How to Get Massive Kickstarter Backers from Influencers Marketing

Regardless of the stages that your campaign is in, be it the planning stage, halfway through the campaign, or even the post-crowdfunding stage. We can all agree that launching a successful campaign is super hard by itself. The biggest hurdle of it all is marketing your project and getting the visibility it needed to drive backers in.

It is in all creators’ dreams to see their Kickstarter campaign getting fully funded and more.

What if you could achieve all that by having a crew of your own dedicated influencers promoting your project relentlessly to their loyal followers, where your phone will be constantly beeping from all the social media notifications of people commenting and sending messages interested in the project.

Have you ever wondered what happens to all the successful projects after their crowd-funding stage?

What if you can have a massive followers count that is highly interested in your product right off the bat, the moment your campaign gets fully funded. Literally having potential customers peeking at your ‘shop front’ wanting to know more about your product.

In this article, we’ll lay down all the precise exact steps you need to take your project from zero onto the spotlight of interested followers and get yourself a crew of enthusiastic influencers ready to work in your campaign without a single penny. Sounds too good to be true? Nope! You’re just steps away from making this level of success a reality.

If you are a creator or a part of a team that launched or is launching a great project deserving the booming attention of the marketplace, I urge you to read what I am about to say carefully.

Before we jump straight into the fire, let’s understand the problems that every crowdfunding creator is facing; unlike many others had said, crowdfunding is a complex alternative to raising funds to grow your business and it has problems at every step of the way that accumulates and eventually will impact the result of your campaign.

How many campaigns have failed through their Kickstarter journey?

Staggering 64% of all campaigns failed to achieve their goal and it all boils down to one problem, getting backers to support their project. To top it all off, creators on Kickstarter are expected to provide a working product prototype before their project is even approved!

Could you imagine all that hard work savings collected through the years spent on designing and building your product prototypes only to have your campaign be called into the statistic of 64% failures?

So how do we get backers? It’s a literal loop cycle of a nightmare. To get backers to support their project, first, they need marketing, but the problem itself circulates back to the core. In order to do marketing, you need to have the strong financial backing to afford a reasonable allocation of funds to execute marketing. How is it possible that they are forced to fork out money that they didn’t have to begin with? Or else why would anyone use crowdfunding if they already had sufficient funds right!

Now creators are presented with only two options:

1. Take a risky loan or borrow money from their peers, in hope that it will pay off in a form of a positive return of investment

2. Another option is to go penny-pinching and run the full marketing efforts yourself.

Surely again the first option is simply not viable. Why? If anyone can or would take the risk of borrowing money from anyone, they wouldn’t need to use crowdfunding to raise funds. So what about the second later option?

Well, how many people are an expert in marketing and have proven a positive ROI skillset? I say not many and most likely the majority of creators are also not one of them.

Definitely, creators could try to market the product themselves, but it would take a lot of time promoting, learning the steep curve of trial-error, and not forgetting the risk that it would not turn out the way you expect it to be.

How many times have you been told, marketing is super costly. You could engage professionals but they easily ranged in the $10,000 to $ 20,000 minimum. What if you can actually do the marketing yourself without the need of a professional and all while having zero knowledge on the given topic. What if you can have a full marketing effort with 0 penny in the total cost?

Well, the truth is, Yes it is possible.

Anything can be learned if you are given the right step by an experienced person that lays out the steps for you in detail. You may not be able to bake a pizza today but if an experienced chef tells you the precise step-by-step details on how to bake a delicious pizza, could you replicate his pizza? Definitely! With at least 70-80% accuracy.

The world we are living in today is changing rapidly, technology is powerful and almost can be accessed by all with $0 in the fee. Our social dynamic has also changed, how many people are now watching TV? I say not as much. But how many people have a phone and social media? Almost everyone.

Now I would like to ask you, what’s your thought on influencers? Perhaps someone with huge followings and maybe a little arrogant and doesn’t really want to care so much about normal people like us. Well yes, probably it was the case two decades ago!

The world we are living in now is more connected than ever, every day you see new “stars” and new “influencers” born with the power of social media.

So you must be thinking, what does it have to do with me as a creator on a crowdfunding platform!

Hear me out, unlike the olden times where influencers are managed by money-hungry sharks managers trying to eat your precious dollars just to engage these influencers. Yes, they still do.

