crowd-fundingI’m preparing for a Kickstarter launch well in advance and want to assess potential marketing firms who specialize in this area. Has anyone come across a compiled guide to these firms or services?
I’m suspicious that you’ll find a guide on choosing a marketing partner for a Kickstarter, because there’s not much special about doing one.
Sure, online crowdfunding campaigns have a few characteristics that make them a bit special, due to the facts that they’re limited in duration and - less saliently - that incentives vaguely impact the campaign’s success. But beyond that, they’re your typical marketing or fund raiser campaign; there’s nothing magical about them.
In my opinion, you’ve very little odds of locating a credible marketer who is offering genuine and helpful Kickstarter partnership services. Because the target audience for such services is, almost by definition, broke.
If you do run into any such partners, take a cold hard look at what they’re actually providing you. In particular, is their commission paid regardless of results or strictly tied to your results? The odds are high that they’ll just be a snake oil shop that will set you back financially while providing little to no material benefit compared to any other marketer.
And if you do run into a guide on choosing such a partner, the marketer in me has this much to tell you: you’re actually reading a sales brochure on how to purchase that guide’s author’s services, intended to spell out explicit checklist items so you’re comparing their competition on their terms. Which is good marketing and sales practice, of course. Credit to them if they did that. But it’s not built with your interest in mind.
With all that said, here’s a suggestion to evaluate the marketer whose help you’d like to register. Ask them to sketch out what they’d do to help you run the campaign - and why. For comparison, here are pointers on how to run a successful campaign that I had compiled to help a friend a few years back. (He ended up raising a bit over $70k on a $50k campaign, so they’re hopefully not too inane.)
Give lots of attention to what your partner suggests to do before the campaign. What they’ll want to do at launch and during the campaign - and to some extent after - also count, but the crucial step is what goes on before. A campaign is very short. You’ll have no time to “organize” anything during it. And if you’re not half-funded within a day or two, you’ve slim chances to gather the momentum you’ll need to succeed. As such, you need a list of excited backers before launching.
Good luck!
Honestly, I haven’t come across this kind of question. Nor I have thought off.
Marketing doesn’t always work at instant and sometimes take more than expected timeline. Thus it is good to scale out, as early as possible. Why not now!
If I were you, I would choose to start marketing alone at start and gather feedback and understand what is my market and who are my customers. In this way you get your customers talking you directly and you will get feedback and May be you choose to apply changes(As suggested).
Going with marketing firms, I will take them as my last option. Few reasons:
I wont know the feedback
I will not know where my customers are coming from(which market, what mindset)
You need to STILL keep track of what is happening and what is left.
No report will as accurate as you do it.
When you do it, you know where your customers stay(market) you may choose your marketing firm at that market. Thus you may have high success rate.
All of this, is my personal view and there might be many different views out there. Comments are welcomed.
PS: you refers to your firm(Specifically not you)
I have been stumbling a lot these days with ads from http://www.jellopcrowdfunding.com, I think you should take a look on it. There are others similar to this, but I can’t remember any other.
After the project is funded, I recommend using https://www.backerkit.com, I’ve had many positive experiences from a backer perspective.
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