choose the right crowdfunding platform, and more.

Introduction

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth, discusses the emotional cycle of change, the valley of despair and hopeful realism. All emotions that you’ll experience on your journey to launch your crowdfunding campaign. Stick with it!

Research similar campaigns using BackerKit’s BackerTracker. The powerful tool lets you see how much each campaign raised, how many backers supported them, and a daily breakdown. Great for setting realistic goals.

Tip 6 — Find Journalists Based on their Beat

Researching journalists is the foundational step of PR.

Use the following sites to find similar coverage:

Use Similarweb to see how each journal’s domain ranks on the web.

Once you’ve found what journals you want to be featured in, find each journalist’s contact details using these sites:

Tip 8 — Warm Up Your Email Before Bulk Outreach

Subscribe to my newsletter at narekvardanyan.com for monthly tips about crowdfunding, launching businesses, digital marketing, and managing your early team.

Warm up your email using Lemlist’s Lemwarm service. This will never be as good as receiving real engagement, but it’s good to kick off a new address.

Tip 10 — Create Compelling Videos & Photos

Check out our article on the Best Kickstarter Videos, and discover the tricks you can use when planning yours to join the list in the future!

For your video needs, reach out to our partners at Milenium5. They’ve delivered some of our best-performing crowdfunding videos, and can do it all. From short animations for your ads, to long-form podcast content for your SEO, to storytelling-rich crowdfunding videos.

Creator Club

Check out Creator Club here. It’s currently in the process of relaunching, with a focus on scaling on ecommerce. But you can still access all the crowdfunding content at a discount here.

Part 2 — Campaign Page

This chapter covers everything you need to know about your campaign page. The structure, the elements to include, how to talk about the competition, and what platform will serve your needs the best.

Tip 1 — Research Between Kickstarter and Indiegogo

This article covers all the differences between Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It’s very in-depth, and touches on everything from fees to features, communities, perceptions and more.

The key point to remember is that there is no perfect platform. Find the one that works for you and make the most of it!

Part 3 — Facebook Ads

Blow your audience away with amazing Facebook Ads. Discover how to steal from the best ad creatives, how to make your own high-converting ads, and how to ensure you don’t get penalized by Facebook’s algorithms…

Apply to the Sprint Crowdfunders’ Fund here to cover all your advertising needs.

Tip 1 — Research the Market Before Starting

Create wide-ranging powerful ads by using our CSM Template. This sheet will help you create winning ads in a simple step-by-step fill-in-the-blanks process.

Tip 2 — Squeeze the Most From Custom & Lookalike Audiences

Learn how to set up your Facebook Pixel to then be able to access Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences. This article is straight from Facebook, on their best practices.

Tip 4 — Verify Your Domain & Track Events

Without verifying your domain and tracking the events every time somebody clicks or purchases, you’re losing out on a LOT of data. This data is crucial to improving your ads, and increasing your sales.

Tip 7 — Use URL Shorteners with Your Facebook Pixel

URL shorteners abound, and help to create shorter, more manageable links for everything from social media posts to ads. We use LinklyHQ.

Tip 8 — Discover New Creatives

Want some inspiration? Discover some amazing ads here:

Tip 11 — Fund Your Advertising Budget with the SprintFund

Apply to the Sprint Crowdfunders’ Fund here to cover all your advertising needs.

Part 4 — PR

Find the best journalists in your niche, craft a pitch that won’t get ignored, get them to trust you, and write fascinating stories about your new product. All that and more in this chapter on PR.

Tip 2 — Validate All the Journalists’ Email Addresses

Save your domain from getting marked as SPAM, by avoiding bounced emails. Use a service like Zerobounce to double-check if all of your journalists' emails exist before sending.

Tip 5 — Use Bulk Pitching Tools

Sending emails to 1,000s of journalists and tracking their responses can be a BIG hassle. Automate your process using tools like Streak and Mailshake.

Part 5 — Influencer Marketing

The PR of the modern age, Influencer Marketing lets you connect with your audiences on a more personal level. Discover how to make the most of your niche’s influencers to create the most brand awareness, and tap into the trust they share with their audiences.

Tip 1 — Conduct Instagram Hashtag Research

Before you start reaching out to people, study what hashtags they’re using. Check out these tools to do Hashtag Research, and up your social listening game.

Tip 2 — Find Influencers with these Tools & Platforms

Just like PR, you need to find the best influencers for your crowdfunding campaign. You could scroll Instagram for days trying to discover them yourself, or you could use a search tool like:

Tip 5 — Calculate Each Influencer’s Mango Score

Want to see which influencers have more clout? This isn’t only about their number of followers, but the influence they hold over them. Are people engaging with them? Commenting? What’s the general emotional response of their community? Find out all this and more using the Mango Score Calculator.

Part 6 — Social Media Marketing

Social media is a powerful tool, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. Like writing, people think that because they’ve ‘always done it’ that they can apply their personal experience to the professional world. But running a social media campaign for your brand is very different.

Chris Dixon’s essay, Come for the Tool, Stay for the Network, is a perfect example of creating a community and benefiting from the network effect.

Tip 2 — Choose the Right Social Media Channel

Should you be on Twitter? LinkedIn? Facebook? There are so many social channels now, and it’s impossible to do all of them well at the same time. Synchronize your accounts and schedule your posts to give yourself an automated upper hand using Buffer, Hootsuite, or one of the Hootsuite alternatives.

Tip 5 — Create an Instagram Filter to Show Your Product in Use

Create an AR version of your product that users can see themselves using, with Facebook’s Spark AR tool.

Tip 7 — Drive Sales on Holidays with Hubspot Marketing Calendar

See what holidays and events people celebrate around the world. From Earth Day to minor festivals, tap into the zeitgeist and make your product relevant to your audience.

Bonus Tips — 11 Actionable Ways to Increase Your Follower Base

Invite people who liked your posts to follow your page with the Invite Post Liker.

Part 7 — Direct Sales

Get your hands dirty with some one-on-one direct sales. This is often the scariest and most avoided activity, but if done well, it can add an additional 10% to your revenue! See what you can do to maximize each conversation with your potential backers.

Tip 1 — Use a Pop-Up Chat Box on Your Landing Page

You can’t do sales without a way to start the conversation. Get to chatting with your Facebook community with Facebook’s native chat plugin or ManyChat.

Part 8 — Bonus Campaign Hacks

Want to squeeze some extra juice from your campaign. The bonus hacks included in this chapter will help you do just that.

Tip 2 — Submit Your Project to Backer Communities

Tap into crowdfunding-specific audiences and increase your overall conversion rate with targeted messaging using these backer communities:

Tip 11 — Understand the Quality of Your Leads & Get Better Insights

Learn how to ask the right questions from your community by reading The Mom Test.

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