Discover the Insider Secrets of Million-Dollar Crowdfunding Campaigns
Some clients pay us over $1,000,000 to run their
multi-million-dollar crowdfunding campaigns. For the first time ever, we’re pulling back the
curtains and showing you how we do it.
How to develop a product everybody wants
How to get 100,000 visitors to your page
How to increase sales by over 37%
What services to use... and which ones you shouldn’t waste time on
So, now that we understand how you can do effective crowdfunding research, let’s move on and together understand how to start a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign from scratch!
A Kickstarter campaign can be a great way to put your ideas in front of the right people, but how do you get started?
Many people think launching a campaign is as easy as ABC. They just submit a half-baked idea on Kickstarter and wait for it to meet and exceed its goals.
Well, dude, I’m sorry. But that’s not how it works!
Starting a campaign isn’t just about having an idea or drawing up possible designs for your product or service. A Kickstarter is about community building and engaging with potential customers, influencers, industry experts, and crowdfunding backers who can help bring more visitors to your Kickstarter page.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Running a successful campaign takes months — we’ve even run some pre-launch campaigns for over a year as we got ready for the launch at The Crowdfunding Formula.
If other campaigns raise $25,000 in two months, we raise around $50,000 in just one day.
What’s our secret, you ask? Two words: Proper PREPARATION!
It takes time to determine your target audience, and to connect with them months before your campaign kicks off… you need to let things marinate to get the best results.
In the second part of the crowdfunding campaign launch article series, we’ll show you how to start a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign, how to set up your webpage, create a user-friendly landing page, and craft your story so that your future backers can relate with what you’re doing.
You’ll also find some tips on how to create killer pre-launch pages, drive relevant and engaging traffic to your page and make your email marketing and messenger marketing stand out while avoiding common pitfalls that leave your leads and future backers feeling disappointed.
Collecting and Warming up Subscribers
Whenever you think about where and how to start a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign, the first thing you need to focuse on are your leads.
Gathering subscribers before you launch is one of the key contributors to a strong start. And a strong start is one of the biggest indicators of a successful campaign.
There’s nothing worse than launching your campaign and not having hit your goal in the first 24 hours.
Hit it, and you’ll start appearing higher in people’s searches, on the Kickstarter or Indiegogo homepages, in their newsletters… and like a snowball gaining momentum, you’ll hit your milestones one after the other.
Creating a Pre-launch Landing Page
Building a website doesn’t need to be hard!
Gone are the days when you needed a computer science degree, coding experience, and days of figuring out what went wrong between your HTML and CSS.
There are lots of analytics platforms out there, but with Google’s wide reach across the web, it provides some of the most accurate overall analytics of your audience.
Facebook’s Pixel allows you to gather your visitors into an audience you can retarget with Facebook ads, and better understand their conversion rates on your page.
Note: Setting up your Facebook Pixel can sometimes be a challenge. With this Chrome extension, you can easily check to see if its working before you start running ads.
Did you know your email list is one of your biggest launch assets?
Use email marketing services to reach potential backers, increase brand awareness, and drive hot leads ready to convert to your campaign page when you launch.
If you’re new to email marketing, use MailerLite. It’s pocket-friendly, easy to use, and has beautiful template designs.
Our project managers also recommend ConvertKit, which is convenient if you want to send targeted emails. Rest assured that your email will be sent to the right segment.
Try these email marketing services and see which one works for you better.
Tip #12. Catch your leaving visitors with pop-ups
No matter how many people subscribe to your pre-launch through the on-page form, you’ll be losing people who get distracted, aren’t as attentively interested, or gave up halfway through.
No matter their reason, you’re going to show them how cool your product is in your email marketing, so you might as well get them to sign up now. Right?
Showing a pop-up to visitors after a certain period of time, or as they’re about to leave your page, can increase your sign-ups by 5-10%
Optimonk has a lot of variations for adding pop-ups to your landing page.
