I’ve been working hard on the promotion for The Honest Food Kitchen lately.
Due to circumstances outside of our control, we’ve had to rally and think outside the box to regain our momentum.
This week I sat down to come up with 10 things we could do to raise awareness of the campaign. I got to 6 easily enough, then I turned to Google for some inspiration.
And you know what I found? The same 5 recommendations on every link for the first 5 pages. Everyone’s saying exactly the same things – and none of them work for us.
We had to come up with some new crowdfunding promotion ideas.
So today, here are 5 things we’re going to do (or have done) on this campaign which are different.
1. An “AMA” (Ask Me Anything)
We ran this on Twitter using a hashtag.
We noticed that a lot of questions were coming through on the campaign.
Using Twitter provided wider visibility for the project – I had plenty of people tell me they’d been watching the AMA.
2. More videos
There are a lot of target audiences for this campaign – my current count is 6.
If we were to specifically address everyone in the main campaign video while still explaining what the project is designed to do… it would get complicated. And very long.
So instead we’re creating more media, more videos, and specifically targeting audiences in a way that connects directly with them. Like this one.
3. A landing page
Yes, I know, lots of people recommend landing pages for easy sharing, but we’re doing it a little different. When you hit our landing page you get the video we’ve made for the target markets, as well as a video explaining how PledgeMe works.
The key purpose of this landing page is to connect the campaign with our target markets.
We’re encouraging our backers to share it with the people they think fit, which will hopefully result in more effective crowdfunding promotion.
Check out the page here.
4. Influencers
We made contact with a network of highly connected people well in advance of our launch, and now we’re beginning the process of “activating” them.
They’re being asked to share and support the campaign. Will it work? Who knows. But we can only try.
5. Progress rewards
We’ve all heard of stretch goals, but we’re trying something different. When faced with a stalling project, we’ve started encouraging supporters to pledge NOW by giving them extra rewards if we meet targets by specific days and times.
The first one is below, but we’ve got 4 planned for the campaign to get us closer to our goal.
What original crowdfunding promotion techniques have you used in your own campaign? Did they work? If you try any of our ideas, let us know how they turned out in the comments below!
Kat, I thought you advise that the people behind the project should be in the video. This video doesn’t even have voice over. Why is this a good video?
This wasn’t the crowdfunding video. It was one of two additional promotional videos we created for the campaign.
We found there was need to clearly put forward the reasons to pledge. Now we are over a year past the campaign, this type of video would be extremely effective for Facebook exposure due to their ‘autoplay’ feature (see more information about how ‘word-based’ videos are gaining more momentum for this reason here)
You can see the ACTUAL crowdfunding video for this campaign on The Honest Food Company’s PledgeMe page.
Hope that helps!
Thanks!
For the AMA on Twitter – my campaign will be to help fund my super inclusive, body-safe sex toy store. I’m a tad worried that an AMA will open the door to a ton of inappropriate questions. Any suggestions for managing that or should I just allow it to happen? Thanks!
Have some great (and funny) responses ready to go and let it work in your favour. Check out what Groupon did with the Banana Bunker: http://distractify.com/megan-mccormick/banana-bunka-lovin/