10 Things Teaching Us About Running Successful Crowdfunding Campaigns

There are thousands of prospective businesses out there looking for financial assistance to kickstart as well as functional ones that want to expand on the one hand while there are a large number of investors who are looking for projects to fund. Crowdfunding platforms come into the game, to bring the two together. Here are 10 things teachng us about trunning successful crowdunding campaigns.

The main reason being that you don’t organize a successful crowdfunding campaign with kids gloves, it takes the input of an expert, an experienced and tested crowdfunding marketing support agency.

Where others find it extremely difficult a growth marketing service provider can help some of the world’s largest companies and fast-growing startups accelerate their growth and raise funds.

• Anker’s is the most successful Kickstarter campaigns that raised 5M USD. Anker is Amazon’s largest electronics seller doing revenues over 1bn USD. Crowdcreate helped them get there.
  
• Nui Cookies hit their first Kickstarter campaign and the food craze company was featured on ABC’s hit TV show Shark Tank.
•  Asia’s fastest selling token sale, Bezant, raised 18M USD in just two hours, and built their community from zero.

Eric Youn, Community Manager of Bezant mentioned how efficient and successful crowdfunding campaigns done by Crowdcreate were. Youn said: “We could not have met our 17 million Hardcap and sold out our 4 million Bonus round without Crowdcreate. They helped us when FUD and spam were getting the best of our Telegram room. They also advised me during peak panic hours.”

What are the 10 things teaching us about running successful crowdfunding campaigns? Here are the takeaways you should learn.

1. Building an Audience.

For any campaign to be successful, you have to package it correctly. According to Crowdcreates Co-Founder Ivan Kan, “Getting a product from development stages to becoming a well-known project is still very challenging. There’s still a lot of projects that go up there — a lot of it gets lost in the noise. Our specialty is to craft a story and make it viral.”

The point is not just to go about telling a story, the most important thing that will make your story sell is how it is crafted. The way you package the campaign invariably determines how successful it will be.

2. Get Funding as Quick as Possible.

It is the duty of the accelerator or marketing support agency to advocate for quick funding of crowdfunding campaigns, with the hindsight that it overwhelmingly and resoundingly sends across the message that the startup has come on board and is one to watch out for. It also contributes greatly to enhancing the brand’s visibility and helps to attract additional investors for subsequent funding.

3. Around the clock support.

A marketing support agency that intends to help crowdfunding platforms attain their goals should have at their beck and calls a global team of passionate thought leaders and moderators that provide 24/7 support across all major languages right around the year who will effectively grow your community. Before investors dip their hands into their pockets to fund a project, they carry out an extensive evaluation.

The investors take critical looks at the size of their community and engagement — with the view of discovering any shortcoming. People don’t ordinarily bank on a sinking ship

Lendingblock sold out $ 10 million in 3 days, and Linda Wang, Co-Founder & COO of Lendingblock has this to say: “…our telegram room has already grown 100X within two months. Already, their team has proven their knowledge in both marketing and lending across all of the community channels.”

4. Network of influencers.

According to influencer marketing agency Mediakix’s latest influencer marketing survey, 89 percent of surveyed marketers say the return on investment is as good as — or better than — other channels. Eight out of 10 also said that they see influencer marketing as “effective” or “very effective. Networks to look into are: YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter influencers.  These channels are influencer marketing at scale and gives brands the opportunity to leverage social influencers organically as well as enjoying cross-channel competency.

The mammoth network of influencers ensures that any brand they are accelerating carries out a successful crowdfunded campaign all the time focusing on the here and now. The game changer is to outsource to the best hands around instead of depending on the internal source. Or, trying to engage influencers on your own which is not as effective as working with a crowdfunding influencer network.

5. Prompt responses.

Marketing has gone customer-centric and any business that wants to effectively compete must do everything to satisfy the customer. The speed with which you attend to their pain points determines every other thing.  A good marketing support agency must staff full-time team members around the world in multiple time zones that speak multiple languages to be able to respond within just one minute.

Investors and community members want to be quickly responded to; it minimizes fear, doubt, and uncertainty (FUD). Your company aim here is to stop spam, get community members engaged, and provide immediate responses to your team. An investors view fast responses as a measure of the level of commitment the team has about their project.

6. Accredited investors.

Crowdfunding platforms must not only ensure that you’re funded by investors but also ascertains that they are accredited. Accredited investors are a special class of investors who are able to access investments that regular investors can not. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) permits companies and private funds who sell assets to accredited investors to skip the need to register certain investments.  When you sell to accredited investors, you are exempted from registering any securities with the SEC under rules 505 and 506 of Regulation D.

No government agency or independent body review an investor’s credentials, and no certification exam or piece of paper exists that states a person has become an accredited investor. What it boils down to is how you determine a potential investor’s status by conducting due diligence prior to your sale.

7. Build your reputation.

Around 40% of a public company’s market performance can be attributed to non-financial factors associated with its corporate reputation. These can also be individualistic properties according to analysis. “A corporate reputation is the overall estimation in which an organization is held by its internal and external stakeholders based on its past actions and probability of its future behavior.” This statement according to a leading international expert Charles Fombrun, former research professor of management at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and founder of the Reputation Institute.

Experience is based on a person’s past dealings with your organization while the other is purely the extent and nature of people’s direct and indirect communication with you. The reputation built by certain investors over the years stands helps a marketing agency stand out among its peers.

When you strive to enhance your reputation by being genuine to your goal, the outcome is that people will eventually learn about your project.

8. Good relationship.

If a solid relationship exists between a crowdfunding platform, the investors and businesses, a route for constant feedbacks will be established. Growth may not always be the answer. Companies that utilize supergrowth techniques are having a difficult time managing their groups after saturation. Sometimes they provide bad answers or simply ignore their now large community. A good relationship ensures that customers have the opportunity to be heard and they, in turn, provide valuable feedback for brands in areas that might need to be tweaked.

9. Expertise.

The need for expertise for a marketing support agency cannot be over emphasized. A competent team has to work on many startup projects and have years of crowdfunding experience to have an expertise. It also can help you if the marketing support agency you pick can work with some of the largest blockchain and enterprises companies in the world. Find out if they’re connected to the most influential people in Blockchain.

They travel to the largest crypto conferences in the world and have networked with thought leaders like Charlie Lee, the Founder of Litecoin, Joseph Lubin, Co-Founder of Ethereum, and, Tim Draper, the biggest Bitcoin Whale VC Investor. Get connected to a team with clients on other channels globally, and to countries in many languages. Find a company with a billion views, not just millions if you can — and expertise that can provide you with geo-specific targeting.

10. Data-driven approach.

In this age of big data, any corporation that wants to excel must adopt a data-driven approach to execute projects successfully. Ivan Kan says to focus on being data-driven in every project.

To be data-driven you must ensure that:

• Test design and analysis are overseen by analytics/data science teams.
• Dashboards are already in place to give stakeholders self-serve access to key metrics. (Otherwise, you’ll have low-value ad-hoc requests to pull these metrics, and it’ll be a time sink.)
• Analytics/Data Science teams collaborate with the business to understand the problem and devise an appropriate methodology.
• There are data governance and consistent usage of data definitions across departments in the organization.
• You have an unassailable data strategy.

The post 10 Things Teaching Us About Running Successful Crowdfunding Campaigns appeared first on ReadWrite.

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Segun Onibalusi

Founder & CEO

Segun Onibalusi is the Founder and CEO at SEO POW, an Organic link building and content marketing agency. When he’s not learning something new about link earning and his industry you’ll find him planning his next trip. You can reach out to him via email at segun@seopow.net.

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