We would especially recommend exit-intent pop-ups, which retain visitors that are going to leave your page. This “last reminder” to subscribe to your product really works!
Tip #13. Don’t use pictures that say nothing about your product
Try to capture your product in situations it’s meant to be used.
Try to make your target audience identify themselves in your pics. Not only that — think about how the person looking at your pictures will imagine themselves using your product.
Hack: As most people are right-handed, if you’re selling a mug, have the handle to the right so people imagine themselves grabbing it!
And don’t forget to emphasize the unique selling points of your product in the photo, and tie it into the accompanying copy.
That’s exactly what we did on Albicchiere page, when showing the portable aspect of the wine dispenser.
Tip #14. Use 2-3 subscription forms along the landing page depending on its length
Subscription forms are what allow your visitors to sign up and claim their discount on your product when your Kickstarter campaign goes live.
And while you might think that one subscription form at the end of your page — once your visitors have read all your copy — is enough…
It isn’t.
Your readers might be convinced the moment they read the headline. Or after reading a couple of blocks. Or after skimming through to the end. Or after skimming back up a bit…
It’s hard to say. And it all depends on the complexity, niche, and price of your product.
So why gamble on the wrong position for your subscription form if you can add 2-3 — or even more — throughout your page?!
Tip #15. Describe your product in one sentence
This is the hero image. Above the fold. Your headline.
The first thing visitors to your website will see.
What’s that one idea you want to transmit immediately?
This descriptive sentence should highlight your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition — the single reason your product stands out.
What is the value you’re offering your customers? The most important benefit? And the problem it solves for your prospect?
Note: Generally, avoid using long sentences on your page. The user should get the message at a glance. Use visuals instead of text whenever possible.
Tip #16. Hide an expensive price behind a percentage
If your product is under $150, show it!
Have your price up there by the subscription form, and show how much you’re knocking off with a dollar discount — Now $17 instead of $50!
If, on the other hand, your product is expensive, just tell your visitors how much they’ll be saving. 30-50% off the MSRP is usually a good price point for crowdfunding campaigns.
Driving Traffic to Your Landing Page
When you’re thinking of how to start a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaing, you now have to drive visitors — or traffic — to it.
You need to engage the relevant audiences on Facebook, and bring them to your site with highly-converting ads.
Tip #17. Use Facebook Ads to drive relevant traffic to your totally new webpage
Tip #18. Create at least 2-3 versions of your landing page
Aim for different market positions on each, so that you can see what resonates with your audience. Maybe they care more about your product being lightweight or want to know that it’s built out of recycled materials.
Rewrite your copy, and present your product using these different angles, and then choose the one that works best.
Tip #19. Organize a referral program on your “Thank you” page
Starting a successful Kickstarter of Indiegogo campaign require quite amount of creativity.
You can use the Kickoff labs to let your backers refer to their friends and earn rewards.
Maybe they wrote down the wrong email, or you’re landing in their Promotions/Spam for some reason.
That’s why it’s always a good idea to have a Facebook VIP group that you can invite leads to after they subscribe.
This secondary channel can actually become a valuable place to talk with your potential backers, and is one more place you can remind them of your launch.
Email Marketing
Most people don’t know how to create the buzz in the initial stages of their campaign planning and development.
The easiest way to gather and warm up leads before you launch is through email marketing. This has been by far the most effective strategy when it comes to answering the question on “How to start a kickstarter or Indiegogo campaing.”
What?! Emails?!
Yes, I know you might have heard that everything happens on social media now, that digital advertising is the way forward… but email marketing is still one of the most effective sales generation strategies. Especially when you have something valuable, like an early access or special discount.
With conversion rates of 5-15%, and almost no cost, if you gather a list of 5,000 engaged subscribers before you launch — and treat them right! — that’s 500 people backing your campaign in the first 24 hours!
Use email to keep your subscribers updated about your product’s journey — and of course, let them know when you launch!
The email is an additional tool you can use to tell the story of your product, why you’re the right person to bring it to market, and explain other benefits they’ll enjoy that you cannot fit in the landing page.
