Spielgaben has become one of the top crowdfunding projects in Australia with the most funds raised across Pozible, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo with the sole purpose of putting education and play back into the hands of parents.
We started the Spielgaben crowdfunding campaign on Pozible but failed due to some reasons that you will know later.
We then decided to create another campaign on Indiegogo, which gave us the biggest win. This wasn’t possible without the combination of client collaboration, smart social media marketing, digital strategy, and content marketing.
Before I hand you the helpful and exact crowdfunding marketing strategies that we’ve used, I would like to give a big shout-out to the considerate and smart founder of Spielgaben, Jim Kim, for allowing me to create this case study.
The Spielgaben Crowdfunding Story
My client decided to launch crowdfunding for the first version of Spielgaben using Pozible since we target Australian parents for purchasing decisions.
However, although I have been working with the client already, I am not aware that they have started creating and launching the campaign without planning and strategy. The campaign led us to failure having funding and a pledge of only 32% of our original target goals.
Since the deadline was almost coming, we knew we couldn’t make it so my client decided to collaborate with me, ask for feedback, and create strategies.
We planned to relaunch a crowdfunding campaign for the second version through either Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
The client chose Indiegogo.
We have reached our target goal in just two days for the second round of our crowdfunding and have raised 1090% from our original goal after we hit the deadline.
Disclaimer: Although the strategies below worked for us, I do not guarantee that they will also work for you. However, taking the fact that we’ve got our target goal in just two days, you can use most of them to create your own crowdfunding success. The success wouldn’t be possible without the help of Jim Kim, the founder of Spielgaben, and the bloggers who supported the campaign.
5 Marketing Strategies on How to Succeed in Crowdfunding
1. Market Segmentation and Data Gathering
When running a business, market segmentation is the primary thing that everyone should do. This can last for a week or two, or even for a month. But this research is critical to get those paying customers and supporters to help you escalate your business. Here are the things we’ve done.
Market Segmentation: Brainstorm
We have been targeting Australian users before and I thought that widening the market globally could potentially increase our reach and success rate. I created a proposal for the client to see if he’d agree. And since he did, we included the United States and the United Kingdom as our targeted locations for our next crowdfunding campaign.
We have been also targeting different people and persona—parents aged 65 years and older, parents aged 25 to 34 years, grandparents, etc.
However, we have decided to narrow them down to come up with our primary market.
Market Segmentation: Narrow
Whenever I do market segmentation for my clients, I used to ask seven key questions:
- Is the target customer well-funded?
- Is the target customer readily accessible to our sales force?
- Does the target customer have a compelling reason to buy?
- Can we today, with the help of partners, deliver a whole product?
- Is there an entrenched competition that could block us?
- If we win this segment, can we leverage it to enter additional segments?
- Is the market consistent with the values, passions, and goals of the business?
Market Segmentation: Primary Market Research
During this period, we’ve used our current website users’ data, sales data, and our current customers’ demographic data. We have also conducted interviews with paying customers to collect accurate information.
The segmentation we followed is neither specific nor broad; it is just enough to reach a wide array of potential customers and markets for our client business.
Facebook Data Gathering
Here are a few data that we have gathered from the users on Facebook alone:
Considering the data above, we are trying to acquire at least 0.1% or around 460 people to back up our crowdfunding campaign. Fortunately, we have gathered 560 funders at the end of our campaign.
Other Data that We Gathered
- Lead Customers
These are the most influential customers that others look to for thought leadership and adoption of new technology.
- Partners/Players
These are the companies or people that we will work with to provide the solution we’re aiming to produce and achieve.
- Competition
These are the companies that are making similar products.
- Complementary Assets Required
These are the other things that our customers need in order to get the full solution and functionality from the product.
We gave full attention to this research for at least a few weeks to get an accurate assessment of the market opportunities.
2. Layout and Content Optimization
These are the optimization and things we’ve done for the crowdfunding page and a separate external website to serve as our landing page.
Optimization for the Crowdfunding Page
We made our crowdfunding campaign page as simple as possible, focusing on four elements: testimonials and reviews, benefits, a showcase, and an FAQ for product shipping and information.
Before, the page was longer than how it can be seen today due to images. We made the page as less cluttered as possible and compiled images to make it neater.
