Mastering Indiegogo Pre-Launch Campaign Strategies

[00:00:00]hey salvation here welcome back to the crowdfunding demystified youtube channel on the channel we talk about crowdfunding raising money and specifically today i'm getting into an indiegogo pre-launch how do you raise money and do it in such a way that you get funding instantly and the way you do that is with a pre-launch so today i'm talking about how to actually conduct that and kind of go through a step-by-step process that you need to master if you want to do so okay so when it comes to the pre-launch um i kind of think of this as a warming up phase a way to get people excited to get to the top of mind i call it uh where you know you can be let's say you have a list of 10 things you can keep in your mind at any one given time maybe five things honestly um but you're trying to get to the top of that list as a marketer right so someone is thinking about this product throughout the day and they're like oh my gosh this campaign is going on i'm so excited i can't wait to support it or i can't wait to get a product of this kind that's what you're trying to do with the pre-launch is to get people excited right so you're building emotion and this is really important to understand that emotion is anticipation and also that emotion is wanting to own it wanting to buy it wanting it the best deal want to be a part of the community loving the story resonating with the values of the company and the pre-launch is designed to go from someone here emotionally is like eh okay i don't really care just browsing through facebook kind of apathetic to right before you're ready to go live their emotions are up here and they're like i can't where am i gonna buy this i want this thing now like just tell us where to buy it you know the whole thing is like shut up take my money right there's that meme out there that goes about that but that's really where you want to get people is you want to raise their emotions to the point where they're like i want to know where to buy this where can i buy it where can i buy it and then you unveiled the kickstarter or the indiegogo campaign and then they have the option to be able to pre-order it and that's really the whole goal of the pre-launch for more of a broad view so let's talk about the mechanics right the actual procedures you're going through as you navigate the process that is a pre-launch how do you go about this well first of all you need a way to be able to message people and contact people and typically by that i mean like a broadcast medium of some kind now for some campaigners that could be as simple as building out social media profiles you know having instagram having facebook twitter maybe as a way you can broadcast to your followers but the problem with those is when i was first getting started in the industry um i would watch campaigns who had a massive following had like 50 000 you know instagram followers or whatever and they'd go live and they wouldn't get any funding and i'm like why is this you know and that's when i had this realization in mind and i was on a podcast episode with someone i do a podcast crowdfunding demystified i have more than like 200 episodes on that podcast and i had this realization and the realization was that quantities and followers what we call vanity metrics that doesn't always convert into engagement the most important thing is engagement and who is on your following so how engaged are people who are they right would you rather have a list of people that are following you who are teenagers who don't have very much money to spend and don't even suffer from the products maybe that your problem solves and don't don't care about it or would you rather have you know let's say would you have ten thousand of those teenagers would you rather have a hundred people who are following you that are millionaires business owners that clearly see the problem that your product solves that value the solution and if you actually came forward with that they'd be interested in buying it i would rather have a hundred millionaires a hundred business people than ten thousand teenagers that are following me right and that's kind of how you wanna think about it is you want the right people who are following you in the pre-launch you want the right people who experience the problem or are interested in what it is that you've created and that's really where conversion happens is getting engagement getting people is there attention engagement is a code word for attention if you have lots of followers but no attention of those followers it's very hard to get them to do anything whatsoever so number one procedure get engagement get attention number two is go beyond the traditional mediums the traditional mediums are facebook instagram maybe like tik tok you know snapchat twitter social media youtube right go beyond those social media mechanisms and get really into the real ways that people communicate nowadays which are text message email direct message those are all great great ways in order to actually get someone's contact information in a more meaningful way so for example if i send an email it's probably going to get a much larger portion of my audience that views that versus an update on facebook right so it's one thing that you should have but you need to be kind of pulling multiple levers in the pre-launch phase in order to have the most effective amount of engagement i call this omnipresence right what is omnipresence i try to create this effect in my own marketing honestly so with my own marketing i try to create an omni presence effect and what that is is you're going on youtube you're watching my videos you're listening to the podcast you're reading my book you're reading my blog articles when they appear and you're searching for something you're maybe following me on instagram when i'm posting different tiny clips with like new tidbits of information and education i'm trying to create this omnipresence effect within my own following so that people know if they want help with something how i can help them and also that you know i can i'm legitimate basically i know what i'm talking about you want to have the same kind of omnipresence effect in the pre-launch where these people they're on your email list they're following you on social media they're following you on instagram you know maybe they're even getting direct messages from you if you're doing a facebook bot there's so many ways to create this effect but you really want to have that and also paid advertising can be another part of these omnipresent effects maybe they're going on facebook and they're seeing your ads this keeps you at the top of their mind which is one of the things we were talking about in the beginning of this video is keeping you top of mind your brand so that when you go live they are excited they know about it they know who you are there's no question marks in their mind right and that's really the omnipresence effect