If no one knows, no one pledges

 

If you fail to communicate to your personal and business networks that you’ve begun a crowdfunding campaign, it’s very possible that your campaign will get no traffic, social sharing, or pledges.

You can combat this undesirable outcome through marketing and constant communication with your network about your startup and crowdfunding campaign.

Keep Them Informed

Happy backers are as likely to spread the word about your awesome crowdfunding campaign as irritated backers are to spread the word both in person and on social media about what an unorganized, unresponsive crowdfunding campaign you are conducting. One way to promote a positive image (and get great word of mouth marketing) is to keep backers informed and feeling like part of the action through updates on your crowdfunding campaign. You should post these on the campaign itself rather than emailing them out so that potential backers can view communications and feel reassured about the campaign’s legitimacy.

Be Deliberate

While updating your backers is a great way to keep them happy and informed, you don’t want to overwhelm them with information. To avoid piling on too much info too quickly, limit posts to approximately twice a week. The content and length of your updates should vary. Major product milestones, investor interest, or company pivots make fantastic updates as they are interesting, key developments or achievements, and show forward movement by the business.

Be Creative

Aside from your initial marketing and updates, you’ll need a way to fill in the gaps between major communications. You can do this with minor social media updates, email blasts,and even phone calls or text messages. All that’s needed in the intermediate communications is a small thank you, day to day update, or fun (and easily shareable) picture. The point of these small updates is to entertain and maintain a constant flow of reassuring, consistent information from your startup to backers (and potential backers).