3 Social Media Marketing Tips That’ll Make Your Crowdfunding Campaign Snap, Crackle, and Pop
- Understand the Medium You’re Using, the Audience You’re Targeting, and Play to Your Strengths
Research suggests that social media is an entrepreneur’s delight and can be selectively leveraged to project yourself and your venture in ways that spell big money in crowdfunding:
- Facebook (2 billion active users): Top rated for videos, infographics, and curated content.
- Instagram Pics and Video Sharing (800 million users): High impact projection of high-resolution photos, pithy quotes, and personal stories.
- Twitter for News and Networking (317 million users): Best for breaking news, high voltage blog campaigns, and GIF animation.
- LinkedIn (106 million users): This comprehensive encyclopedia of global movers and shakers in business and employment is the ideal platform for airing powerful content that lends a professional touch to a fundraising appeal.
- Pinterest (200 million users): Captures the power and potential of eye-catching visuals and infographics, and informative photo-guides that’ll help you say the most with minimal content.
- YouTube (1 Billion active users): Your best bet for video sharing and influence marketing; Google concedes that YouTube is more effective as a branding and marketing tool than television.
Facebook and Twitter are undoubtedly the Prima Donnas of the social media circuit that is very useful for driving engagement and eliciting long-term commitment to new ventures. These are definitely your best choices for monetizing a powerfully persuasive 45-day campaign.
Opening a campaign page on Facebook ensures that can feed a steady stream of updates tied to real-time developments so that potential investors that you’ve already contacted can stay informed and be in the loop.
Instagram is a haven for connoisseurs of the artful and the aesthetic and is the ideal place to host stunning images and captivating videos that convey your message thoughtfully and artfully.
In Twitter, by paying a small fee, you can use Promote Mode to automatically promote your Tweets and profile, which is a very effective way of expanding the audience and for attracting new followers. Create a hashtag that is unique to your campaign so that followers can zero in on fresh content as the campaign progresses.
The venture capital industry considers Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to be the ideal launching pads for finance-oriented initiatives.
2. Ensure That You’re Providing Value, and You’re Not Just Asking for Money
Don’t raise the sales pitch too high that followers press the kill switch midstream. The whole purpose of using social media for marketing a crowdfunding campaign is to create a buzz around your product and to provide value that inspires potential followers to invest in the venture. To do that effectively, split your social media content proportionately in three ways:
- Getting thought leaders and like-minded individuals to share stories and discuss ideas regarding your product that converts followers and helps improve your bottom-line as the campaign builds momentum.
- Creating content that is exclusively devoted to promoting your idea, presenting its future outlook, and seeding interest in potential investors.
- Allocating time that you dedicate solely to building your personal image and fostering personal interactions with the community.
The three-pronged content marketing strategy yields the following key benefits:
- The majority of the time you’ll be sharing content that is being generated not by you but by influencers, content that’ll be relevant to your target group. The audience will be absorbing your information that the market is debating. That’s more convincing than overwhelming the audience with a lengthy monologue.
- The content will be original and fresh as you collect feedback and respond to potential investors in real-time and propel investor interest to a high.
- Your promotional materials like coupons, discounts, special offers, trial demos, product brochures, and press releases will appear to complement your overall strategy, and will not overpower the community.
3. Push Your Product by All Means Possible, and Pull Your Audience for a Closer Engagement
When you market content in social media, you’ll be connecting and communicating your message and image to the community. But your journey doesn’t end there. The most successful crowdfunding campaigns are those that go the distance and really engage their audience.
The smart entrepreneur realizes that talking down to an audience doesn’t work. Getting people to share, discuss, and contribute feedback is more important. If you show the audience that you value their feedback enough to tweet their support in neon lights, you’ve won the war of attraction. Investors will stick by you through the highs and lows of your campaign.
Never leave investors high and dry after you’ve engaged their support. Thank them, compliment them, and post, tweet, and resonate their support in cyberspace which in turn will act as a beacon inspiring fence sitters to chip in and help you.
Conclusion
Do the spadework months before the campaign, build your reputation, make your idea share-worthy, choose the most suitable crowdfunding platform, and quietly kick-start the campaign to viral status. You’re only an attitude away from heart-warming success as a game changer.
