Shouting From a Mountaintop

Lessons learned from marketing 5 Kickstarter projects.

By Peak Design

If there was ever a time in your life to shamelessly self-promote, it’s now.

That quote is from our earlier post on Kickstarter success factors, titled The Crowd Goes Wild. Not exactly infinite wisdom there. But it does sum up how we marketed our very first Kickstarter campaign back in 2011, and it still mostly holds true (we’ve gotten less shameless in our old age) with our crowdfunding marketing strategy 5 years later. In this post we’re going to share our Kickstarter marketing philosophy, avoiding nauseating marketing jargon at all possible times.

Think less, do more

The biggest difference between our marketing strategy in 2011 and now is the amount of time we spend thinking about marketing before we do it. Back then it was 2 minutes, and now it’s about 15 minutes.

In many ways, that’s not an exaggeration. If a lightbulb pops up over one of our heads with a crazy idea for getting more people to our Kickstarter page, it doesn’t take much hem-n-haw before we grab that bulb and screw it in and see what happens. It’s the perfect retreat from launching physical products: when you’re doing marketing activities you can take half-baked ideas, toss ‘em out there in the wild, and if they get eaten by wolves you can just go back to the oven.

There’s a difference between being reckless and having a bias toward action. Between being sloppy and not having everything perfectly in place. Between being risky and trying something new. You’ve got a maximum of 60 days (on Kickstarter, possibly longer on other platforms) to meet your funding goal, and the more time you let tick, the less time you have to try, measure, and tweak.

Peter Lockett and Peter Dering filming Kickstarter video footage at dawn in the Marin Headlands.

Start Early

This is a common theme throughout our Kickstarter advice: if you wait until the launch of your campaign, you’re already behind. Another theme we preach is that you can’t just press the campaign launch button and expect the pledges to just come rolling in. Well, if you follow the former piece of advice, you could totally show us up on the latter.

A month before you launch, start building buzz. Begin with your friends and family. Talk about your upcoming campaign with them. Build an email list and sent them brief updates or teasers. Let them know how passionate you are about what you’re doing. If they’re not familiar with crowdfunding, educate them.

If you have the time and resources to go bigger, build a teaser webpage. You’ve seen these before—you see an ad about a product or app, and then get to a page that gets you all excited about it, but then you realize that it’s “COMING SOON.” You pop in your email, and boom, you’ll be the first to know when it goes live. Do that. Share the page across your network. Advertise that page on Facebook, targeting people who you think would be interested in your project. Post it in crowdfunding forums.

Another great tool is Thunderclap. It allows you to harness the collective online influence of your friends and followers by having them sign up to post the same message at the same time. Setup a Thunderclap to announce the beginning of your campaign, and ask friends to participate in it. A Kickstarter campaign only has one launch date, and that is a date that you will want to celebrate. You owe yourself the effort it takes to get as many other folks in that party as possible. Starting your campaign with a bang is like getting straight A’s during your first semester of college: you’ll look and feel like you’ve got your shit together, and it makes your life a lot easier moving forward.

Spend money to make money

Paid digital advertising. It’s as fun as it sounds!

First off, we realize that headline sounds like a douchy Wall Street adage. Secondly, advertising has been around for a long time, so you shouldn’t be surprised that it can really move the crowdfunding needle. But it’s a tricky and sometimes dangerous activity to get into. On one hand, you’re investing funds up front to reach new people, who can bring in a lot more funds in return. On the other hand, it’s really fast way to waste money. And it can be downright dangerous (to the the solvency of your business) when you don’t have a good handle on what you can afford to spend and what your actual return on investment is.

You’ve got two options: do it yourself, or pay somebody to do it all for you. We do both, and we’re going to explain why below.

The Everyday Messenger 13 rests on the floor of a traditional Japanese hotel room aside Creative Director Peter Lockett.