However, today with the power of social media, there is a new class of influencers that operates solo and you no longer have to deal with these sharks! By now you must be starting to catch up with where I am going with this.

What if all your worries of campaign and marketing can be solved with just one word.

Influencers! That’s about it.

You do not need PHDs and Master's in Marketing, nor do you need to have work experience as a marketing director to make your crowdfunding campaign a success. All you need is a gang of your own dedicated and highly enthusiastic influencers ready to promote your project for 0 penny.

I want that! How do I go about it? So now you’re wondering and full of uncertainty, “I don't know how to make a deal with them?" would they be interested in my offer? Who should I be targeting? Would it be very expensive? “

Worry not, in these steps below. We’ll go through how you can have your own press-release articles on your project to get massive leverage and bring in influencers to promote your project and finally get that sweet backers' support into your crowdfunding campaign.

So let’s go through the important key points to make that happen!

Firstly, the press-release article.

A press release is a form of an article consisting of generic information about an interesting upcoming event. This can be a new product launch, a piece of viral news, or a new business launch.

Every business needs one and you do too regardless if you’re still in the preparation stage about to launch or halfway through the campaign or even post-funding campaign.

It is an indicative element that shows your campaign is great. It is the difference between another bad campaign with 10 backers or a booming campaign with at least 100-200 backers that blows the statistic out of the chart.

It may sound superficial but let me ask you a simple psychological question. If you see a person wearing shorts with slippers and messy hair, as compared to someone wearing dark navy suits with a red tie and gorgeous sleek hair. Who would most likely grab attention and highly correlate successful energy? I think it’s pretty obvious that the answer is a guy with suits.

Just like that, we want your campaign to have that kind of presentation as well to show everyone that you are not just anybody and your campaign deserves the media attention.

You’re a creator, not a writer or journalist, and are not sure how to write your own press release. Perhaps you are worried that the article that you crafted will be too long that it annoys the journalists or even too short that it doesn’t convey the right sufficient information.

Would journalists even want to deal with crowdfunding creators? Didn’t they require a huge sum of money to publish your work? You’re pretty sure that journalists receive hundreds of emails every week requesting a free publication and why would you be any special this time.

Yes, in fact, it is true.

Journalists are super busy with countless people asking for publication and most of the time you can only guarantee a publication by paying. It costs $1000-2000 to get your article published by popular blogs and upward of $5000-$10,000 for authoritative names. And if you are asking for free publication, it is more than likely, your email will end up in a spam folder, get buried, or even be deleted.

No! We refuse to fork out such ridiculous amounts just for a 500 words article that can’t even guarantee any returns. There’s some way to bypass this system of theirs.

Firstly I want you to think about these blogs and journalists' day-to-day job responsibilities. They are a platform that provides news, one way or another, they will still have to post content every day and you want to ride that bandwagon of free content publication.

Now understand that these journalists are also human and they’re not going to go out of their way to find newsworthy content. In fact a lot of the time, they just camp on certain sites and repost contents that are available there.

So what does it mean for you? Simple! You have to appear everywhere on free platforms and get yourself just into a few ‘popular’ blogs to get noticed.

To begin with, it can be as simple as posting your project on prominent places such as Reddit under business/innovation/startup and related topics, as well as posting your projects on free community-based blogs and groups. Crazy right? Who would have thought these editors just sit around sipping coffee and scrolling through Reddit's comments?

If you’re lucky enough to get picked up by these editors and published in relatively popular blogs. Your visibility has just been drastically improved. Now your project story is most likely to get picked up again by other blog editors. The cycle repeats, the more visibility you get, the easier it gets.

Another way to do this is ‘forcefully’ submitting your press release article through their blogs by submitting a tip. This is hard work and purely a numbers game.

By the basis of the Pareto principle of 80/20. If you submitted 200 of your press releases into different blogs. Chances are, 80% of that submission will not be seen and another 20% will be seen, that will be around 40 journalists looking at your article.

Out of that 40 journalists, 80% couldn’t care less about your campaign and only 20% will reply to you indicating their interest to know more, that is about 8 journalists interested to know more about your project. Surely the number varies according to industry standard and who you’re contacting, but that gives you a rough idea of the amount of hard work in order to get a free publication.

So how should you craft your press release to boost your chances of getting published?