Let’s see how to get started with email marketing.
Tip #22. Send 5-6 powerful emails
The idea behind a strong email sequence is to tell your leads the story you want them to hear.
Make each email about one topic, and have a call to action at the end that gets them to join your Facebook VIP group, answer a survey, share your campaign, or to back your campaign.
Some ideas for your sequence include:
Introduce yourself and confirm their subscription.
Tell them about the problem you discovered, and how your product solves it
Share additional information about the product
Give them social proof (if you have it), and sources that enhance your credibility
Let them know you’ll be launching soon (3 days left, 24 hours left, etc.)
And make sure you let them know when you go live!
Tip #23. Follow a consistent email marketing calendar
Plan your emails for the same day(s) every week.
For example, let them know in their welcome email that you’ll be getting in touch every Thursday.
That way they know you won’t be spamming them every day, and they’ll also be waiting for that weekly email from you on that day.
Just be sure to avoid weekends and holidays, as people usually don’t check their emails that day. And by the time they do, yours will already be way down on the list of important messages they need to check.
Tip #24. Keep track of the right metrics
So, you’re sending emails out. But how do you know if they’re landing. And if they are, how do you know if people are actively reading them, waiting for your launch?
That’s where email marketing’s 2 most important metrics come in.
Open rates show you how many people are opening your emails.
If you’ve targeted the right audience, and informed them well on the page, AND are sending them engaging emails, you should expect open rates of over 50% during your pre-launch campaign.
Click rates not only show you how many people click on the links in your emails — they also are an indicator of your audience reading and engaging with your emails.
That’s why you should rarely, if ever, send out an email without a link.
If you’re doing everything right, you should get around 10-20% click rates.
If your metrics are lower, there are several things that could be going wrong. These are some of the most common ways to fix them:
Narrow your target audience. The people signing up for your emails aren’t that relevant and aren’t interested in opening your emails.
Give your subscribers more value. These are people on the other end, that you’re asking to give their time to read your emails. Make sure they’re interesting, fun, and well-written.
Authenticate your domain with SPF and DMARC records, and turn on DKIM signing.
Thanks to the advancement of technology, a new form of marketing has made its way onto the scene — chatbots. These are programmed online applications that are commonly used in messaging services like Facebook Messenger or Slack. This type of marketing can prove to be very useful for companies because it lets you get in touch with your audience directly through their preferred channel without them needing to change how they’re communicating already. The best part? It’s fast & free!
If you want to know how to start a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign that brings in millions, one more thing to consider is understanding chatbots and how you can benefit from them.
Tip #25. Use ManyChat to reach your audience on Facebook Messenger
ManyChat is currently the best messenger marketing platform. Its user interface and flow building are perfect and straightforward.
Besides, all the texts and actions can be edited in one place. And its platform builders are doing a great job by constantly developing and enhancing it in terms of functionality and usability.
Here are a few tips for its initial setup:
Add your Facebook page to ManyChat and create the welcome flow and persistent menu flows, which include a CTA to your landing page (or a flow, where you tag them and send a campaign launch broadcast later), and an “Unsubscribe” button.
The latter is one of the most important things to remember since if you don’t provide an easy unsubscribe option to your subscribers, they’ll get mad and report your bot. Consequently, your page will be blocked by Facebook.
Here is an article to guide you throughout this setup process.
Note: Always monitor your Facebook Page Insights for page reports and try to keep them as low as possible.
Tip #26. Automatically segment your audience
ManyChat gives you the opportunity to schedule a broadcast for your segmented audience to get in contact with them whenever you wish.
So make sure you set up automatic tagging, and build a segment of those that want to get notified about your Kickstarter campaign launch.
Tip #27. Collect subscribers organically
If you have built a decent community on Facebook, you can make engaging posts and use the Comment Growth Tool. The latter brings your followers into your chatbot automatically given their consent.
Or you can turn on ads, and bring people to your ManyChat bot via those.
