Objective: You will learn how to build maximum excitement for your Backers campaign launch, which will help you raise more funds when you launch.
You’ve put in a lot of effort in building your community, and you will continue doing so up until your Backers launch (and beyond)! You want to leverage all that hard work and have a great launch. Getting people excited and acting in the earliest days of your campaign is critical to show there is a crowd behind your idea and that you will be able to reach your funding goal.
You’ve been keeping engaged with and growing your community of people. You’ve maybe given a couple of sneak peeks of your campaign to people so they’re excited. You’ve presented the Backers campaign as a way for them to further their engagement in the community, while also benefitting financially. You are ready to upsell your community on your equity.
As you’re getting close to one month away from launching, you should be pushing and organizing for big sharing on launch day. We will go further into this in the Backers Launch Playbook, but here’s a start on what this means. This means communicating with media about your launch (you should have a press kit that includes some of your photos from your campaign, your video or at least a shorter ad-like version of your video, and a compelling press release), setting an official launch date for all your friends, family, community, and other connections to put in their calendar (so they come and support you the day you start and also so they share in their networks that day), getting anyone you know who has big connections ready to share (for example, if people in your network or community-run other organizations or have connections in media or are influencers). Your community by now should be ready to support (whether financially or by sharing with their networks, although financial support is the goal)! Do not be afraid to lean on your family and friends, especially since this is your first equity crowdfunding campaign ever. People should be supportive of you and want to help you out in any way possible. If they aren’t, that’s not on you.
Ideally don’t set your launch day on a day when nobody will be on their computers, or when people will be distracted by something more important. This isn’t hard now since everyone is always online it seems. But for example, launching on the United States’ election day probably isn’t the best. Everyone should know with about 2 weeks to go exactly when you’ll go live. You should have your project fully approved by Backers long before this time, and only be making very minor changes if need be. Keep getting people in your community by sharing valuable content, and be sure there are clear calls to action that inspire people to support and share when you go live.
Action Item(s):
- Create a media kit for your Initial Backers Offering (use filler video/photos where necessary).
- Create a list of potential big connections (look at your networks, networks of people in your community, etc and see if people know people)!
- Create a message that you will send to each of the people on that list when you are one month away from your launch.
Further Reading:
https://neilpatel.com/blog/product-launch-strategies/
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/280830
https://www.snapmunk.com/buzz-marketing-5-ways-to-hype-your-crowdfunding/
https://entrepreneur.indiegogo.com/education/article/how-to-build-pre-launch-page/
