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.