Video Creation and Photo-shoots
More than 70% of your visitors will not make it all the way down to the bottom of your page. So how do you get their attention and make them scroll? Short answer: eye-catching photos and videos.
But it’s not even just about your eventual Kickstarter page. Strong visuals can help you find better leads, they can show what your copy talks about on your pre-launch page, and they can even be cut into smaller clips for highly-engaging ads.
Let’s see what you can do to plan better videos and photos.
Tip #28. Spend time planning your video beforehand
Take your time planning every single detail concerning your video so that you don’t lose track of even a small thing.
When shooting, changes can turn into delays, and delays can end up costing quite a bit of money.
Think through everything beforehand, and make sure it fits within your budget.
Tip #29. Brainstorm with your team for plot ideas
Write down each and every crazy idea you can come up with.
Remember, great ideas have a tendency to come suddenly and fly away quickly!
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are wacky platforms, and often the videos have a very unique “crowdfunding style”.
Watch a few together, and get creative. Even the most boring products — from a screwdriver to a bag — can have insanely creative videos that propel them well into 7 figure campaigns.
Tip #30. Give your videos structure
It’s no good if your video’s plot is all over the place.
Keep it focused, and tell the story your product needs you to, in the most efficient way possible:
The Introduction: Describe your product briefly, in just a few words.
Define the Problem: Briefly discuss what problem you are trying to solve, and why your competition hasn’t managed to yet.
Introduce your Solution: Show your viewers why you decided to solve the problem, and how your product solves it. You can also start by discussing some traditional ineffective solutions — if there are some — and only then introduce your solution. This will make your product look stronger.
Introduce your Team: Share with your potential backers who you are, and give a brief overview of your motivations and story. You should look capable and professional to your backers so they can trust buying your product with their hard-earned cash.
Present the Features of your Product: Give examples of how your backers can use your product. Let your backers imagine themselves with your product in hand. Be honest, show your product in action, and don’t use technical language.
Include a Call to Action: Once you have aroused your prospects’ interest, don’t let them lose it by the end of your video. End with an effective call to action — something that encourages your potential backers to act right away. Try to make them feel their contribution can be crucial to the campaign’s success.
But if you want to make your video even cooler, read our article on Kickstarter video creation, or get in touch with the amazing Milenium5 creative agency.
Tip #31. Don’t exceed 4 minutes
You don’t want to bore your potential backers to death, do you?
Keep your video short and sweet — 2:30-3:00 minutes is more than enough to achieve your desired effect.
Tip #32. Don’t concentrate on making a viral video
You’re not making the next Apple ad!
Remember, most ads you see on TV are about brand awareness, recognition, being top-of-mind, retaining customers and easing buyer’s regret.
But that’s not what a Kickstarter video is about.
Highlight the product, its benefits, and why people should buy it. It’s that simple.
You’re not bringing them to the page, they’re already there. It needs to grab them emotionally and inspire them to watch it till the end and buy the product.
For this Pico video, we had a 40% watch rate — a pretty good statistic for a crowdfunding campaign that reached thousands of people.
Tip #33. Make your video emotional
Did you know people most often buy based on emotion rather than logic?
Do your best to arouse the desired emotion in your prospects through visuals and copy that match your brand and put your visitors in that state of mind.
Don’t try to logically explain how your product is better than the competition. Don’t tell them that it’s got a speed of 2,000 MB/s. Show them how that’s going to positively impact their lives!
Tip #34. Prepare your photoshoot
Look through commercial photos of similar products on Pinterest and prepare a storyboard that you can show your photographer for inspiration before the photoshoot.
You’re going to need a lot of photos for your social media, ads and campaign page, so don’t skimp!
Over the course of a typical campaign, we take over 200 high-quality photos.
On the other hand, a couple of good photos will do most of the work. So if you find your photos aren’t working, just keep taking more to get that awesome one!
Stepping up your PR game
Collecting databases of relevant journalists and influencers sets your Kickstarter campaign up for further promotion. A targeted digital PR campaign increases brand awareness and boosts lead generation.