Doing your advertising in-house

If you have the bandwidth and expertise to do your own advertising, more power to ya. Using Facebook advertising as a reference point, the DIY advertising tools out there are rapidly getting easier to use and more powerful. If you’re a decently tech-savvy person, you can get a Facebook ad up and running in about 5 minutes. And we’ve found that our DIY ads often perform just as well as the stuff that paid advertisers put forth.

Quick plug: we haven’t found another entry-level advertising platform that gives you the kind of DIY bang-for-the-buck that Facebook does. We could spend hours going deep on our tactics here, but thankfully the folks at AdEspresso have already knocked this one out of the park.

But beyond doing fairly simple stuff, DIY advertising (on any platform) has a steep learning curve. You can spend hours trying to determine what knobs to turn or how to interpret the data. By the time you’ve optimized your ads, your campaign could be over, or dead in it’s tracks for that matter.

Paying someone to do your advertising

Over the past couple years a bunch of marketing agencies have sprouted up who specialize in advertising for Kickstarter campaigns. It’s probably due to the advancement of both advertising platforms and crowdfunding platforms—for instance, you can now connect your Kickstarter page to Google Analytics and see the number of pledges and pledge dollars you get from different ad sources, which lets you rapidly optimize the ads you’re running. Couple that with an explosion of crowdfunding projects and backers, and you’ve got a large and growing market with lots of money to be made and amazing new tools for making it.

The result is a bit of a Wild West when it comes to finding a marketing vendor. Lotta young companies out there with very different business models. Few rules or regulations. A handful of complete crackpots and phonies, and a handful of great companies that probably have very bright futures. Get a group of project creators together and you’ll hear a cornucopia of stories ranging from “they saved my project” to “they took my money and ran.” In a future post we’ll share which companies and tools we’d recommend.

Our advice here is be smart and don’t give away the farm. Shop around, and don’t hire somebody if you’re not comfortable with it. If you’re new to the business world, keep in mind that everything is negotiable, from the price of a service to the terms of the contract. When it comes to the price, sit down and do some math first. Some marketing agencies claim to charge a fee of 35-40% of the funds they help you raise (or in some cases, all the funds you raise). Is that worth it? Every business is different, so we can’t outright say what’s right for you. But we can say that you should avoid getting yourself into a “break even“ scenario, whereby you pump all sorts of marketing dollars in and wind up with zero profit. Kickstarter, from our experience, is literally the most profitable sales and marketing platform on Earth. If you‘re unable to be profitable on Kickstarter (again, it depends on the type of business you have), it‘s highly unlikely that you‘ll have a profitable product after Kickstarter. Lastly, press your vendor to explain to you the return on your money spent with them. When they give you the data, double-check it with your own analytics.

Measure, when you can

We’ve already mentioned this a few times, so we’ll stay short and sweet here. Use Google Analytics and the analytics provided by your crowdfunding platform to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. If something looks particularly effective, double down on it. For example, if you see a bunch of pledges coming from a specific online forum, go talk to folks in that forum build the buzz. Go find more forums like it. Sometimes the data will tell you stuff that you never would have expected.

Also, sometimes the data won’t tell you anything. And when that happens, that’s fine. Not everything needs to be a perfect science, and you definitely don’t want to get stuck in the slippery rathole of getting too deep into your analytics, searching for answers that don’t exist.

Product Designer Joey Cunningham conducts a in-line QC inspection on The Everyday Messenger 13 at our sewing facility in Vietnam.

PR: Worth the pain

Most of the time PR feels like telemarketing: lots of cold-calling, lots of rejection, and very rarely do you land “the big one.” Like digital advertising, you can do PR yourself or pay somebody to do it. The right move for you will wildly vary depend on the nature of your product and industry. But we can offer some simple tips.

First, if you are launching a physical product, do whatever you can to have units of that product available for media dissemination early in your campaign. Getting a stranger to write a story about your product is hard. If they’ve never even used your product, it’s really hard.

Next, note that for the duration of a Kickstarter project the only type of media you need to focus on are what’s called “short lead.” These are largely online publications, bloggers, social media heros, news sites and possibly local newspapers. Most print publications fall into the long lead category, meaning that it’ll take them at the very minimum 2 months (typically 3-5 months) to turn around a story.

