Guest
Having the right influencers on your side for Crowdfunding Success
Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’ states 150 as the maximum number of people that a person can maintain social relationships with. Putting this rule in the context of crowdfunding, any project creator is highly dependent on these 150 people to kickstart the funding. While running a campaign, some from this group will help you cover 40-50% of the target amount in the first few days of going live.
This initial response shows acceptance for your project. Thus, inspiring funders, falling outside the 150 group, to make the final decision of funding. However, reaching out to this external group and getting them to visit your crowdfunding campaign page is the tricky part!
Related Read: The Apt Marketing Strategy For A Successful Crowdfunding Campaign !
This is when you can fall back on Malcolm’s ‘Law of the Few’, wherein a few people can not only spread the word but also influence the larger external group to support your campaign. These influencers allow you to overcome your constraint of a limited social circuit. But, what’s crucial is reaching out to the right kind of influencers. So, who are these people? Below is a list of a few type of influencers, whom you can reach out to, to amplify the noise about your campaign.
Journalists
These are the first set of influencers whom you should approach. Journalists are the most difficult ones to convince as their criteria to cover a story is extremely stringent. The project not only needs to be interesting and unique but also, concrete and nearest to the completion stage to attract a journalist’s interest.
Hence, a project gets further legitimized after a journalist from a reputed print or online publication chooses to write about it. It may or may not induce direct funding, but it will certainly grab attention and swing the funders your way when they have just heard about the project and are not sure about its genuinity.
Twitteratis
Twitter is the most effective platform to gather funds while crowdfunding and avid twitter users with a large following are the key to influence funding on this micro blog site. There are three types of twitteratis that you can target through emails and direct tagging – celebrities in the same field or with a common interest, non-celebrities but large followers base in the same field and general ones who tweet about everything and have a large following.
Related Read: Crowdfunding Success Stories Of Startups !
The preference and the level of difficulty to have them tweet about your project can be put in the same order as they have been mentioned. It is important to ensure that you include a hashtag in all your tweets, making it easier to track the traction that the project is getting on the platform. The tweets sent out to these twitteratis need to be very specific, highlighting the objective of funding and including the link where their followers can contribute.
Bloggers
Unlike the three types of twitteratis, in case of bloggers, only the ones writing in the same area of interest as your project, should be approached. This will ensure that the story is targeted to the right audience who would have the maximum motivation to back your project.
Bloggers are most likely to include the link to your crowdfunding campaign page, helping you drive maximum traffic out of the other two types of influencers, from their followers base. Do shout out loud about your story being covered by every blogger. Your story going online through multiple bloggers will also help improve the SEO for the campaign page.
Simply by having these three types of influencers on your side, you break the reach barrier of your close friends and family, and extend your base of funders to a much larger network of people!
(Disclaimer: This is a guest post submitted on Techstory by the mentioned authors.All the contents and images in the article have been provided to Techstory by the authors of the article. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)
Image Source: ted.com
About The Author:
Anshulika handles Sales and Marketing at Wishberry. Inspired by the characters Dagny Taggart and Miranda Priestly, this Ex-McKinsey analyst found the idea of crowdfunding while on a project at McKinsey. She got so fascinated by the concept that she ditched a US job opportunity and flew back to India to pioneer the concept of crowdfunding for creative artist with Wishberry.
She doggedly believes that crowdfunding is a lifeline for all budding creative artists in India. But at the same time she says, “it’s not all about the money, honey”; more than money, it’s the people’s belief behind a dream that makes all the difference.