Many entrepreneurs will feel like this when launching their first crowdfunding campaign, but you can avoid that.
Crowdfunding has remained a popular and solid choice for entrepreneurs looking to bring their products and ideas to market. However, many don’t realize the intense workload that comes along with it.
Successful crowdfunding campaigns need resources for:
- Professionally produced videos
- Product shots and renders
- Advertising
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Page design
- Public relations
- Prototyping
- Manufacturing
- Fulfillment
- And more
If you and your team are trying to do it all by yourself, you’ll find yourselves stretched far too thin, and will skip out on one or more aspects of a successful crowdfunding campaign. This can result in failed crowdfunding, or in the event of a successful campaign, failed fulfillment.
4 Major Headaches You’ll Avoid by Hiring a Crowdfunding Agency Before You Launch
The fact that creating a campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo is easy has lured many into thinking crowdfunding is a simple or easy ordeal. While it’s certainly nowhere near the complexity of raising VC (Venture Capital) funds or doing an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), a successful campaign doesn’t come easy.
There are many challenges to overcome and tasks to do which, quite frankly, most don’t know about until it’s too late.
Hiring an expert crowdfunding agency brings with it the experience of many past campaigns, thus saving you from these common, and major crowdfunding headaches:
1. Establishing Multiple Relationships
Perhaps the biggest headache saved by bringing on an agency is that of networking, press relations, and sometimes even manufacturer relations.
A crowdfunding agency will have helped many startups similar to yours find success, and along the way has built a long list of connections including influencers, journalists, and more..
This enables you to instantly make use of their network, getting results like reviews and news coverage in top tier publications with a fraction of the effort!Additionally, some agencies have connections to manufacturers, suppliers, and fulfillment centers, and can put you in touch to save time and money in that aspect of product development as well!
2. Launching Effective Advertising Campaigns
Let’s face it. You’re not a marketer. You’re an inventor, a visionary, an entrepreneur. You have a brilliant idea, but getting that idea to market may not come naturally to you. Agencies will be staffed with experts in each field of marketing and advertising from social media to adwords.
This gives you a huge boost in ROI as you’ll have ads with copy, testing, and optimization which you just plain couldn’t do in house. This boost in marketing and advertising performance will translate to more backers and lower cost.
3. Fumbling Around with Image, Text, and Video Sizes
One of the biggest headaches when launching your crowdfunding campaign as a rookie will be the constant back and forth that’ll accompany every image, text field, and video.
Both Indiegogo and Kickstarter have strict guidelines for content, images, and videos. They must adhere to certain lengths and it can cause you to go back and redo several parts of your campaign page. Additionally, their guidelines differ, making it even more difficult if you’re looking to launch a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter and switch to an Indiegogo Indemand campaign after. (An increasingly popular tactic.)
Crowdfunding agencies will have a checklist of size and content requirements for both platforms, helping you to avoid the resizing and editing of content before launch!
4. Putting too much on your plate
One of the most underestimated aspects of crowdfunding is the daily, weekly, and monthly routine work that’s needed for a successful campaign. Seasoned agencies (like us!) can do the following work in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it yourself:
- Building a pre-launch email list
- Developing your website
- Producing videos
- Photo shoots for products
- Setting up admin accounts
- Deciding on Indiegogo vs Kickstarter
- Copywriting and editing
- Crowdfunding page design
- Social media marketing
- Managing communications
- Optimizing advertisements
- Monitoring analytics
- Email marketing
- PR
- Transitioning to Indiegogo InDemand
- Posting campaign updates
- Sourcing retail opportunities
- And more!
Ultimately, Crowdfunding Agencies Reduce Risk
At the end of the day, all these headaches avoided are nice, but the true value in hiring a crowdfunding agency is the reduced risk and increased money in your pocket! Nothing better drives this point home than comparing Kickstarter’s average success rate and funding rate with our own here at Arora Project. Kickstarter’s average is $24,839 funded with a 35% success rate. Arora Project has a 100% success rate raising on average 6 figures or more.