How to Reach Your Audience for Your Kickstarter project

I have a Kickstarter and Need and Audience

Most people rely on Kickstarter to find their audience for them, the truth is that there are not enough people browsing through Kickstarter to get your campaign funded, you need to reach a targeted audience of known crowdfunders, crowdfunding supporters, and Kickstarter funders. If you have a Facebook page you can actually use those fans who liked your page and use Kickstartmyads's custom users I.D targeting and upload Ads directly onto their newsfeed!

Who is My Audience?

Every project up on Kickstarter can use targeted Facebook Ads to drive supporters to their campaign, think about it, when would targeting specific groups of people who are interested in your product, field, or even just crowdfunding already not get you real results? General promotion DOES NOT work for Kickstarter campaigns, your project needs to reach a very niche group of people, which can still actually be very large.

How Do I Run Targeted Facebook Ads

You can upload your ads to general target groups using the Facebook Ads tool, separating simply by age, gender, country etc. Kickstartmyads used custom I.D targeting software to reach people who are directly related to your field and are most likely to Kickstarter campaigns, and campaigns related to your product! Kickstartmyads used this for us to target fan pages of any other Facebook pages that we wanted who we think would be best to get our ads in front of, this drove us targeted clicks and drove supporters directly to our Kickstarter project, they would target the users who 'liked' these pages and run the Ads campaigns directly on their Facebook profile newsfeed instead of those easily ignored right collumn ads that we all see on the side.

Newsfeed and Right Column Ads

The custom user I.D targeting actually places the Ads on the newsfeed of the users you're targeting, this gets your Ads much more engagement not only because they're targeted groups of users, but also because News feed ads are known to get you more reach than a Ad on the right column of the screen. Then when someone sees the ad for your Kickstarter project they click the link and are taken directly to your campaign page, and from their they contribute to your project and you can track the sales coming in from these Ads in real time on your analytics! 

- Joshua

My Crowdfunding Experience: Kickstartmyads Review

How We Drove Supporters to Raise $20k+ on Kickstarter

Our first project that we launched on Kickstarter earlier this spring got massive amounts of exposure across facebook via ads campaigns, this is a great strategy to use for a crowdfunding campaign and we will be sure to use the same method of acquiring supporters with our next campaign we've planned to launch this fall.

The best method of raising the funds that we used to get our company moving in beginning was to reach out to friends and family throughout through Facebook and Twitter, but that only lasted for so long. Then we also used a crowdfunding Facebook ads agency called Kickstartmyads to reach people outside of our network by using targeted Facebook Ads to reach people who have already contributed to other Kickstarter projects! This drove massive amounts of supporters to our project, which mixed great with the support we already were getting from friends and family!

Our Own Promotional Efforts

We had quite a small audience of people on our own Facebook page (at the time about 200 or so) so the volume of people who were already interested in our brand and product was so small, we got a few contributors out of them after running a few Facebook ads on our own, and using some promoted post options, but we really didn't know too much about what we were doing at the time.

We felt limited because of the amount of fans on our Facebook fan page so instead we opted for more general social media promotion on twitter and our personal Facebook profiles.

Our Mid-Campaign Stall

Friends and family already contributed so much to the campaign, now we needed to find new avenues for bringing people in and driving supporters. 

Most services we were contacted by on our Kickstarter page were promoting some cheap press release service, $100 here, $199 there. Since we already went with such a high-end firm we knew that any of these lower level services were just there to send a quick mail blast, call it a PR campaign and take all the profit.

Using Kickstartmyads to Drive Supporters

Kickstartmyads Ad report showing us getting real clicks and conversions on our campaign!

When we launched our Kickstarter campaign we were pretty optimistic about our campaign and how far we would go. But then in Mid March we experience our mid-campaign stall after we went through our rounds of asking friends and family for contributions. We tweeted and posted about project on our social media pages as much as we could but we need some aggressive support. We found out about Kickstartmyads through an Ad on Facebook that I actually saw right on my news feed! I clicked on it and got brought straight to their site, I knew I needed to do something to save my campaign so I thought I'd give it a shot.

How to Use Targeted Facebook Ads

Instead of just being limited to promoting our campaign to our own Facebook page, I learned that you can actually target specific users on Facebook using the Kickstartmyads service and special techniques. so Kickstartmyads actually went in a targeted people who liked pages about shoes, boosts, and any other page that we wanted. (including and most importantly, our competitors!) they also automatically target people who are known crowdfunders, crowdfund supporters, and past contributors, which is why they're specifically for Crowdfunding campaigns. 

Why We Didn't Run Ads Before

Our team was so weary of running Facebook Ads to people outside of my own Facebook page because they would be to everyone and anyone, but the Kickstartmyads team actually ran the ads based on specific audience targeting to get the best results! 

They optimized the ads and were helpful with me along the way to improving my Ads, getting them exactly how we wanted, gave us an ad preview and also gave us live ad reports throughout the whole project to let us know how everything was running. Even though we could tell how the ads were doing based on the amount of daily contributors we were getting on our Kickstarter project. 

So if you're looking to get great results for your crowdfunding campaign, then social media promotion and targeted Facebook ads are the best way to get more contributions to your project, and couldn't we all use some more contributions on our campaigns?

- Joshua

Natural Time Crowdfunding Campaign Gets Funded

Our Kickstarter Success

Once a far fetched idea sketched out on pen and paper is now getting ready for production thanks to our recent successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter! On May 19 our Kickstarter project successfully reached it's goal!

"I would like to give thanks to our awesome friends, family, fans and the loads of contributors from Facebook who helped us get to where we are today, All us on the Natural time team don't know where we would be today if we didn't get the crucial funding needed during our Kickstarter campaign.

- Joshua, Founder of Natural Time

What is Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding is bringing a community of people together to fund a campaign, or project who is started by someone offering a service or product and is looking for funds to start the first round of production for a new product or idea, people fund the campaign with a contribution in return for a perk, which will then get them a product after the campaign is over (if the campaign reaches it's goal). 

Also campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo (the biggest platforms) can only be up for a limited amount of time.

Since our campaign was on Kickstarter our campaign was automatically put on fixed-funding. This meant that we needed to hit our fundraising goal completely to receive any of the funds. Which meant that the next month was going to be very stressful.

"So in the one month our project was up on Kickstarter, we knew as soon as we launched our campaign that we had to make every day count, no matter what it took." 

How did you get exposure?

A lot of our early promotion was done through friends and family, word of mouth, and a lot of posting on our own social networks and fan pages across Twitter and Facebook.

We also used a crowdfunding marketing service that specializes in running Facebook ads for crowdfunding campaigns like ours to get more contributions. We launched a targeted Kickstartmyads Facebook Ads campaign to drive more supporters to our project during our mid-campaign stall.

Because of the success of our first crowdfund project and the crazy amount of funding we received. We're actually planning a new crowdfunding campaign for sometime this summer!

We plan to launch our new line of footwear line consisting of new boots and shoes later this fall because of the great amount of success we had!  Now we have a good knowledge of crowdfunding up our sleeve on how to get the best results for a project. Don't worry, we'll share them with you too!

Advice for other Crowdfunders?

More info to come! We will be talking more on our Kickstarter vs Indiegogo decision recap, why we went with Kickstarter, what crowdfunding promotion services we used, and how to launch a full scale targeted Facebook Ads campaign to start driving supporters to your project immediately!

- Evan