This Week I Learned: How to Create a Kickstarter Marketing Plan

A full promo guide with links to more detailed sources

This article originally appeared on my Medium publication, This Week I Learned, a collection of skills, tools, news, and realizations that I pick up every week.

So you want to launch a project on Kickstarter.

Great! Kickstarter is a powerful platform for raising money to fund your side project, a new product line from your company, or your startup’s first product, whatever it may be. Projects can range from hundreds of dollars in funding to tens of millions of dollars.

But getting people to discover your Kickstarter project and fund you is an entire process in of itself. In fact, it’s been done so many times that people have actually defined the marketing and outreach process. There are a ton of resources out there for people to research and figure out how to market their Kickstarter project.

Recently, I had to do a lot of this research for one of my clients for my marketing agency, Elevate Media. For me, it was pretty dizzying to trawl through the dozens of articles, guides, and resources that I found. They were all helpful, but I had to organize them all in a way that made sense.

So, I made this guide on how to create a full Kickstarter marketing plan.

There are three main steps to make this marketing plan.

1. Prepare Marketing Assets
2. Prepare for Outreach
3. Prepare a Marketing Schedule

“Prepare for Outreach” is by far the most extensive part of this guide (it also happens to involve pretty much most of the effort), so I’m delving into that more than the other two.

Prepare Marketing Assets

Marketing assets are primarily going to be the content for your marketing campaign. Think images, photos, videos, GIFs, articles, project updates, project samples, and all of that.

Most people think that all you’ll really need is a Kickstarter video and a couple of product shots. Well, you’re going to need a lot more than just that if you want to keep up the momentum during the campaign and reach your goal. Before the campaign even begins, start creating the majority of your assets in preparation so you’ll be ready to go when it starts.

For this, it helps to organize your assets in a way that will help your categorize them and prepare them for different types of audiences and channels. Use Google Sheets or something similar to do this.

This is a general format for each marketing asset:

• What is the asset (video, image, photo, article, project update, project samples, etc.)
• Who is it for (which of your communities/audiences will be excited about this content)
• Where (what channels and who will share it)
• When (at what phase of the campaign will you share it)

Here’s an example of the format:

• Georgia Tech Technique article about my Kickstarter campaign and its story
• Georgia Tech students that don’t follow the campaign
• Social media channels (FB, Instagram, Twitter) and the publication page itself
• After the first week of the campaign

And that’s the first step.

Prepare For Outreach

This second step is broken down into three different phases:

1. Build a List
2. Write for the Press
3. Create a Communications Strategy

Build a List

Marketing for Kickstarter isn’t just spamming your friends on Facebook and Instagram. It requires a great deal of preparation in order to be successful.

So, first, you’re going to need a list. This list will be a collection of all of your friends, fans, followers, and related people. Get all of their contact information and make a big Google Sheet with all of this information.

Then, segment your list into different types of supporters (friends, family, random fans, industry professionals, influencers, etc) so you can make it easier to tailor your group messages and contact later on. Know what channels they use (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, email, flyers, phone calls, texts, etc). After that, make an educated guess as to how much each supporter type will help fund the goal so you can estimate how many backers you need and what types you need. That will be your rough goal to work towards.

Next, create a launch group that will share your stuff and back you immediately at the launch of the campaign. Let these people know what you’re doing, what the campaign is, and what they need to do. Make sure you coordinate this launch day plan with them (get them all in a big Facebook message chat and do a countdown on the day of the launch). This launch group is going to do the initial sharing, funding, and broadcasting so your campaign gets to the top of thousands of people’s feeds.

While you’re building this list of individual contacts, you need to also build a list of organizations, groups, and communities (digital or physical) that are relevant to your target audience. If you’re making a Kickstarter project on hearing aids for children with hearing problems, then you should be looking for Facebook support groups of parents who have children with hearing problems, national associations of families with children with hearing problems, and…you get the drift.

With this list, you’re going to have contact everyone to get your initial hype going. The idea is that this hype will roll over to everyone’s personal networks and allow your campaign to spread far beyond what you could do on your own.

That’s phase one.

Write for the Press

Press = Get the word out.

First, you’ll need to do research on your target audiences and make a list based on:

• Who the audience is
• Where they are (channels or gathering places)
• What they like

Next, make a list of blogs, publications, news outlets, and individual journalists that will care about your Kickstarter project. These can range from small outfits to major organizations. You’ll need both to succeed.