Remember you are not paying them one penny so don’t expect them to ‘serve’ you. Instead, you have to ‘request’ them to perhaps write about your project.

In general, your press release should consist of 4 main components:

Attractive titles, Your General Info, Core of Publication, and Contact Information.

Attractive titles, who doesn’t love an eye-catching title. What are the chances of you turning your head down the street if you see a flashy sports car in red passing by versus a pickup truck in dull grey? Obvious right.

This is probably the one, if not the most crucial part of your press-release request. If you have a bad title, chances are, you’re not getting any email clicks.

For example, let’s review these two titles of an imaginary product: you’re selling a revolutionary dog leash that can loosen up itself if it senses your dog getting a little choked on the neck.

Title A:

New dog leash just invented and now available on Kickstarter

Title B;

This robotic revolutionary dog-leash won’t choke your dog anymore!

Which one catches your attention and makes you want to click it? Pretty obvious right!

Title A is not wrong but it just doesn’t build up excitement and anticipation upon clicking it.

Title B has the wow factor which is ‘robotic revolutionary‘ and the active factor which is the ‘choke‘.

For opening requests. In a nutshell, it is time to plead without sounding like a beggar.

Share your story as a founder of the project and subtly ask to get media coverage. It can sound something like this:

Hello XXXXX Team

I’m Albert, I would like to share my story on how we founded this revolutionary dog leash. I’m a dog owner myself and to say the least, my dog is super active and loves to take charge and run even while leashed up. Each time after taking my dog for a walk, I noticed that he seemed breathless and there was a leash marking on the neck. As a dog parent, that got me thinking, I can solve this problem! That’s where we created a robotic leash!

Notice how the message is short, addresses the problem, solution and conveys emotion. It shows that you’re a genuine person who has the first-hand experience in a given product, which commands expertise in the email. The key is to share about yourself and the product without being too formal and draggy.

As for the core of your publication, it should be straightforward, you just list the core features of your products, keep it short. And talk about where it would be available and at which price points. So it should look something like this:

Our latest dog leash is revolutionary in that it incorporates a robotic mechanism that is able to sense when our dog seems breathless or increases pressure in the dog leash. It can tighten and loosen. It's leashed to the precise few millimeters just to keep your dog happy and not too much that it gives you a headache when your dog runs away with a loose leash.

The leash is called BioLeash and will be available on Kickstarter this coming Friday at 8 AM EST, with a starting price of only USD 140.

For the last point! Remember to always include your full contact information. You don’t want to help an interested lead just to have them going back and forth about your information. It should look something like this:

Contact: Albert ( Founder )

Email: BioLeash@Bioleash.com

Website: BioleashDoggy.com

Phone: +00 000000000

So how should it look all together?

--- This robotic revolutionary dog-leash won’t choke your dog anymore! ---

Hello XXXXX Team

The leash is called BioLeash and will be available on Kickstarter this coming Friday at 8 AM EST, with a starting price of only USD 140.

Contact: Albert ( Founder )

Email: BioLeash@Bioleash.com

Website: BioleashDoggy.com

Phone: +00 000000000

Although all the information, company, the product above is fictional, take a look at how compact and precise this press-release request is. This is the arrangement and standard that you’re looking for when sending in your press release.

The press release is an important element of success to your campaign, however, it is not the mother of all crowdfunding success. Remember, it is just a tool that we leverage to show ourselves as an authoritative figure in the industry, which can help us down the line when dealing with influencers, which will be covered in the next part.

If you’re not able to get any media coverage, it does not matter. Some products do not fit the criteria for media coverage and I assure you that it is totally fine. Regardless you can still get a booming campaign with the influencers marketing that we’re going to talk about shortly.

Finally the main juice of marketing effort! Your gang of dedicated influencers.

So what is influencer marketing exactly?

Influencer marketing is where you promote your product or campaign by getting some help from important individuals with a certain degree of authority in their given communities. They take your product, talk about it, review and post them up, these can come in the form of Instagram feed and stories or Twitter quote retweets.

These actions although simple, create a hype that accumulates build up within the community and help your brand get backers into your campaign

If that was the case then why is influencer marketing a better choice?

In general, influencer marketing is a way more powerful marketing method in 3 key distinct points;

You can reach people who truly matters to you, namely your intended target audience
You can build relationships with authoritative figures in your communities
Your outreach has the backing of social proof and credibility

Unlike other marketing methods such as targeted ads, it ran by selecting certain demographics characteristics, the problem with this, you tend to get people who have a bare interest in a given topic.

