How to Get Your Kickstarter Campaign Featured
Getting featured for your Kickstarter Campaign is a social proof that you have a solid project. Before we get deep into how to get featured, we want to breakdown the type of '' getting featured '' on Kickstarter means. Receiving a campaign featuring comes in three generic form:
1. Kickstarter Project We Love
2. Featured on News Outlet
3. Endorsement from Influencers
We can all agree that getting featured in any form is a great achievement that any creator dreams of because of the massive exposure we get and possibly can bring hundreds of additional pledges to your campaign. This short guide will give you an overview on how the algorithm works and some tips to get your Kickstarter campaign featured.
Kickstarter Project We Love
Ultimately, the individuals making decisions about who gets to become a Kickstarter “Project We Love” are people, just like you and me. They work for Kickstarter and are tasked with finding cool or interesting projects. But of course as much as these ' individuals ' may want to pick your project, there are certain guideline given by Kickstarter before giving the Project We Love badge to any campaign.
So how do you become a staff pick? These are 7 criteria from Kickstarter Guidelines
Start with a strong idea — and express it clearly
Upload a compelling project image without much text overlay
Put the essential information first
Show your project not just the story
Show your rewards clearly
Focus on your audience
Don’t spam, Kickstarter takes strong action if there's complain about your project
You can check out their full guideline by heading on Kickstarter, Select Kickstarter Support > Creator Question > While your project is Live.
Kickstarter won’t share exactly how their algorithm works. However, from checking out the featured projects, it’s clear that Kickstarter wants to endorse trustworthy and popular campaigns.
They calculate this based on how many pledges a campaign has received divided by how many days it’s been running. So, if a campaign has been running for three days and has zero pledges, then it’s not as likely to be featured as a campaign that’s received 100 pledges on it’s first day.
As a rule of thumb that separate project with high chance of getting featured is that you have to gain massive backers within the first day or often said ' get fully funded within 24 hours '. However, take note that Kickstarter value backers count more than monetary count. So campaign with 100 backers of $1000 is seen more valuable than 20 backers with $10,000.
Featured on News Outlet
Who doesn't like seeing their project on popular blogs and website. It gives creator the validation that their project has meaning and interesting enough to have a special article written for them.
News outlet comes in both major outlets such your mainstream TV media and minor outlet such as digital blogs.
Sadly, it is almost impossible to get featured by major media outlet, unless your project is truly ground-breaking revolutionary. Your goal as crowdfunding creator is to get your campaign recognised by a couple of digital outlets.
So again! How do we get featured on News Outlet? Here's 6 tips that boost your chance
Write down truly unique points that your project has
Craft a short introduction and compelling 'friendly' request about your project
Submit your introduction to numerous blogs under ' submit a tip '
Relevance is the key, submit to only blogs that are related to your campaign
Follow up to journalist that shown interest
Show it off on your campaign
Remember that journalist are not obliged to write about your project. So it is your job to create a short 'press release' request containing all necessary information, in case that they decided to write about you.
To submit your press release request, you can go to any related blogs of your choice and head towards the contact section. Usually there will be emails of journalist that are contact-able or you can just 'submit a tip' directly on their blogs.
If there's journalist that approached and write about your blog, remember to show it off on your Kickstarter page. Often time, others blogs copy content from other news outlet, so it's sort of like a ripple effect, where getting featured in a few blogs may lead you to get featured by even more blogs.
Endorsement from Influencers
It is in creators wildest dream to get endorsed or featured by influencers. The massive benefits from getting featured by influencers are just incomprehensible, from getting solid social proof, getting boost of visibility, and at the same time getting backers.
How many times have you seen successful campaign displaying enthusiastic comments of backers on Instagram about their project, even before going live? Almost every time. This is done absolutely using influencers endorsement.
How do we get featured by influencers? Here's 5 simple tips to get featured
Product, Product, Product, Your product speaks for itself
Be a human, influencers are human not robot, Don't be afraid to approach them
Have a strong social media presence by having lots of contents
Have some kind of incentives for them
Share your project and persistently ask for help
Unlike Project We Love from Kickstarter, we can agree that influencers endorsement often go beyond crowdfunding stage and benefits the business as a whole.
The problem is people mistook influencers as scary and cold people. The truth is nothing like that, they are just people. Of course, goes to say there will be influencers that are cold and money oriented that wouldn't give care about you if there is no money involved.
The key is just to be persistent, ask for help from 100, 500, even 1000 influencers and continue to ask for help, most of the time you can get a few influencers to help you out.
Unlike other featuring, you're depended on the mercy of third-party individuals, where you just sit and pray that your project get featured, not for Influencer Endorsement!
Out of all the three type of featuring, Influencer endorsement is the only one that can yield result if you put enough hard-work on it.
In simple equation, Hard-work = Getting Featured = Backers.
Now you must be wandering, 500 and 1000 influencers? You must be crazy right!
As a creator, we are already super busy with everything that is going on. Trying to contact that many influencers are just insanely time consuming and may not be efficient if done alone.
Key Conclusions
We hope that this article was helpful for you to get your campaign featured and gain the visibility it deserves.
The good news is, PurelyMarket is a specialised crowdfunding agency that connects influencers with crowdfunding campaign. We have successfully connected over 1000+ influencers and get projects the endorsement they needed. You get to have professionals by your side that handle your top to bottom influencers channel and now you can be laser-focus on making your business a true crowdfunding success.
Good luck with your Kickstarter campaign! And remember, PurelyMarket is here to help if you need us.