For this, we integrated no psychological strategies for the layout but just made it readable and easy to understand for viewers and funders.
Special Offer Landing Page
Kudos to Spielgaben’s developer for creating a neat landing page and following the changes we want to do quickly. The landing page is already deleted but you can still access it via the archive.org website.
The Wireframe
We might have done much better than this and have chosen orange for the call to action rather than yellow; but since the client wanted it the way it was and I thought yellow is close to orange (well almost?), we, therefore, have considered it.
We used this landing page to get leads and funders from other referral sources such as Facebook and blogs.
The testimonials and video that we’ve created played a big role in getting registration and leads from this landing page.
3. Use Facebook for Marketing and Outreach
Effective Facebook marketing is one of the reasons why we have succeeded. Facebook is the biggest social media platform that drives conversion for my client, until today with over 92% more conversions from other social platforms.
We ran ads. We published a post with a sales pitch. We’ve found potential Facebook pages where our target customers hung out and collaborated with their administrators. That’s it. That is simple, but not really, since it requires full monitoring, engagement, and attention.
For Spielgaben, I created two types of posts: link and engagement with key roles to either encourage, entertain, or educate our target users while driving traffic or engagement.
This made my client’s Facebook page active and drove more conversions and engagements.
4. Influencer Outreach and Relationship Building
Spielgaben’s founder is wise enough to choose blogs that we can reach and build relationships with. Basically, I asked him to submit a list of blogs that he thought most of his target customers were reading. Once it was submitted to me, I curated and came up with the best list to do outreach.
Here are the things that I looked at:
- Alexa Traffic Rank and Information
I used to check blogs that have at least below 500k in Alexa rank. I also checked the audience geography, which should have at least a high country rank in the United States, Australia, or the United Kingdom. Once a blog has these criteria, I consider it to be on our final list of blogs and bloggers to reach.
- Social Proof
This is more important than the above metrics I looked at. I made sure that the bloggers or the blogs had decent followings and readers, especially on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
- Social Activities and Engagement
I am aware that some businesses buy likes to get a boost on their following so checking their social activities and engagement was perhaps also one of the most important metrics I looked at. I made sure that their readers and audience engaged on their social profiles. When I say engage, it could mean sharing their content, liking their posts, or commenting. I graded their engagement and those that have higher grades ended up being our finalists for outreach.
I chose blogs that I knew would help us make the campaign a success as fast as possible. Being an entrepreneur myself, I believe spending on things for your business that you know won’t make you or return any profit is useless.
I value more on how much revenue I can drive, I don’t care if the following we could get is slow as long as it is highly targeted and surrounded by people who are ready to buy or help us engage anytime.
5. Incentivize
I have found out that the best thing for my client brand to escalate and increase awareness is by getting reviews from educators and parents. And that’s what we did but with a little twist.
We gave free Spielgaben version 2 sets to help them test it firsthand on their kids and see if it works or not so they could create an honest review. Fortunately, an amazing product like Spielgaben surely produced positive results for kids’ learning and play.
Final Steps
Once the posts were live, we asked the bloggers to help us spread the word about our crowdfunding campaign by putting it on the review post and sharing it on their social media profiles.
And since we have been continually building relationships with them, these blogs help us anytime we have new campaigns and promotions.
Lessons Learned
- Segmentation and research are critical.
Market segmentation and research help us target customers effectively. They also help us create digital strategies, analyze competitors, create a project plan, and, more importantly, estimate results to build our client goals.
- Optimization produces more conversions.
A small tweak using layout, boosting the speed and performance, and making the page search engine and social media friendly help us gather more sign-ups and conversions, which we can use in the long run.
- Facebook marketing works.
I have been using it for years and it continually produces results for my clients. It has been a fixed marketing channel that every business should use no matter what size it is.
- Building relationships with influencers skyrockets success.
One person can be a drop of water. An influencer who has big networks on his side can result in rain. However, having more than one influencer will result in a flood—a flood to success that continuously pours your website traffic, conversions, and engagement.
- Giving opens the way for receiving.
Now I love this quote by Florence Scovel Shinn. And on this case study, I would definitely agree with it.
Make sure to follow Spielgaben on Facebook to see their amazing products.
