6 Must Have Marketing Essentials

It’s all about the money. When it comes to getting a new product off the ground, raising money for a cause, exploring growth opportunities for your small business and building your brand, crowdfunding offers a nontraditional way to reach non-conventional investors.

Crowdfunding reaches a larger and more diversified pool of interest than many standard methods of raising capital. It invites investment at any level, small-dollar and big. And, it helps you do something new and important for yourself and your investors. Plain and simple, it just makes sense to explore the marketing side of crowdfunding.

Six Marketing Essentials

Here are six essentials culled from our conversation to keep in mind before getting a crowdfunding campaign started.

1. Straddle the fence. Crowdfunding is all about capturing the personal ethos of the campaign -- a connection between message and emotion. However professional it looks and sounds, your marketing has to separate itself from the corporate impression with something casual, humorous or sentimental. If your message is somehow too proper and perfect, the audience might wonder why it requires crowdfunding.

2. Make it worthwhile. The object of the campaign has to come across as special or unique. It should embody an element of innovation, need or scarcity in any market. Scarcity drives the demand for any product, so you have to offer some exchange for the participation. It might be a T-shirt for helping fund a charity walk, or equity participation in a startup, or even an early model of the product (if it’s a physical gadget). But, creating marketing reciprocity must have a felt quality that takes more than just convincing language.

3. Build momentum. Every campaign needs an end date. At some point, the funding has to stop. So, several tracks run in sequence:

• You need a calendar to plan your strategy for the action and implementation.
• During the period before launch, it’s the campaign owner’s job to generate as much interest as possible. Usually through collecting emails and marketing to them.
• Lastly, a specific marketing event launches the period of funding.

Your strategic thinking has to visualize this rollout. You might, for example, peg your calendars around the date for the specific marketing event. That date cannot conflict with competing events like religious holidays, seasonal distractions, equity market activities and more. It’s to your benefit to make your launch stand alone.

4. Write a narrative. Everyone involved should follow the same script. They should all know the story of how things started, where you want to go and how you intend to get there. Your story needs an explanation of why you are pursuing crowdfunding as opposed to other investment strategies and a description of how the funding will make a difference.

It’s also important to respect the needs for copy writing. That is, your team has to brainstorm the language repeatedly until you can reduce the message to one quotable phrase. Then, all parties must be able to speak and write briefly from no more than four to five talking points.

5. Make it multi-dimensional. Content copy is important. It has to convince and persuade. It needs to testify with proof and credibility. Be sure to support your pitch with facts, figures and specifics on costs, forecasts and expectations. You’ll also want to make this a media event, something that goes viral across many a platform.

That takes vivid visuals, such as photos of people interacting with the product, commitments by key principles, testimonials by end users and so on. Finally, well-educated and entertaining videos of prototypes in action, users involved, or analysts’ comments will help your campaign go viral.