The Facebook algorithm works by pushing everyone to your ads regardless of their interest level in a given topic. Person A and person B may like coffee, but person A is rarely a coffee drinker while person B is a big fan of all types of coffee. Facebook cannot recognize and sort people based on their interest level.

With influencer marketing, although not perfect, you can narrow down your target degree of interest by picking a certain influencer that has a higher likelihood of followers with high interest in a given topic and leveraged on bigger outreach of social media.

For example, if you target people who are interested in coffee on Facebook. The algorithm will list everyone who has interacted with anything related to coffee, be it a comment, like, or watching 3 seconds of the coffee clip. Is this good? No! You're targeting people who are barely interested in coffee.

But one post by an authoritative figure of the coffee industry would easily reach hundreds if not thousands of coffee drinkers who have a decent level of coffee interest.

You can build relationships with authoritative figures in your communities

Let me ask you, what is the foundation of all business? Relationship and connections.

Crowdfunding is just an early stage of your business, not the final stage. I'm sure you want your product and business to survive the ruthless marketplace in the future and establish its presence.

Ask yourself, do you want your product to sell well and continue to grow as a prospering business after your crowdfunding stage?

It is only logical that the answer is an absolute yes.

Then you need to build relationships with important people in your related communities.

With influencer marketing, you get the perks of getting backers and at the same time get to build relationships with people to accelerate your business growth post-crowdfunding stage.

Your outreach has the backing of social proof and credibility

Let me ask you a simple question, would you trust a nobody or someone with strong credibility? No brainer question right, anyone would say someone with strong credibility.

In a simple example, influencer marketing would be:

If a well-known executive chef recommends you to have your dinner at this specific restaurant versus your barber recommending you to have your dinner there.

Who would have likely made you eat there? Executive Chef.

Compared it to direct advertising via Facebook would be:

A restaurant promoting their dinner service to you via online ads post at random hours of the day.

What emotion does it convey? Spammy and annoying right? No one wants to be sold, especially with direct ads.

So which marketing method will most likely get traction? Simple, the chef from influencer marketing.

It is an absolute logic because people tend to trust and buy things from individuals they know or at least have a strong influence in their communities.

Human is an emotional and community-based species, we trust in products that are being recommended by important people.

A simple example would be: have you gone to a celebrity chef restaurant to eat a simple pasta and got charged $200 for a simple dinner. Did you see anyone complaining about the price? No.

Now go to a local restaurant down the street, have pasta, and you get charged $200 in the bill. Would you hear people complaining? Most likely.

This shows the power of influence that people with authority boost have on the value of your product, thus helping you justify the high price tag of certain products.

Also by having these people talk and promote your project, builds the necessary social proofs, increases visibility, and eventually brings sales to your campaign.

In a nutshell, influencer marketing is the most underrated marketing method that is being used in crowdfunding, its power extends beyond crowdfunding and into the core of the business itself. If you aren’t getting into then you are missing out on the potential backers and prospective growth coming in from them.

So how does it exactly drive your backers to your campaign?

All that sounds exciting right, getting backers all while growing your business and getting credible endorsements. But the main question remains, how can we push backers into your campaign.

From our past experiences working in crowdfunding campaigns, influencer marketing has never disappointed me. To a certain extent, it always brings backers into a campaign.

To understand how it works, we need to go back to the foundation of influencer marketing.

It is getting ‘famous’ people to talk about your product and reach thousands of people in a short period. Given the correct execution, it can build up an instant illusion of hype.

When hype occurs, people will talk about your product ORGANICALLY, it can come in a form of sharing your product via IG Story, retweet or even talking about it via word of mouth.

That’s when you notice backers are coming in from random Kickstarter referral tags, sometimes they have categorized under ‘’search’’, ‘’ external referral of unknown source ‘’ or even custom referral tag.

And guess what, the best thing about influencer marketing is just yet to come!

When they are done and stopped promoting your product, the sales don’t just stop there unlike ordinary advertising.

You now have a loyal following that is interested in your product at present and possible future.

Not only did you get backers in your campaign but you also got to build your brand to run your business in the coming future! A win-win situation.

So now you’re wondering, how do I get these people to promote me?