To run a successful digital PR campaign, you need to go through three stages:
Media Research. Journalists and publications receive hundreds if not thousands of pitches a day. Don’t waste time and effort sending them pitches on topics they do not cover. Instead, use tools that allow you to identify media outlets and reporters in your niche. Their readers are your potential backers.
Media Outreach. You’ll most likely spend a lot of time sending pitches to journalists. Save time and send amazing pitches in bulk.
Media Monitoring. You got in touch with more journalists and bloggers you can count. Now you want to see if your efforts paid off. Use media tools to get a notification every time your product is mentioned on the web.
Want to see how we do it?
Here are some research tips which will help you collect these data in a tried and tested way.
Journalists and Bloggers
Get your product media attention. Find relevant journalists, bloggers, and publications that will write and publish about your cool idea. The best part? It’s free publicity.
Tip #35. Find a list of journalists that cover your beat
Every journalist covers a set of specific topics. There’s no point in outreaching a tech journalist about a dog toy, or a pet blog about an e-bike.
Luckily, you don’t need to scour the internet and read every single magazine to find your media contacts.
The platform provides all the information about journalists — which publications they are currently working in, their personal blogs and profiles on various social media platforms. On top of research, you can also contact journalists directly from the platform.
Having access to this information makes the tool irreplaceable. It is particularly useful when it comes to starting a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign, arranging your PR expectations, or writing pitches and reaching out to journalists.. Once you start following your selected journalists, the platform emails you their articles as they get published.
Tip #36. Target journalists with advanced search operators
You probably know this already, but it’s a useful refresher.
Google has tons of commands that let you search in more advanced ways. Here are some common commands that will make your Google Searches more effective:
Exact-match search — “relevant keyword”
Search in the titles — allintitle:”keyword”
Search for relevant writers in the journals you want — “keyword” site:the-journal-you-want.com
Find reviews of your competitors — allintitle:review (competitor1 OR competitor2)
Search for journalists in a specific location — loc:placename
Tip #37. Use advanced search queries to find relevant databases for your campaign
Welcome to the age of data and perfect research. Are you about to dive into search for your next big list of journalists on Google? How about doing this super effectively and fast? Here are some common commands that will help you perfectly master Google Search and make your search really productive:
Exact Match Search: Include your relevant keyword in the quotes “” (e.g. “Techchrunch journalist”) to get the result with the keyword inside:
Search in titles: if you type allintitle: and add your keyword right after the colons without a space (e.g. allintitle:crowdfunding formula), the search will return only the articles where the keywords are in the title. If you are searching for an exact phrase, include the text in the quotes, e.g. allintitle:”crowdfunding journalist”. This is the best way to narrow down your search,
Search for relevant articles in the journals you want: if you are looking for a specific article in a journal, here is a hack to help you find it easily. Type the keyword in quotes (e.g. “advertising tip”) and the site information site:[the-journal-you-want.com]. Here’s an example: “advertising tip” site:https://thecrowdfundingformula.com/
Find reviews of your competitors: To spy on your competitors and find what reviews they have, simply type allintitle:review [name of competitor1 OR competitor2] in the search space. E.g. allintitle:review lenovo
Location search: If you are looking for journalists from a specific country, you can use the location:[state/country] search hack. Thus, if you are looking for a journalist from Japan who covers the tech industry, simply type location: Japan “tech journalist” and check out the results.
Let’s take your searches one step further with Google Dorking!
Using Google Dorking is quite easy.
Combine a few useful search commands and you’ll get some ready made data for your campaign. Look at the example below and try to play with the commands to get the best outcome:
“blogger” OR “editor” OR “journalist” “email” filetype:csv OR filetype:xls OR filetype:xlsx
See what we did there?
This will search for:
Emails within a spreadsheet (csv, xls or xlsx)
On pages that also contain the keywords of blogger, editor, or journalist
You can also search information in unprotected and public Google Sheets. To do this, you can use the following query:
[ inurl:docs.google.com/spreadsheets and “@gmail.com” and “journalists”].
