What to Expect From a Crowdfunding Marketing Agency

What to Expect From a Crowdfunding Marketing Agency: Conversations With an Account Manager

What should you expect when working with a crowdfunding marketing agency? You’ve got a great idea but need a helping hand to market your product to a crowd of would-be enthusiastic backers. The task is daunting. Letting agencies leverage their know-how and expertise can make a huge difference in the success of your project.

Working with a crowdfunding marketing agency can increase your chance of success, but you’ll want to make the relationship a good one. Agencies know the ins and outs of the market and launch campaigns every day. By partnering with an agency, you’re free to focus on other aspects of your business.

Here’s what account managers want you to know before you begin your relationship.

Understand the Risks

Launching a new business or product is risky. There’s no way around it. Partnering with an agency can mitigate some of those risks because you’re using a partner who has best practices to fall on.

Crowdfunding success isn’t guaranteed. A great product, solid assets, and a marketing plan are necessary if you want to surpass your funding goal and manufacture your project. According to Kickstarter, less than 40% of all projects launched are successful. Only 4% of all successful projects raise more than $100,000, and 0.29% raise more than $1 million.

Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to raise $1 million to be successful or to launch a business. We’re here to help you navigate setting realistic goals, price your product appropriately for crowdfunding audiences and market to them. Even if your project’s launch doesn’t succeed, it doesn’t mean your journey is over. We’ve worked with creators who took a failed first launch and turned it into success on the second try.

Think Through Your Advertising Plan

Crowdfunding isn’t free. Campaigns launch every day, a stark contrast to the early days of crowdfunding when every project was novel and exciting. Standing out requires creative advertising. Advertising requires money.

Pre-Launch Advertising

At Enventys Partners, we recommend beginning your advertising plan with a solid pre-launch phase. It’s important to plan your advertising assets before you launch. This means taking high-quality product and lifestyle images and shooting your product video. Use that video to create GIFs and shorter-form video ads.

If you have samples, send them to people and ask them to create user-generated content. In this phase, you’ll run lead generation ads to capture emails from potential backers. This will allow you to build excitement and momentum before your campaign launch. We recommend allocating a $5,000 advertising budget for about a month of pre-launch.

Live Campaign Advertising

When you begin running live campaign ads, you’ll want to allocate 10-15% of your internal funding goal in the advertising budget. Working with an agency will provide you access to their historical data and will help target the right audiences first. It’s worth noting that agencies can (and will) target audiences from campaigns similar to yours, but it isn’t an indicator of success. Just because one campaign raises $1 million, doesn’t mean that yours will too.

We’re on the Same Team

Communication is critical when working with a crowdfunding agency. As a creator, don’t hide information from your agency team. If you’re going to miss a deadline in creating assets, tell them. If you’ve received information from your manufacturing partners that will affect the price of your product, share that information early. The agency can’t help you if they don’t know the details.

Come to the table with an understanding of your target customer. The more you know, the better we can collaborate. Agencies have a deep understanding of the crowdfunding campaign backer, but each individual project also taps into other audiences. Doing your own research ahead of time makes the process more collaborative and effective.

Working with an agency takes a lot of the guesswork out of running a campaign. Agencies have been there before. They’ve tried and tested, new ways of attracting backers and they’re ready to use what works for your project, too.