this youtube video is sponsored by the gadget flow the gadget flow reaches over 28 million people and they've been around since 2012 they're indiegogo and kickstarter experts they featured over 5 000 crowdfunding campaigns if you have a tech or design campaign it is a great platform to generate awareness and get backers check them out at thegadgetflow.com submit and list your project today there are two more key parts to the pre-launch um the first is testing right so every good pre-launch should be having a testing phase where you're testing out your marketing and here's why if anyone tells you that they 100 know how to communicate with your customers they are lying to you i'm saying this again if anyone says virtually guaranteed 100 i know how to message your your customers they are lying to you people are human beings i am a human being i know some things i have i've had a lot of experience but even i have to learn and the way we do this is through a testing phase so this is part of the pre-launch phase where you're basically testing out your messaging you're testing out landing pages you're testing out creative copy um creative images the kind of stuff that gets followers engaged and you learn it's almost like a learning mechanism where you're putting out all this content as an experimenter and you're capturing the feedback the data the comments and you're like okay what is the next content i gotta put out that's gonna get the most engagement and then you focus on that so maybe you find out this landing page you made isn't getting good results but another one is so you go and focus on the other one and you figure out how to optimize it or you see this one post you're doing gets lots and lots of likes and engagement so you do more posts right it's really simple um but it's something that can kind of be a little bit elusive this testing phase because people can get um almost downtrodden or like they don't know if things are going to work they don't know how to do a test so this is really part of the pre-launch is figuring out the best way to communicate with the audience and that's what informs your actual live campaign on indiegogo when you're live with the copywriting the imagery the video you use all that the final thing i'll say about a pre-launch is there's another emotion and we talked about some of these other emotions like anticipation or engagement being a code word for attention another word that i want to throw out there is the emotion of urgency i want you to think about the last time in your life when you felt something was urgent right so in my own life when something is urgent i gotta do it now otherwise these other things i have a mental movie of what happens like all these other things happen if i don't do it now and even if we have a really busy and chaotic life if something is urgent you will make time for it because otherwise all these bad things in your mind that are in the back of your head will end up happening to give an example i use this example a lot when i was in in school you know years ago and back in 2012 when i was just frustrating my blog um i was the kind of person that would leave until the last night to do assignments and to do essays that were assigned to me because i hated school i thought it was so impractical right i would leave until last minute to do these things and i always think to myself why is it that i'm leaving it until the last minute i didn't understand my own behavior well now as a marketer i do the reason was that i didn't feel any sense of urgency about the assignment and therefore other things occupied my time but when it was last minute the night before if i did not get it done i was going to get an f in the class or i was going to have my parents yell at me or i was going to flunk out of you know george washington university and waste all this money you know thankfully i had a pretty good scholarship but like i'd end up wasting a lot of time so i had this mental movie of all the bad stuff that would happen if i didn't finish this assignment and that only started to become more of a vivid picture in my mind the day before that assignment was due and what that did was it created massive urgency and when you have massive urgency you're willing to do things that are a little bit more difficult to do and you're also willing to justify whatever it takes to get those things done so i would stay up from 12 o'clock at night until like 00 5am the next morning just doing assignments right that i had put off because there wasn't enough urgency i was willing to crank out tons of work in a long duration because of that and i've learned how to deal with that over time obviously but that's something that's natural so the last part of the pre-launch is you need to create a sense of urgency why should people take action now there are many answers to that question but why should people take action now why should they check out the campaign now as opposed to five days after you're live with the campaign why should they check it out on the first day why should they join your email list or join your tribe or subscribe to you why should they do it now give them a reason and create urgency and if you do that you'll see people take action much more readily because it's important to them they're not just only thinking about you they're not only thinking about your campaign they're not only thinking about what it is you're trying to do with your product they have so much other stuff going on in life man most people are just struggling to get through the day and they're more so looking at e-commerce products because it's fun it's exciting it's fun to buy stuff right and in order for them to take a little bit of action you need a little bit of that urgency kind of sprinkled on almost as though it's that secret ingredient that makes a dish just like tastes really really good so i hope that you like this video if you did i have a great book out there called the kickstarter launch formula which you can check out on amazon or on audible i got a link down below in the description um i also do one-on-one coaching calls i also do long-term coaching with clients so if you want to talk and you want to book a one-on-one coaching call with me this is basically how if you want feedback on your product feedback on your strategy or from my advice when it comes to hiring other people and agency marketers etc you want to explore the option of us taking over your campaign like that is one way um to be able to access me is to book a one-on-one coaching call an hour-long intensive call you can go to crowdcrux.com coaching and you can check that out or a link down below in the description but also just go and watch some more videos got a ton of stuff out there hopefully it is helpful for you and i really um wish you well when it comes to your campaign give me a thumbs up if you liked the video come subscribe if you want more content like this leave a comment down below and i will see you next time