You're now full of uncertainty, “I don't know how to make a deal with them?, would they be interested in my offer? Who should I be targeting? Would it be very expensive? “

Worry not we’ll go through the important key points needed to find yourself a group of highly enthusiastic and motivated influencers to promote your successful campaign. So let’s begin:

1.Your product is your selling point!

I want you to sit down and identify who is your ideal buyer. Is it a dog owner? It an enthusiastic adventurer? Is it a working housewife? Maybe an avid yoga person?

This is where it gets interesting! Once you have identified your ideal buyer, put yourself in their shoes. Imagine yourself as them.

Where would you hang out daily? What kind of pages or person would you look up into?

For example, an innovative pet feeding bowl belongs to people who have pets such as dogs or cats. These people frequently visit or interact with influential cute pet pages and individuals who have pets.

Another example, if you are selling a high-tech water bottle that’s scratch-resistant and unbreakable. Your target audience is people who are adventurous and need a water bottle that can be relied on during critical times.

The steps above should be easy, as the creator of your product, you should know who the target audience is and who will likely buy your product.

2.List key points related to your product

What do I mean by key points? It is not the features of your product. But general keywords, you have identified earlier that the target audience would engage in.

Using example earlier, a pet owner key words would be, #dog #frenchbulldog #cutepuppies #cat #goldenretriever, and so on

Adventurer keywords would be #adventure #hiking #camping and so on, basically activities that a hardcore adventurer would be involved in.

Remember, you have to do your homework and dig a little deeper. Certain industries have some major players that are often used as hashtags in popular posts from influential people.

For example in the board game category, logically it would be #boardgame #partygame

Dig a little deeper, you will notice a trend of #BGG or #boardgamegeek. They are a company specialized in board games so influential people tend to tag them.

Your main task at this stage is to gather a few major keywords, the more you have, the better it is. So now you are wondering, what is the point of having these many keywords when we only need some of them. The answer is you want keywords that have strong relevance and popularity.

After you gather at least 20-30 keywords, you can simply type them out in the Instagram search bar and it will indicate how many posts are there in that given keyword. I want you to repeat the same process and list out 10-15 of the most popular keywords from your list.

Out of those 15 popular keywords, select 5 keywords that you think have the highest relevance to your product.

As you are doing it manually, I urge you to take your time to do this properly because the inferior hashtag will affect the quality of the result down the line.

Take note of the detailed difference in your chosen industry. For example, pets are a super broad category, if you are selling a dog’s bowl, you don’t want to target a cat-related profile. Both of them fall under the same category but a totally different types of people.

3.Search up your influencers

Now, this is a manual and labor-intensive method. For us, we use our proprietary software to list influencers based on interest and keywords.

However, for you, you could do the same but it is just going to take a little more hard work.

Use your previously identified keywords and search them on Instagram, click on the recent pictures.

Scroll around and spend some time checking the profiles who posted these pictures and get the hang of the targeted communities.

Once you get the hang of it. I want you to start tracking the people you identified.

Copy and paste their social media handle on your notes, office words, or excel, doesn’t matter.

Repeat the process x100 x200 x500 times, as many times as you like until you have a strong enough list of influencers who you could potentially engage and get them to promote you.

Remember you only want quality people, not quantity. Bad quality influencer leads will waste your resources and your precious time. If you are selling a dog's feeding bowl, It is better to reach 10,000 dog owner-parents rather than 100,000 fish owners.

As a rule of thumb, target people who have < 10,000 followers. The higher it gets, the harder for them to promote for you. From my experience, 5000-20,000 followers are the sweet spot that you are looking for.

However, the strongest key indication to show that a profile will be worth your time is their likes and comment counts. a 10,000 followers page with 500 likes and 100 comments is a clear winner, as compared to 20,000 followers with only 400 likes and 20 comments.

Not to mention, people with higher followers count tend to charge neck-cutting deals, so it is easier to deal with people with lesser follower counts.

4.Time to get creative and friendly

At this stage, you should already have a strong list of influencers that are specifically handpicked for your niche ready to go somewhere. We do not want to message individuals who are not related to your target audience.

As a key rule, do not message more than 50 people/day, you do not want to get shadowbanned by Instagram, so plan out your messages properly.

