by Helena Kaufman
Promotion Power
Le Kickstarter
Promotion, or marketing, is the natural next step on your path to bring any creative idea, product or service you’ve conceived and nurtured to public attention.
After you’ve refined your goals and project details during incubation, you must go public to succeed, so prepare to launch your project. Use the momentum you’ve gotten from communicating your message in text and video and go out there and engage your audience directly. The due date is now and smart marketing will take your “baby” right to delivery and beyond.
You’ll get valuable feedback from your promotional interaction and you’ll create success throughout its life cycle in the marketplace. Kickstarter estimates that “as much as 80% of your accomplishing your goals and finalizing a project will be due to marketing.”
Use Your Networks and Power Up Promotion
Product promotion fuels the success of any business. Here’s a Kickstarter refresher with its focus on your own networks (and their networks):
- Timely repetition is essential. To have people back your projects, or buy your goods you must tell them what you offer and tell them more than once.
- A personal message in email is an effective and a nice way to notify close friends and family first about your project.
- Tune in everyone else who is paying attention by posting on your personal blog, your Facebook page, and your Twitter account.
- Remind your networks a few times during the course of your projects, without overwhelming potential supporters with e-blasts and group messages.
- Individual contacts can make the big difference in your success.
- Go ‘face to face’ and let people see your passion for your project in person – educate, promote, encourage fun get-togethers and organize pledge parties to let people join in–creatively.
- Tell traditional media! Your local newspaper, TV, and radio stations especially like DIY (do it yourself) stories.
- Request coverage from like-minded bloggers and online media outlets – and help fill the quest for content.
Be respectful of people’s pages both on Kickstarter and out in social media and don’t push people away by over posting. Begging or nagging is not a strategy towards success in the project process.
Next time, a short note on overcoming the “fear of shipping.”
Be creative,
Be in touch,
Helena
Helena Kaufman is a writer and communications trainer. In 1982, success at promoting, marketing and writing about 200 artisans launched Helena as an event publicist. The designers who sold at the Annual Manitoba Christmas Craft Sale exhibited original functional and decorative pieces in fibre, pottery, metal, oil, paper, wood, distinctive wearable art and more. Helena worked to raise their profile, bring media attention and increase their sales. She now shares some of that savvy in the Artisan Ally series. Helena’s writing and communications site can be found here.
