Proven Tips for Making a Kickstarter Pitch Video That Converts - Part 1: Target Market
(The full version of this article was originally published on CrowdCrux.)
Video is an often overlooked element of many crowdfunding campaigns, but it’s actually one of the most important factors in whether potential backers actually make a pledge after landing on your campaign page. Research from IndieGoGo shows that campaigns with videos are 4x more likely to get funded than those without.
With everything that you’re already doing to get your campaign ready to launch, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, so the idea of trying to plan and coordinate a video shoot can feel incredibly daunting.
Firstly, there’s the cost – while the cost of video has come down a huge amount in the last decade, thanks to big advances in technology, it’s still easy for costs to spiral upwards. For example, this excellent promo for the startup Knock cost at least $50k. (source) If your campaign goal is in the $10k – $50k range, then you’re obviously going to have to find a less costly option.
Also, the whole process of planning, shooting, and editing video can be a hugely time consuming process. You’re going to want to avoid the common mistakes that can end up wasting hours of time.
I’m going to give you a peek behind the curtain of the process we used to plan, execute and deliver a pitch video for a campaign that raised 7x their original goal.
Here’s the finished video:
We were also able to create a large number of billboard quality stills, and a second cut down version of the video for FB ads and social, all without adding significant additional time to the shoot.
Start with who
Who is your ideal customer? Hopefully by this point in developing your product and designing your campaign, you’ll have a very good idea of who they are. If not, start with this short but full of wisdom post by Seth Godin.
When you’re writing your pitch script (yes you should be on camera, we’ll get to this later), think of it as if you’re talking directly to your ideal customer. In our video for the Arcido bag, a rough outline of the ideal customer is a 25-30 year old male, who frequently travels for work and leisure. Will, the founder of Arcido, looks straight into the camera and talks conversationally whilst still getting quickly to the point.
You’re going to want to avoid using any language in your pitch that is different from how your target customer speaks. For instance, we knew that words like ‘smarter’, ‘freedom’ and ‘organized’ were all words that we’d heard or seen the target customer using to describe similar products.
Part 2 coming soon.