After deciding to crowdfund your project and choosing the right platform, comes the most important and difficult part of your campaign: making the right pitch.
At this point I assume you have seen many pitches made by your competition and you are right to assume that they could make a great template for for learning how to successfully pitch your project.
Your Video
The video in which you make your pitch is the most important part of your campaign. This is the first thing potential backers will see and in many cases the only thing they will see out of all the material you will prepare for your campaign.
Most people will make up their mind about you and the product you are going to offer based on that video. This means that you have to spend the very big part of your per-campaign preparations on it.
High production value is a must. Especially the sound quality. Some people may forgive the low resolution in a video, but none will forgive you if they can’t hear you. Those videos are a form of communication, so people need to understand what you are saying.
Film the whole thing on something better than a phone. Entry level cameras are relatively cheap, you may also think about borrowing one from someone else.
The person who will talk about your project has to be enthusiastic and good with people-skills. If you are not passionate about what you are doing, then others won’t bother to be passionate for you. It is important that everyone in the video acts natural. Conveying that there is a genuine love for a product you are pitching is a very part of the campaign.
So what kind of information should a successful pitch for your project contain? You should explain who you are and for what product you are raising the money. It is always nice to explain what the backers will get out of the campaign and make a call of action to share the campaign using social media. Don’t be afraid to tell a personal story and how the crowdfunding will affect your future and what dreams you are accomplishing by using it.
Image Source
Those videos work the best when they tell the story. If you decided to crowdfund your project, then there is a decent chance that you have your own story about it, so don’t be afraid to share it. Try to be concise, yet engaging in your story.
The story should engage potential backers on the emotional level. You should connect with them and show how both of you are similar. You are one of them, you want your project funded both as an entrepreneur and the person who buys your product.
Be sure that what you communicate is understandable for the person who knows nothing about the campaign. The best course of action would be to run the finished video through your friends and ask them what they understood from your message.
Remember that the first few seconds are very important, make them engaging and interesting so the potential backers will be hooked from the beginning and won’t leave.
There are many ways in which you can make your video. It is 100% perfectly fine if it will feature just you talking on the couch if you will adhere to the rules mentioned above and execute them well. Remember that if you have a prototype of your products you should always show it.
If you want to make a more artistic video, then here are a few successful examples for you.
Rewards
Good rewards will make the backers pledge their money to you. The lowest one should give them your product at the discount. You should make many reward tiers, each of them more expensive than the previous one. Don’t be afraid to have the highest level cost a 1000 dollars or more, since sometimes there are backers willing to pledge that much if your pitch is good.
Be wary of offering physical rewards. Making them and sending to many places in the world is difficult and more costly than you can imagine. You’re better off making only one or two rewards of that type and only for high level backers, or maybe just not offer them at all.
There are many things you can give to your backers. Some are as simple as wallpapers or soundtracks. Some are more interesting like offering an hour-long video chat with you to the higher level backers. More entertainment-oriented projects have a multitude of possible rewards, but whatever your product is, you can offer attractive rewards if you are creative.
Here are some ideas for rewards which will help to successfully pitch your crowdfunding project.
The Other Things on the Page
You have lot of space for many paragraphs of text and photos on your crowdfunding page. Use it! Although most backers will decide to give you money based on the video, some will scroll down and read more about the project.
Writing that text is actually surprisingly easy. Just expand on your ideas from the pitch video. Certainly there is more you can tell your backers about the project, so do it! Be more detailed and technical in your writing, because many people who will decide to read it will be interested in details, sometimes minuscule ones, so make sure you get them right!
Don’t start your crowdfunding campaign just yet, because in the next article we will teach you how to run it through the month. You should have a road map for the whole campaign before you hit the publish button, because not planning the whole thing beforehand had put many companies in a lot of troubles.
List of Best Case Studies & Hacks for Successful Crowdfunding Campaigns
To further deepen your understanding of the crowdfunding, we have prepared a list of case studies that we hope you will find useful and inspiring.
http://crowdfundinghacks.com/category/case-studies/
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236582
https://backbottle.com/pages/49-tips-to-a-succesful-crowdfunding-campaign
https://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2012/07/13/five-keys-to-creating-a-winning-campaign-using-crowdfunding
https://go.indiegogo.com/blog/category/success-stories
https://artofthekickstart.com/category/crowdfunding-case-studies/
If you have missed the previous instalment in the series, you can read it here.
