4 Tips on How to Do Kickstarter Marketing ft. Eric Chen

Sharon Tseung 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income become financially free and design the best lives. Hey, guys, so I’m here with Eric Chen, head of growth at start pad. And we are going to talk about four different methods for marketing your Kickstarter launch. So the first one we’re going to talk about is pr,

Eric Chen 0:27
pr is actually a very key component for your Kickstarter campaign. And the reason being is because the social validation of having something to say like, you know, Forbes, on your campaign, or TechCrunch, or Associated Press talking about or giving you a quote for your campaign gives that social validation for your campaign already. And so that’s really important. Pr in itself isn’t going to give you a like a direct correlation, it has the possibility to blow up your campaign. But you also have to, you know, really figure out your investment into the into PR, and what you’re trying to get out of it.

Sharon Tseung 1:06
If it’s someone who wants to launch a product, doesn’t really have too much money, would you recommend them going to these different sites and trying to reach out to these people and get press around it? Or do you recommend getting more money and then investing in a PR

Eric Chen 1:21
firm, for most people, if they’re launching a Kickstarter campaign, and you’re running it by yourself, or it’s a very small team trying to save money, you just have to really decide, do you have the time bandwidth to be reaching out to all of these publications sites right? Now, you’d imagine a lot of these companies, you know, get inquiries all the time, look at my product, check out my product feature my product, right. And so you’re just, you know, one person out of thousands of emails that they get every single day. And so, for you to go out there, you know, go and source all these emails, and, you know, blast them and figure out where we should be reaching out to you, that takes a lot, a lot of time. So something that people don’t realize is that PR firms exist for a reason. And, you know, most people can claim that they do PR, but they’re doing that exact same thing. They’re the ones just emailing for you trying to contact them reach out to these media sites. But the really good ones and the reason why they exist, it’s because they’ve been in the business for a long time, they have a close relationship with these media sites. And so that’s really what you’re paying for your, you’re paying for the time saved, and the connections that they already have. So you want to make sure you know, when you do talk to these PR firms that the they are very confident that they can get you in because maybe, you know, the person working at TechCrunch was there, you know, college roommate or something, right, and they have a very close relationship. Otherwise, they’ll just be doing standard reach out, which you could then evaluate, is it worth, you know, your time is based on how much they owe you? I mean, it ranges right, you can go for PR firms that will charge you $500 a month or $10,000 a month, it just really, really depends on like, you know, your appetite for the risk or even knowing what you’re trying to get out of it. Okay,

Sharon Tseung 3:11
next, we want to talk about SEO. So I am curious if SEO matters with Kickstarter, or people actually searching within Kickstarter campaigns, or are they coming externally through? I don’t know, links and stuff like that. So does it really matter to try to rank

Eric Chen 3:27
I would say that there won’t be too much people looking for very specific projects on Kickstarter. But they might discover your your project through that, but what you want to be able to do or make sure is that you’re driving traffic to your Kickstarter campaign, your external traffic, maybe like Facebook ads for it.

Sharon Tseung 3:47
Yeah. And then I wanted to talk more about Facebook ads. And I remember you had told me before that the time frame that you kind of like launch, and then get those conversions, or backers actually matters a lot, right. So a couple of more.