This stage would feel very demoralizing, as a lot of influencers will ignore your message or do not show interest in your product, I would like to remind you that you have to press on and continue the hard work. If you follow my script template below, your response rate will be between 10-30% depending on your list and product quality.

You do not want to sound like an Instagram bot, spamming people and pleading for help. So I urge you to follow these steps:

Copy-paste their IG handle to your search bar
Follow them and like some pictures of theirs
Wait a few hours or 1-2 days before messaging them.
Message them with a friendly opening without sounding too pushy

In general, you want to have 4 components: opening, your deal, the incentive of your deals, and the final question.

Your message script should sound something like this:

“ Hey dude!

Came across your content, it was shown in my feature tab. Really love your dog! I have a 3 years old Frenchie too :))

I created a product that is meant for dogs of our size! Specifically Frenchie dogs! :)

Just wondering if you would be interested to collaborate with us.

No worry, you don't have to spend anything! I would send it to you for free to keep for your dog

Let me know if you are interested! I would send you details about it “

Or it could be more personalized, like this

“ Hello *their name*

Just followed you! Cute dog post :))

I’m *your name*, we created a product that is meant for a dog like yours! I would like to propose this collaboration deal just for you

Our product is called *describe your product in short sentence*

Would like to collaborate with us? We can send you some of the products for you to keep! Do not worry, you don't have to pay anything :) “

Remember, your main goal now is to get them to be interested. Once they are hooked on your product, you can then decide if you still want to work or not work with them.

Ultimately, you are in the crowdfunding stage and product prototypes are your precious assets, it is only logical that you want it to go to people who can contribute in the long run.

Build relations and trust, interact with them regularly. You want their support even after your crowdfunding campaign is successful. In the end, you are running a business, not a one-time hit-run product. So you will need community support from people like them.

5.Craft and schedule the deal

At this point, you have already secured the influencer and you have to play your cards right. So time to get creative and work with what you have.

Ask yourself, what you are willing to give out in return for their endorsement. This can be as simple as giving them money, giving them the product, or a mix of both.

We want to aim to give them our product and if they are not that interested, offer them both monetary and product reward. This will help you get more exposure because they will feel obliged to post more about your product. Using monetary reward is simple and efficient but for most cases, you only get what you paid for, not more.

Once you have decided what you’re willing to give in return for their endorsement, always take charge and plan out for them. Do not expect influencers to take the initiative for you.

Usually, the deal-through rate is about 30-40% of people who have shown interest. So if you messaged 1000 people and 200 replied, 30-40% of that 200 people will most likely agree, given that how you phrase your message and deal is aligned.

Your message about the deal should sound something like this:

“Thanks for the interest :) super excited that you’re interested in our product

Anyway for the deal, we’ll be giving you our product, free of charge and no worries, shipping is on us :)

What do you think :D “

This will be a complicated task due to the high frequency of messages coming in and out of your inbox, but take your time to plan out their ‘ shout out or promotion days ‘

Remember you will be messaging 500-1000 influencers, so you will be having possibly 50-100 influencers dealing with you. Plan out what they will be doing for you and pick the date for them to ‘ shout out ‘ for your product.

It can look something like this, either in words or excel:

DAY 1: Influencer A B C D posts 1 story and 1 feed

DAY 2: influencers B C F G post 2 stories

DAY 3: Influencers G H I J post 1 story and 1 feed

And so on

Do not forget that your target audience is not robots, do not expect your influencers to push traffic towards your page, only to realize that your page is empty or a dead town. Make sure your page has sufficient content and has recent interesting updates.

You also need to have some system in place where you can tick off a certain work that the influencers have done as agreed, so you can monitor and keep track of everything.

This management system is done automatically by our in-house logging system, but if you are doing it manually, just be precise and make sure you logged the right things.

6.Ship your product's prototype or samples

Once you have gathered all the deal details from all respective influencers, ship their sample to their allocated address. I recommend you to use a shipping provider that you are familiar with or has an indication tab that lets you know when the shipment is going to arrive.

Some of the influencers are going to be located far from you, so you have to make sure that the product can arrive on time before the intended promotion date.

You do not want to be sending your sample via international standard shipping which takes 2-3 weeks only to have a promotion deal that is due next week. So always make sure that your shipping deadline is aligned with your promotion deal or campaign timeline.

But what if you decide to only have mass production after the campaign succeeds due to the high cost of upfront mass manufacturing? Not a problem!

