You’ve Launched Your Campaign, Now What?

So you’ve launched your campaign, congratulations!

This next step is exciting and frightening at the same time. You might be wondering, “Now what? What do I do now during the crowdfunding campaign?”

Your Launch Day

Launch day is going to be one of the most thrilling days ever. You’re probably a little jacked up on coffee, had little to no sleep in the past few weeks as you’re preparing for your campaign and responding to people, and then finally, it’s the day.

Check out the first update from our friends over at Moonrakers. It’s short and sweet, fully encompassing the feelings of a crowdfunding creator that has successfully done all of the hard work during the pre-launch phase!

We’ll go into detail today on exactly what you need to do on the launch day of your campaign to get things going and beyond that, exactly how to set goals for yourself during the campaign.

Get The Word Out On Launch Day

There are three things you need to do on launch day: get the word out, get the word out, and get the word out.

Oops, I guess that’s just one thing, but it’s so darn important to do that I really believe it requires that repetition.

If you’ve been building a dedicated list of people interested in your launch, your main directive is to get them to know about your launch.

We’ll call this your “warm leads” because they have already been exposed to your brand and your project, are aware that you’re launching, and even have expressed some sort of interest that they might back your project once you do launch.

You’ve done all this planning to reach out to PR, connect with influencers, rally your friends and family, and even outreached to other strangers on the internet who might be interested in giving you money for your project. Be sure to GET THE WORD OUT to them that your project is live.

How do you do this?

Send the journalist an email, text your best friend from high school, post on social media to your fans and followers, chat with people in the forum you’ve been frequenting — just remember to continue communicating to them on the same channel as before to keep things cohesive.

These are the people who will push your campaign to be funded right from the beginning!

That’s how you see campaigns go from $0 to $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 or more in the blink of an eye — all the pre-launch efforts come together on this Day 1 explosion of backers and online attention.

The Complete Launch Day Timeline

To make things easier for you, I’ve also prepared a launch day checklist for you so that you can make sure you’ve covered all the bases when you launch your campaign. Feel free to make your own copy of the list and update it to suit your project and team.

What Happens After Launch Day?

Ok, so you’ve gotten through launch day. The next month or so will be a whirlwind, that’s for sure. It will be an adrenaline-filled 30–60 days so fill up on coffee and get ready for the ride.

At the heart of it, there are three big questions everyone should try to answer every single day during the campaign:

How can we reach more people?

What can we do to convert more people?

How can we get people to pledge more?

The Typical Crowdfunding Journey

Before we get started, let’s look at what a typical crowdfunding journey looks like:

See that initial peak on the left?

That’s the fruits and labor of your pre-launch campaign. The hours of work you put into networking with people in your industry, the days of work you put into creating your landing page, and running ads to get email leads, the months of work you put into creating your project prototype, and getting images ready for your project.

It’s those people who rush to contribute your project to assure that they’re one of the first ones to get your product.

And the peak on the right?

That’s the fruits of your entire pre-launch phase AND your campaign phase. With this peak, it means that you’ve adequately kept people interested in your campaign and informed about your project.

Really, it means that you continued to keep people hooked and drove those who were on the fence to finally contribute to your project.

To be honest, it’s also a tactic every single industry uses (especially those in retail) to create a specific end date for a “sale” in order to capture those last-minute purchasers. That’s why Black Friday sales end at a certain time (and it’s advertised) and why Amazon Prime Day has a set duration in which it goes for (and that is also heavily advertised).

But now, let’s look at that trough in the middle section. It looks horrible, doesn’t it? Fewer backers and fewer funds coming in during that middle section.

Those of us in the crowdfunding industry tend to call this the Valley of Death (or something equally ominous).

Your goal as a creator for a project is to make sure that trough is as gradual as possible; you want a campaign that is consistently bringing in backers and bringing monetary contributions. This is not only great for team morale but also great for your final number raised and social proof points that you can use to get more people to talk about your project.

So what are you supposed to do for the next 30–60 days of your campaign to stay away from the Valley of Death?

The Magic Number For Success

For one, you need to figure out exactly how many visitors you need to bring to your page in order to reach your goal.

You can use the method below:

• If you have already reached the listed goal on your campaign page and have a new internal stretch goal to reach
• If you have not reached the goal listed on your campaign page just yet

A week into your project, take a small reset, and figure out what funding amount you want to reach by the end of your campaign.

A word to the wise: if you’re at 30% raised within the week, dreaming of 1,500% raised by the end of the campaign is probably a pipe dream. However, if you’re at 875% of your goal, maybe getting to 1,500% won’t be too far off. Just take some time to think through what you actually want, what that success means to you, and what you actually can achieve.

From there, take a look at your on-page conversion rate found on your Kickstarter or Indiegogo dashboard. Now make it a point to work backward to see how you can get to that goal.

For example, if your page is currently at a 5% conversion rate, you’ve already raised the $10,000 of your listed goal and you want to reach a goal of $35,000 by the end of your project. With these numbers, how many additional visitors to you need to your page to get to that $35,000 goal?

First, let’s collect all the variables:

• Conversion rate: 5%
• Goal: additional $25,000 ($35,000 goal — $10,000 current funding)
• Average order value: $50 (you can obtain this from your Kickstarter dashboard, or download your backer spreadsheet via Indiegogo and calculate this with a Spreadsheet by averaging all order values)
• Number of backers you need: $25,000 (additional goal) / $50 (average order value) = 500 backers
• How many visitors you need on your page = 500 (backers) / 5% (page conversion rate) = 10,000

There we go! This means that with all the variables above, you’ll need an additional 10,000 visitors to your page in order to get that $25,000 additional funding to get to your new, stretch goal for your project.

Next Steps For Success

All of this sounds pretty simple, huh? Truth is, all of this is simple in theory, but the execution is where creators fall short. That’s why 70% of crowdfunding campaigns fail to reach its funding goal.

If you’re done struggling through each phase of your crowdfunding project and ready to take the leap to hit your goals, I have something for you. It’s called the Crush Crowdfunding Bootcamp and it’s my signature system to take you from idea to fully-funded within 90 days.

Originally published at https://crushcrowdfunding.com/