Want to learn more about Google Dorking? Check out the following article to make the most of this hacking tool.
Tip #38. Rank the publications in your database by popularity
Not all journals are created equal. And for your PR campaign to reach its ultimate success, you’re going to want to get featured in some of the top outlets out there.
How do you know which ones these are? By their Alexa rank!
The higher up they are on the list (closer to 1), the more popular they are on the internet.
Hint: the result is delivered based on the data of the past 90 days.
You just need to go to the page you want to include in your database, hit the icon and note the number. If the number is 30 it means the website is the 30th most visited site in the world.
Tip #39. Build an email list of your media contacts
In general finding a journalist’s business email address is a hard task. But not when you use tools like Nymeria — a browser extension that helps you find someone’s email from LinkedIn.
All you need to do is add the extension to your Chrome, navigate to the journalist’s page and click the Nymeria icon. The extension will automatically scan through the relevant LinkedIn profile to find the user’s verified email addresses.
Once you find that data, copy and paste it into your general media research database:
You’re done!
Instagram Influencers
Many companies are unaware of how effective influencer marketing campaigns can be when running huge successes in their crowdfunding campaigns.
By having other popular sites or Instagram influencers promote projects before they get released, consumers will already know how much effort has gone into the development long before the public release date arrives. When multiple websites promote at once, potential customers feel like they are opening up something new and exciting rather than spending money on an unknown.
Instagram influencer marketing is rising, and you must make the best of it. Reach your target audience through Instagram influencers in your niche, and watch your email list grow.
Here’s how you do the right influencer marketing when you want to start a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign.
Tip #40. Find related pages directly on Instagram
You might know a few Instagram influencers within your niche, but you know there are more out there!
How do you get to them? You could just use Instagram itself…
Use Instagram to search for a popular name within the niche you are interested in.
Then just click the small arrow next to the “Follow” button and Instagram will display similar profiles taking into account the niche, interests, number of followers, etc.
Tip #41. Discover new profiles using hashtags
Search for some keywords related to your product on Instagram search (Tags).
Click on one of the suggested popular hashtags and you’ll get hundreds of thousands of profiles among which you can easily find the ones that constantly share similar content.
Tip #42. Find listicles of influencers on blogs and digital magazines
You’re not the first to search for influencers, and most of the research is already out there.
Just go to Google and search for “Best [keyword] influencers on Instagram”.
It might just be a list of 10, sure, but it’s a good start. Collect your relevant influencers, and then find related ones with the tip from above!
Tip #43. Keep an eye on your competitors’ social media
Your competitors are also a source for Instagram influencers. After all, they’re also searching for influencers and trying to engage them in their promotions.
So, keep an eye on your competitors’ profiles, and you’ll soon see influencers tagging them in photos.
Another influencer swiped!
Tip #44. Make your life easier with influencer marketing platforms
You could keep your own spreadsheet — we do this often. But for how long do you think it will take to maintain a spreadsheet with hundreds of influencers?
Staying up-to-date can be a pain. The list of influencers you used last month may not be active anymore or they may have changed their rates.
Or you could go one step further and use an influencer marketing platform that allows you to research and maintain your own influencer database all in one place.
There are plenty of free ones, and the paid ones usually offer free trials. But the following are our favorites:
Tip #45. Analyze your influencers’ audiences with Heepsy
Although there are many platforms for influencer research, inexpensive platforms don’t offer many features and quality services can cost thousands of dollars. Heepsy is the golden middle.
It has a variety of search criteria you can choose from, making it easy to find relevant influencers on Instagram. The important criteria we look for are location, niche/category, number of followers, and engagement rate.
Heepsy gives good analytics for audience insights showing influencers’ audience age, gender, location, interests and more. After all, it’s not the influencer you’re after, but their audience!
Apart from being very user-friendly and full of useful features, Heepsy has one very cool option — Brand Mentions.