We all understand that startups in the crowdfunding stage are tight financially most of the time, so to have a mass manufacturing unit ready to go is not possible.

You just have to recraft your message and let them know that the offer on the free product will only be given after the campaign has launched and succeeded. Of course, this offer is less enticing compared to others, but if you are tight between these limitations then this is an option to be considered.

Usually, if you were to offer the product after the campaign succeeded, your deal-through rate will drop by 50%.

However, if you insist on using this option. You have to restructure most of your deal.

In this case, you have to provide a Google drive link containing your media kit so these influencers can use your pre-made content to promote your product.

Once your campaign succeeds, immediately send the product to them. It is easy to forget about sending the product but I urge you that it is a must. You do not want to spoil your reputation with them, after all, they have been in the community longer than you.

7.Execute the promotion deals

Remember as said earlier, these influencers do not owe anything to you. As the creator of your product, you have to hold yourself accountable for the action of your fellow influencers.

In general, you want to squeeze your promotion deal as much as possible within the shortest time. Two weeks of big hype attention is better than prolonged weak attention.

If you recall, people buy out of familiarity, if they see your products nonstop from important people and friends in two weeks, chances are they will be curious and check out what is the fuss about, eventually converting to become your backer and loyal followers.

After you have arranged their deal and time of promotions, you have to remind them about it. Sometimes they do forget about it and in the worst-case scenario, they backed out at the last minute.

When these bad circumstances happen, remain calm and do not get emotional, it is part of human interaction in making a deal. The deal goes through and breakdown halfway, nothing special about it.

Simply thank them for the opportunity and let them know that you will be willing to work with them again in the future, you’ll never know if you cross paths again. I have helped numerous campaigns and have influencers break down the deal last minute because they are unsure about product quality and deliverance, only to help again in the short future.

They do not trust you, that’s the problem.

But you can’t gain trust without having people trusting you first. So keep them by your side, I can assure you that in the future, they’ll be willing to help you out again once you have shown yourself as a legitimate product.

During this period of the constant bombardment of influencers' posts, you have to be active on your social media. Here are some key points that you should do during this period:

Repost and retweet whatever people post about you, and leave a comment back. It shows that you are active and a legitimate business.
Constantly post out updates be it feed posts, story or tweets. In general, put out 1 feed post per day and 2-3 story posts per day during these promotion periods.
Interact with people in your comment section enthusiastically.
When posting anything, always includes a CTA request. It can be something like ‘ check the campaign in our profile bio ‘ or just ‘ link in bio ‘.

Once the promotion campaign is completed, what usually happens is you’ll have a decent number of loyal followers who have a certain degree of interest in your product. All you have to do is continue to persuade them on it.

8. Punching out contents

So what kind of content should you generate during the promotion period? Can it be any type of content? No.

Your content should be optimized for sales and ‘’ funnel to become a backer ‘’. Sounds awesome, but how do we do it? We’ll go through the core structure to have a content funnel.

In general, there are 4 parts to the content funnel:

Introduction of your product
Teasing of your main product
The core of your main product
CTA request

The introduction of a product is creating content that lets people know about who you are. It usually involves talking about your company, giving them a little background of your work. Do not post too much about these, nobody cares about the company background. We just want it to be there just in case people are curious about your product.

Instead, you want posts that talk about your product, elaborate what is your product in general. Do not go too much in detail just yet. You want to keep the right flow in your post.

Secondly, teasing of your main product. At this stage, you can post pictures of your product. Talk about the generic features of your product, talk about who’s the people that can benefit from these products.

Thirdly, focusing on the core of your product. Here you want to go all out and share more about all the good things and best parts of your product. At this stage, people who are interested in your product should have a rough idea about your campaign. All you have to do is sell them on it.

As a rule of thumb, always post beautiful pictures that catch an eye. No one wants blurry, pushy, and boring pictures.

Some key points in having beautiful pictures are: make sure your picture occupies >50% of the frame, have your picture in the spotlight, and try not to put visual captions inside your picture.

Lastly, always include CTA captions or requests in both your feed and story. You have to guide them to your campaign, or else it’s just going to be a hi and bye scenario.

9. Keep up the relationship and momentum

Once you are done with all the shoutouts and posting from the influencers. Normally, your Instagram will slowly lose momentum, thus it is important to constantly keep uploading content to your social media platform.