Eric Chen 4:04
Yeah. So you know, if you’re going to launch campaign is really important to try to achieve your goal as soon as possible. And it’s usually done within 24 to 48 hours. And a lot of us like perks that you can get from Kickstarter themselves is you being able to achieve that goal as quick as possible, because they’ll look and track what your velocity is. And you know, if you’re able to hit $100,000, on a 10% goal and 1,000%, you know, the cheating that right? And so what you want to do is get that as soon as possible within 2448 hours, right? Because Kickstarter will then you know, put you up on their own landing page of, you know, trending projects or campaigns on their own site. And so that’s extra free traffic that you can get if you can achieve that. But what’s really cool is that you can actually take that momentum, and run ads and talk about, you know, see why this project got funded in, you know, 24 hours, was able to achieve, you know, 542% within 48 hours or something like that. Right? And that gives a lot of people looking at these ads, some curiosity into like a while Yeah, what is this that people are, you know, super excited about, right? No one really wants to be that the first person to the party mean that no one wants to be that person backing up a non fact product? Yeah, right. So the most important thing is like, if people come and see that there’s a project already backed already fulfilled, they don’t want to miss out, right? Because the incentives that you get from, you know, risking your money to back a project usually is going to be the best deal that you can get. Usually companies and people who run Kickstarter, you should be incentivizing your consumers, like 40% off for your product today, and that this is a deal that no one you no one else can get once your product gets out to market.

Sharon Tseung 6:01
Okay, so in the Facebook ad, you would talk about the success of the campaign as well as you know, the discount, or is that happening in Facebook?

Eric Chen 6:11
I mean, then Kickstarter already have, like the packages that are perks that you’re already offering, which could be a heavily discounted thing, Okay, got it. So, you could you could structure it in a way where you know, only the first 50 people get it for like, 60% off, next hundred people get it for 50% off. So then that way, when the first people, you know, who are, you know, the trendsetters, they go and they go buy it. So by the time the third round of people go in, for their 50 or 40% off, there’s already people who’ve already backed it up by thousands of dollars.

Sharon Tseung 6:43
Okay. And then it sounds like the SEO strategy basically, is using other marketing methods to get the amount of backers you need within a specific time frame. So then you can rank really hard and Kickstarter. Okay, cool. And then the last thing I wanted to talk about is kind of our bootstrapping map is where, if you don’t have any money, like, what’s the best way to say?

Eric Chen 7:05
I mean, if if you’re going to Kickstarter, I mean, and this is the reason why Kickstarter exists, right? It’s for people who are trying to launch an idea or product or project without money, right, and they’re looking to be community, or people within the same interest to help fund that project. If you don’t have that money. Some thing that a lot of people are, you know, this person who’s trying to launch this campaign, you know, might be too scared to do is actually reach out to all of your contacts, people that you have not talked to in years and years, right. So for instance, if I have my Facebook, I have, say, 20 2200 connections, right. And if I’m launching my own Kickstarter campaign, and I will message all 2200 people on my Facebook, right, because if you just make a public post, Hey, guys, I launch a you know, Kickstarter campaign, you know, based on Facebook’s algorithm, maybe only 300, people will see that almost out of the 2200. Right. And so what you want to do is, you know, if you have a small team, maybe it’s you mean to other people, and each of us has 500 to 1000 connections, everyone should be on board to basically harass their friends, right, reach out to the random person that you became friends with on Facebook and say, you know, let them know that even before you launch that you are launching a campaign to kind of warm up, right? And then you know, you could restart some conversation with these people, they might find it interesting, they may be able to share it with their, with their friends and their connections to and then on the day of launch, literally, you know, the night before the day, it’s Hey, guys, you know, we launch our campaign, check it out, here it is, and just drive as much traffic as possible. And then tell them really yet to give them a call to action, tell them to share with their friends or please send it to someone you think might be interested in my product and reach out to all 22 2200 people right and that’s it could be scary it is you’re reaching out to people that you haven’t talked to in years right you know, I come off as like a multi level marketing schemers like hey, let’s catch up and get you know, have coffee or lunch and then all sudden they’re trying to you know sell you on selling knives or something. Right. But no, it’s it’s a product that you know, if you’re going to be launching a Kickstarter campaign, it’s something you should be proud of. So you shouldn’t feel ashamed to be reaching out to everybody. Yeah.

Sharon Tseung 9:19
Yeah, those are great tips because I never personally launched on Kickstarter. But yeah, this helped me a lot. I hope this helped you guys as well. So that was a video on four tips for launching your Kickstarter launch. Good luck. So hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai