Inbound Marketing is all about engaging with your audience, very much like a crowdfunding campaign, and is therefore an invaluable tool to ensure the success of your crowdfunder. In this article, we will highlight a few of the more effective inbound marketing strategies for increasing the traffic going to your crowdfunder. Put our advice into action and harness the power of inbound marketing for your crowdfunding campaign.

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Power to the people!

Online crowdfunding campaigns have in recent years gone from being a new and very uncommon way of getting funding for a project or product, to being one of the most effective and, not to mention, rewarding funding processes a business can do. Beyond just funding, successful crowdfunders can generate a great amount of traffic to and awareness about your business in a very short amount of time. However, even if we have the best idea in the world, we still need to generate enough initial traffic and donations for our crowdfunder to actually succeed. So keeping in mind the limited means many crowdfunding campaigns have at their disposal, one of the easiest and most cost-efficient strategies to utilize is a well thought out Inbound Marketing strategy. If you’re new to Inbound Marketing, we recommend that you check out our article on what exactly Inbound Marketing is.

Practical Inbound Marketing

The first thing you should be doing is making sure you have all the tools ready to maximize the effect of your marketing strategy. This means setting up a blog, learning as much as you can about SEO, and having a strong Social Media presence. Think out of the box here, and don’t limit yourself to just Facebook and Twitter. A front-page post on Reddit.com may just make the difference between a fully funded project and a partially funded one. Having a blog established before launching your crowdfunder is also recommended, and if you can generate a steady amount of traffic to your blog before launching your campaign, you’re already a huge step ahead of the majority of other crowdfunders. For tips on how to do that, have a look at this article.

Just like a normal marketing strategy is a must-have for enterprises, having a clearly defined Inbound Marketing strategy specific to your crowdfunder is vital to its success. Keep in mind that your crowdfunder target audience may be somewhat different from your regular one, so be sure to have a clear definition of the people that would be most inclined to support your project before actually launching it.  It’s never a wast of time to build a Buyer Persona for each individual campaign.

As holds true for all Inbound Marketing strategies, it’s vital to ensure that you have a clear cross-channel implementation of your strategy, meaning that your blog should be linking to your Social Media sites and vice-versa, and everything should be search engine optimized, to generate as much traffic as possible.

Increasing your Chances of Going Viral

The most successful crowdfunding campaigns have been those which have gone viral. When your campaign goes viral,  it takes on a life of its own, with very little effort on your part. When I first had a campaign go viral, I couldn’t believe the exponential growth curve I was witnessing while doing nothing at all! So,  although we can’t really ensure something will go viral, we can take steps to greatly increase the odds of it happening, through our Inbound Marketing strategy focused specifically on our Social Media engagements. 

The first step is making sure that your followers are followers that actually care about your business, as having unengaged followers isn’t really that valuable here (i.e. don’t bother buying fake Facebook likes), so keep generating interesting content, and link to it from you Social Media pages. It’s a good idea to keep track of what type of content reaches the highest amount of people, so you can make sure the posts about your crowdfunder utilize what has worked for you in the past. In order to make people care enough to share your project, you need to tell them why they should care, and why they should share it. As with content creation, the key is to get creative, tell a good story in a way that’s interesting to read, and is relevant to your target audience! 

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Make It Happen!

Make sure that you have a solid Inbound Marketing Strategy in place, and that you’ve implemented it across your channels already to set yourself up for success. Approach your crowdfunding campaign like you would the launch of a normal product, and see each visitor to your crowdfunder as a potential backer, just like you would regard each visitor to your website as potential sale. Keep track of all data, and analyze what results in the highest conversion rates. More so with crowdfunding campaigns than normal product launches, it never hurts to think outside the box and go a bit over the top in terms of generating the initial buzz necessary for it to take off! Best of luck, and feel free to share your best examples of marketing for crowdfunders in the comment section below.