Have 1-2 new feed posts every week and occasionally share an Instagram story about your business, interact with your followers by having a giveaway, questionnaires, and such.

At this point, your business has already gained massive social proof and validation from influencers that matter in your niche. You as the creator have to leverage on this and continue to expand and work on your business.

So what you should do once the influencer marketing is over?

Remember that the influencer marketing effect will last for some time, unlike Facebook advertising. You have to make sure that this leftover momentum does not go to waste.

Thank your influencers for working with you, ask for the favor of reposting your feed post, they will gladly help you out if you did your work flawlessly.

Overall these are the steps that are laid out in detail for you to engage influencers and build up your crowdfunding campaign to a very successful hype level. These steps are very powerful if executed in the right order and correctly.

Remember, every industry is different, you’ll have to dig a little deeper and find out what the norms and trends of the industry are and follow them. After all, you are interacting with humans and asking for a favor, you want to be respectful, friendly, and responsive to their questions.

Making sure your campaign becomes a success is a challenging task. But it shouldn’t be something that is deemed impossible. As long as you put the hours and sweat into creating your own ‘’ influencers gang ‘’ you could also have a successful crowdfunding campaign and have a strong loyal follower base right out of the bat the moment you’re fully funded.

By now, it should be very clear that influencer marketing is a key that can make your campaign a success.

If you are still unsure about the strength of it. Let me share a case study of one of the projects that we worked with here at PurelyMarket.

The campaign is called Immortals, it is a unique playing card that incorporates puzzle quests into the cards that can be considered as unique decks. However, the creator of the project; Anthony, is new to the industry of playing cards and he is no authoritative figure in this community.

At this point, the problem should be very clear to you that it is a big issue to sell something that is already supersaturated in the marketplace.

Just simply checking Kickstarter for playing cards, you can tell there are already hundreds of playing cards, maybe a thousand on Kickstarter alone.

So how is it possible that Immortals get successfully funded and become a sensation in the community when the creator is a nobody in the niche?

Influencers, that’s about it.

Anthony engaged us and consulted about the issue he’s facing and understands that the market is oversaturated and was looking for ways to break through that barrier.

So we recommended him one of our packages which generates a 1000 influencers list specially drafted for his project. Anthony let us manage everything from deal-making to handling influencers and he didn’t regret it one bit.

We contacted all 1000 influencers generated on behalf of the immortals' campaign. The response rate is awesome with over 250+ influencers showing interest.

But, there was another hurdle. Immortals just like any product, do not have the upfront capital to mass-manufacture their product at the initial stage.

Just like shared earlier, we recrafted our proposal and offered the product only after the campaign has succeeded.

Due to this limitation, From 250+ initially interested influencers, it drops to around 61 influencers with exposure of 160,000+ enthusiasts.

Don’t get me wrong, 61 influencers is a big catalyst force to make your campaign a success, but only if you can manage it properly.

Due to the constraint of budget, Anthony told us that he didn’t work with anyone else but us.

Without any other type of marketing, we opened the pre-launch page and received over 100+ organic followers interested in backing the campaign.

So we launched and the campaign got fully funded. Unlike many campaigns, it didn’t hit a plateau throughout the campaign due to the constant influx of attention that the influencers are giving out.

In the end, the campaign was a success with more than 400 people registering their interest to support the campaign and closed with 145 backers without a single ad placed on Facebook.

Now, Anthony playing card business is operating outside of Kickstarter with loyal followers constantly interacting with the business.

Not to mention, due to the influx of hot attention, it grabs the eyes of other popular companies in the industry and big dealers, bringing in recognition and additional business for our client.

Key Conclusions

We hope that this article was helpful for you in laying out all the important steps to get your campaign running successfully using powerful influencer marketing.

You now have a powerful recipe of success in your hand! We know that doing all of the above requires tremendous hard work.

It can be too much for you to handle everything yourself, as the creator of an upcoming successful campaign. The great news is you do not have to worry about that. At PurelyMarket, we want the best for your campaign and are eager to work with ambitious creators just like you!

Instead of getting worked up dealing with influencers, We want you to leave all that labour intensive work to us and you can focus as the business owner on making important deals, managing your campaign and making sure your campaign is a success, and ensuring that you can leave the crowdfunding stage as a booming startup!