When you’re doing your outreach, be persistent and follow up. Keep conversations warm. If you forget about them, you can guarantee they’ll forget about you. This is the part of PR that can be a real grind and time-suck.

If you do decide to hire somebody, it’s a pretty steadfast rule that you get what you pay for. Many PR agencies work on a monthly fee, and those fees vary wildly. If you’re paying less than $2000 a month, don’t expect much. And if an agency claims to specialize in PR for crowdfunding campaigns, or they tout super-affordable prices that are intended for first-time project creators with small budgets, approach them with extreme scrutiny. You get what you pay for in this business, and while there are some fantastic PR agencies out there, there’s also a bunch of duds.

Lastly, PR goes far beyond articles and blog posts. It can be as simple as a Tweet from a well-followed person in your industry or a guest appearance by you on somebody’s podcast. It can also be a live event where potential backers can meet you and demo your product. If you lack a budget there are plenty of creative ways you get your project out there.

Head Designer Art Viger holding up the Outside Magazine Summer Buyer's Guide, which highlights The Everyday Messenger.

use the buddy system

At any given time there are 5000+ active projects on Kickstarter. That’s 5000 other creators like you who are in various stages of excitement and freak-out over how their ideas will fare. Go find yourself some buddies. The classic move between creators is “I’ll post yours if you post mine,” which we’ve done a few times to get fresh eyes on our project. Just be sure to keep your partnerships relevant to your backers. If they’re backing your 12-in-1 spatula, don’t promote a fantasy role-playing card game to them.

Buddies can also be industry influencers. For us, they are popular, well-followed adventurers and photographers. Such partnerships have been among the most fruitful marketing endeavors we’ve ever taken on. For our Slide and Clutch project, we teamed up with 4 influential photographers and 4 charities. Each photographer promoted our campaign for a day, and we donated 10% of our funds on that day to the charity of their choosing. For our Everyday Messenger project we teamed up with Trey Ratcliff, a world-renowned travel photographer, to not only promote our campaign but to design the actual product. The result was a $5M campaign, and a product that won awards from Men’s Journal, National Geographic, Popular Photography, and Carryology. That’s a bit of an extreme example, but it serves to illustrate the power of the buddy system.

Head Designer Art Viger hangs out aside a burly snow crawler during a post-supplier-visit team ski trip in Japan.

With moves like this, Peter Lockett is everyone's buddy.

Turn your backers into amplifiers

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: you backers are the best customers in the world, and they’re one of your greatest assets as a business. If you play your cards right, your backers will become a driving force behind the growth of your campaign.

Give them reasons to come back to your campaign and share. Post updates with new behind-the-scenes images of what you’re working on. Take a video of yourself touring your manufacturing facility, or laying down your demo track, or cooking an omelet and trying to come up with a marketing strategy. Better yet, have interactive On-Air Google Hangouts with your backers where they can ask questions and get responses right away. If you keep people engaged, they’ll keep talking about you.

We’ve become fans of throwing entirely new products into campaigns at the 30 or 45 day mark. We did this with Shell and CaptureBINO and then again with CaptureLENS. These late additions become entirely new reasons for backers to share and for new backers to come on board. If you do this, just make sure that you’re ready to manufacture and fulfill these add-on items.

And there’s no shame in asking your backers point blank to share your campaign with others. After all, they’ve got the same goal as you. It’s even possible (through some 3rd party marketing companies, or through a lot of manual work on your end) to offer backers special discounts or incentives for sharing your campaign and bringing in new pledges.

Art Viger doing some field testing on one of our new bags in Hakuba, Japan. It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it.

what did we miss?

We realize we just said a lot, but in reality each of those sections could easily be a standalone article. Marketing a Kickstarter project is a trial and error process, and it’s also a creative art form. Like the most successful crowdfunded products, the best marketing tactics are often ones that nobody else thought of before.