The Six Million Dollar Tripod: How to wildly exceed your Kickstarter (or any other sales) goals with smart marketing

This is a story about a tripod; a six million dollar tripod. Scratch that. This is the story about Peak Design, which is currently running its ninth Kickstarter campaign for a travel tripod aimed at photographers. However, my version of this story focuses on the very effective marketing campaign that Peak Design has run, with the result that it has exceeded its $500,000 campaign goal by more than a factor of ten with six weeks still remaining in its Kickstarter campaign. At this rate, Peak Design should easily capture more than six million dollars in pre-order pledges for its tripod. Wouldn’t you like for your marketing campaign to be this successful?

How did Peak Design do it? Well, the photography business is a funny one. It’s populated with very large companies that provide cameras and lenses and very small ones that provide an endless number of accessories – both ingenious and brain dead. Photographers are suckers for accessories. I should know. I’ve been buying photographic accessories for my cameras for half a century.

Tripods are an accessory. They’re not usually considered glamorous. They’re not usually especially expensive unless you buy the Italian ones (sort of like automobiles). I have three good photographic tripods and three junky ones. The good ones come from stores that carry photo gear and I usually will spend $100 to $200 on a good, sturdy tripod. The junky ones, bought for their disposability, come from Target, Goodwill, and other thrift stores and usually cost $10 or so. These are the tripods that live in my car’s trunk, just in case.

I am not currently looking for a tripod, I’m tripod-rich at the moment, yet suddenly I found myself bombarded with information about the Peak Design travel tripod and this sudden onslaught peaked my interest, so to speak. This information spike didn’t happen by coincidence; it happened because of Peak Design’s laser-targeted and very smart marketing campaign, which shows off the company’s Kickstarter and target-audience savvy.

To understand Peak Design’s marketing campaign is to understand the tectonic shifts in media usage caused by the Internet. Starting in high school back in the 1970s, I became an avid reader of photographic magazines: Popular Photography, Modern Photography, Peterson’s Photographic, and American Photographer. That’s where I got all of my buying information and advice. (Full disclosure: I loved these magazines so much that I eventually started working on the editorial side of the trade-magazine industry in the electronics market.)

No more.

In 2019, some of the photographic magazines, especially the British ones, still exist. However, their numbers have thinned significantly and I no longer read the ones that remain. Instead, I now hang out on the Internet along with several billion other people. They and I are on the Internet every day. And I still pay attention to what’s happening in photography. It’s my hobby and it’s an essential part of my work as a content creator and marketer.

My photo information now comes from Web sites and, especially, from certain specific YouTubers who specialize in photographic topics: the frenetic Peter McKinnon, the sage Peter Gregg, and the self-amused Kai Wong. These YouTubers who specialize in photographic topics and reviews have my attention, and the attention of millions of YouTube subscribers. I see these three almost daily, as opposed to the magazines I formerly read, which got my attention monthly.

Peak Design seems to understand the essence of the change that has happened and they have marketed appropriately. I don’t know how many tripods they sent out for review to YouTubers who focus on photography, I don’t watch even a small fraction of the photo-oriented YouTubers, but I do know that two of the YouTubers I regularly watch got Peak Design travel tripods and both chose to review these tripods. Both of these YouTubers started their videos by saying that tripods weren’t especially sexy and that they didn’t regularly review tripods. Both then spent ten minutes or so reviewing Peak Design’s travel tripod.

This is a marketing lesson writ large. I see a lot of companies marketing like it’s 1999 – before the Internet, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter essentially wiped the other media from the face of the earth.

It’s not 1999. It’s 2019. It’s time for you to take a good look at your target audience, figure out where their eyeballs are spending time, and getting some eyeball time there instead of wherever else you’re chucking your marketing dollars.

Peak Design did just that and went 10x over goal.

Got it?