After that, draft a press release. You’re basically going to write a draft of the article that will be splashed across the Internet and beyond. When writing this draft, include the whos, whats, whens, wheres, and whys of the project. Make sure you’re concise, inspirational, and passionate. Include a few high-quality photos of the team and the project (they’ll need that for publishing). Include a link to the project page, when you’re planning to launch, your funding goal, and the deadline for that goal. Remember to be inspiring: it’s about the project, not the Kickstarter.

Now you need to reach out to press.

Yes, you need to do that before the campaign even starts. Realistically, you’ll send it to them a few weeks before everything starts and they’ll have it out and published within the first week or two of your campaign. If you reach out to them in the first week, you’ll lose their help in the initial, critically important part of your campaign.

You may be wondering, “I would love to have the media cover my project and my story. But I don’t know anyone in that industry, so how am I going to do it?”

Well, you’re going to find their contact information and hit them up.

Most journalists include their email at the ends of their articles or in their publication profiles. Emails are relatively easy to guess or figure out. In fact, most people’s company email addresses are in one of these four formats:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

For larger publications/organizations, you can use Rapportive, a Gmail plugin, which checks to see if an email address is connected to a LinkedIn account (most journalists at big companies have LinkedIn accounts), which essentially validates the email address to see if it exists. Basically, just keep plugging in various email address formats until their profile pops up.

Tailor each message that you send to a journalist or a type of journalist. Blanket messages will likely increase bounce rate of your messages, and you’ll just be wasting your time.

Lastly, if you receive any sort of press overage, be sure to share it with your audience. They’ll be excited for you, and it’ll help validate your whole project.

That’s phase two.

Create a Communications Strategy

First, make sure you have a messaging strategy.

What is that, you may ask? Well, it’s how you talk about it, what your online voice sounds like, what do you say about it on social media, what potential press will say about it, and everything related. This strategy communicates the core themes and ideas of your project, and it’ll govern how you communicate with people about your project. To get some ideas for your messaging, look at similar Kickstarter projects. See what press coverage they got and analyze how they wrote about it, what images they used, what language they used, etc.

Also, it’s extremely helpful to get feedback from friends and potential customers by sharing the preview campaign page with them before you even start.

Next, have a launch day communications plan. This is just an minute-by-minute list of everything you need to get done and who’s in charge of what.

Go ahead and draft the emails and messages you’ll send to the different people in your list (friends, family, influencers, press, etc). Include draft posts/messages about the project so that they can just copy and share, making it easy and quick as possible.

Plan some project updates throughout the campaign. For example, these updates can be scheduled after the first 24 hours, after a couple of days, after a week, after half of the campaign, after a month, etc.

Engage your community on social media. Follow the 70/30 rule, where 70% of what you share is purely content driven and 30% is a direct ask for support. Don’t be afraid to ask. Some people feel that they can’t ever simply ask people because they’d feel bad, pushy, or something of the sort. If your product, cause, or project is great, then you needn’t worry about it. Of course, you should obviously avoid spamming…

Keep in mind that only a certain percentage of your following will convert into actual pledges.

Ex. Here’s some general math: 400 followers = 40 views = 4 pledges

As just a tip, ALWAYS include a link to the project page in ANYTHING you do. People need to know how to find your campaign if they’re interested, and you want to make conversion as quick and simple as absolutely possible. Also, use a link shortener like bit.ly to track how many clicks you’re getting and where you’re getting them from.

And that’s phase three.

Prepare a Marketing Schedule

Finally, it’s time to create the schedule.

You have the assets, and you have what you need to do. Now, you need to plan it all out and execute.

You’ve done most of the hard work. Preparing a marketing schedule is simple enough: create a schedule (use Google Sheets or something to manage it) for your content, indicating what you’ll post, when you’ll post, and where you’ll post. Use a social media management tool like Buffer to help with scheduling posts and monitoring analytics.

Schedule everything else. When you’re going to reach out to the press, when you’re going to hit up your list, and so forth. Make sure everyone on your team knows their roles, or it’s going to get chaotic and uncoordinated really quickly.

After that, just make sure people get it done.

Creating a marketing plan for your Kickstarter will make your campaign infinitely easier. However, keep in mind that the real work is in getting all of this done. You can plan all you want, but if all you do is make some lists, then you’ve completely missed the point of this article. I wrote this guide to help organize the whole process, but it’s up to you to do your Kickstarter.

Also, here are some general tips on promoting your project if you want to know more.

And, to sum it all up, here’s a master Kickstarter Project promotion guide/timeline/checklist.

That’s it for today. If you ever have any suggestions for what I should write about, just comment below and I’ll check it out.

Look out for the next article in a week!

-Indra

-Atlanta, 2017