We all know that influencers that are heavy on promotional content tend to perform worse than those with entertaining content. You can get insights on what other brands they collaborated with so far, and how well their audience engaged with the promotional content.
Tip #46. More free influencers found on searchmybio
Searchmybio is another great tool you can use for influencer research. So much so, that they call themselves the Followerwonk — a very popular tool for researching Twitter bios — of Instagram.
Just type your keywords in the search bar, select the number of followers you’re after, and it will bring hundreds, even thousands of influencers who match your requirements.
And the most beautiful part — it’s totally free!
Tip #47. Find relevant influencers with Brands Collabs Manager
In 2018 Facebook launched Brand Collabs Manager, an influencer marketing tool to make it easier for brands and influencers to get connected. Facebook refers to influencers and Facebook pages as Creators, which they prefer over the term “influencer”.
To get started, go to the brand collabs manager and apply as an advertiser with your Facebook page.
Once approved, it lets you choose the topics you are interested in to make the recommendations more personalised.
On the home page you’ll find suggested creators for your product and pages similar to those which you already collaborated with, if you have. And if that is the case, the tool will also show insights like reach, impressions and engagement.
What’s more, it lets you boost your promotional posts right from the tool with just some clicks, if of course, the creator gave you the approval.
One of the core features of the tool is finding creators. Clicking on the search button, you can easily search by keywords and sort the target audience by country, gender, age, and interests of the audience. You can also search for the portfolio type of the creator.
Brands Collab Manager gives you access to these creators’ insights including their audience’s main country/city, age, gender, engagement rates, video views and most importantly, their portfolio — the list of brands they worked with and associated promotional posts.
Moreover, BCM lets you contact them directly from the tool without wasting a minute. And if you are thinking of outreaching a few creators, you can create a list for your campaign to export later.
To do this, first find a relevant creator, then simply click on “find similar creators” and it will bring new relevant results for your next great project!
Tip #48. Select relevant influencers from Facebook Categories
Here is a simple yet super hack to find all Facebook creators in one place.
First go to https://facebook.com/pages/category which is the complete list of categories in which all the Facebook creators are divided. If the list seems too long, just use ctrl F to find a keyword you think might be a relevant criteria for your search.
Now you can pick the category that interests you the most.
Tip #49. Find influencers on Twitter with Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a tool for Twitter that does almost the same thing as searchmy.bio on Instagram. The difference is that it has way more advanced features than searchmy.bio.
With this tool you can search any keyword, follow Twitter accounts right from your search results, analyze tweets and much more. In short, this is a must-have tool when looking for Twitter influencers.
Tip #50. Translate keywords
You have exhausted all your research strategies but the results in your language search don’t seem right?
We’ve got a solution — Google Translate!
Try translating the keywords into different languages and expand the limits of your research.
For instance, imagine you get unsatisfactory results after searching for mom influencers with the keywords ‘moms’, ‘parenting’, ‘family’,’ toddler’, etc. Your next step? Type those keywords into Google Translate to get the French equivalents.
Bingo! Now you have the keywords “maman”, “parentalité”, “famille”, etc.and can easily find French influencers.
Remember, your audience probably speaks more than one language. So keep this trick up your sleeve when doing research and never limit yourself to just English.
Tip #51. Calculate engagement rates
It’s not always true that big influencers will get your campaign the most traffic.
In fact, in many cases, 10 smaller influencers will probably have a bigger effect than one large influencer, as their engagement rates with their smaller audiences are bigger.
There are a number of ways to calculate engagement rates. But here is what we suggest:
Sum the number of likes and comments of the last 12 posts and divide it by 12 to get the average for these 12 posts.
Then divide the number by the total number of followers and multiply it by 100.
You can also use the Analytics by WeFind Google Chrome extension, which does it automatically.
Tip #52. Follow ViralMango for up-to-date influencer hacks
There are a ton of resources out there for basic influencer marketing.
But if you want to know how to start a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign with a strong and solid influencer marketing strategy , check out Viral Mango. Not only does this site power up your influencer marketing with a bunch of fantastic tips, but it also has a list of top influencers for each niche, along with their ratings and a custom description that can be used to tailor a pitch for them down the road.
One of its coolest features, however, is the Mango Score. The tool analyzes the top 15 metrics for any influencer you give it — you can even try it on your own profile! — to tell you if it’s worth working with them!
Influencer marketing might be drawn towards Instagram, but that doesn’t mean you should turn a blind eye to Facebook. Between brand pages, influencer pages, and communities — it’s a gold mine of influencers.
Here’s what you can do to reach influencers that will promote your product.
Tip #53. Discover all Facebook Pages in one place
This one is ridiculously simple . And yetso powerful, it’s crazy!
We stumbled on this by accident when researching Facebook pages for a campaign — and it almost seems like a bug on Facebook’s part, as there’s no way of getting here unless you type it directly into the URL.
Tip #54. Use FB Ads Manager to find pages related to specific interests
If you want to narrow down your search, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to find pages related to specific interests pretty easily.
Go to Audience Insights.
Then choose “Interests” from the left column and search for the interest you have in your mind.
Then go to the “Page Likes” section, and presto! There are your pages!
Tip #55. Brands Collabs Manager
With the launch of Brand Collabs Manager in 2018, Facebook made it easier for brands and influencers to connect.
Note: Don’t get misled by the name of the platform, as Facebook refers to influencers and Facebook pages as Creators, rather than “influencers”.
To get started, go to the Brand Collabs Manager, and apply as an advertiser with your Facebook page. And once you’re approved, it lets you choose the topics you are interested in to make its recommendations more personalised.
On the home page you’ll find suggested creators for your product, and similar pages to those who you already collaborated with, once you’ve already started using it. And if you have, it will also show insights like reach, impressions and engagement.
Of course, one of the core features is finding creators.
You can search by keywords and sort the target audience by country, gender, age, and interests of the audience. Once you’ve found a creator you want to work with, just click on “Find Similar Creators” and it will bring you fresh results.
Brands Collab Manager gives you access to these creators’ insights including their audience’s primary location, age, gender, engagement rates, video views and most importantly, their portfolio — a list of brands they’ve worked with and their associated promotional posts.
BCM lets you contact them directly from the tool without losing a minute, but if you are thinking of outreaching a few creators, you can also create a list for your campaign to export later.
And once your creators start posting, Brand Collabs Manager even lets you boost your promotional posts right from within the tool — as long as the creator approves.
Tip #56. Supercharge your Facebook influencer research
You’re limited in what you can do with Facebook. If you really want to take it to the next level, you should use third-party online tools.
BuzzSumo offers a limited 7-day free trial plan. It has a “Find influencers” feature, which makes influencer research for Facebook and Twitter quite easy.
Behind.ai is another similar tool: Just write down the keyword — and the accounts of the bloggers, influencers and their social media pages will all be at your disposal!
Tip #57. Mind the engagement rates
When looking for relevant influencers, pay close attention to the engagement rate of their posts. There are special tools like Meltwater that can help you do that.
But you can also search for them manually. Just look through any influencer’s videos and photos to find out whether they are engaging or not.
For instance, if the given influencer’s videos have 500,000-700,000 views or if their photos have 1,000+ likes and 100+ comments, this obviously means they are quite engaging.
Also note that you don’t have to scroll down through all the posts of the given influencer to assess their engagement rate: Looking through the last 20 posts is more than enough to understand whether they resonate with the audience or not.
Conclusion
Running a successful campaign is not just about submitting an idea — the amount of work you put into your pre-launch pages can make or break the success of your campaign.
And we hope the article provided enough insights and tips for you to understand all the important ins and outs of the overall pre-launch campaign stage.
So, now that you know how crowdfunding research works and how to start a Kickstarter campaign, what are you waiting for? It’s time to put together your campaign page and start your marketing campaign.
TCF team
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