If you’ve been preparing to run a rewards-based crowdfunding campaign, or if you’ve already launched one, and if you’re considering hiring an agency to help you with it, then this blog entry is for you!
Crowdfunding can be both complex and challenging, but so much easier with the right partner. Here are seven overlapping reasons why you should hire us at Funded Today…
It may seem cheaper to do everything yourself, but it’s not necessarily true. Your time is valuable, and the Pareto Principle guarantees that only about 20% of your efforts are going to produce about 80% of your results. Outsourcing peripheral tasks allows you to spend more time focusing on the core of what you do best as an entrepreneur and/or creator, and it also allows you to benefit from the seasoned expertise of those whom you hire. Such specialization-and-exchange can produce highly-synergistic results. So, if you’d like to work out a mutually-beneficial partnership, in which you focus on your team and/or product while we focus on your media and/or marketing, then we’d love to help!
Also on the subject of synergy, whenever you hire Funded Today, you’re hiring not only one agent but the world’s largest crowdfunding agency. This often means having not one but perhaps a dozen crowdfunding professionals available in your Skype group to answer your questions with their expert advice. Since mid-2014, we’ve worked side-by-side with over 3,000 crowdfunding entrepreneurs like you as they’ve run their respective campaigns—and, as veterans of the crowdfunding process, we’d love to put all of our combined expertise to work counseling you! Just as you likely wouldn’t want to try climbing Mount Everest without a sherpa, you might want to hire some seasoned guides like us to coach you step-by-step along your crowdfunding journey. Shall we get started?
Funded Today is the world’s largest crowdfunding marketing agency partly because we offer a comprehensive range of professional crowdfunding-oriented services to our clients, including video production, product photography, page design, pre-launch e-mail lead-generation, social-media community-building, and a full suite of post-launch marketing that may include social-media advertisements, cross-promotions, affiliate marketing (through our popular Cashback Network), public relations, crowdfunding e-newsletters, and even social-media posts. We do it all! And (as we’ll say more about below) we’ve spent years learning to do it all well. Our current competitors may provide one or even several of these services, but no others provide this full range. So, whenever you hire Funded Today as your “one-stop shop” to supply all of your crowdfunding needs, you can spare yourself the hassle of coordinating with several separate agencies simultaneously. You’re welcome!
Our creative team remains one of our best-kept secrets for now, but we’re trying to change this. They understand that what looks good doesn’t necessarily sell well and they’ve learned some about backer psychology—and, although they can’t magically transform a sow’s ear into a silk purse, they know how to present things in their best possible light. In fact, they are experts at producing low-cost high-quality persuasive campaign media within as little as 4-6 weeks! So, we can help you to get your project media both done right and done fast. We’ve now produced over 146 pitch videos (some of which are showcased on our YouTube channel), taken countless product photographs, and designed over 220 crowdfunding pages—and we’d love to create your campaign media next!
Even if you don’t hire our creative team or pre-launch marketing services, we can still provide sound counsel about your campaign before it launches. Crowdfunding is complex, with many factors to consider, and our experience can help you to minimize costly mistakes in some of those factors, such as choosing an inferior platform, timing your launch poorly, setting daunting funding goals, pricing rewards incorrectly, and/or failing to encourage scarcity and/or urgency in your rewards structure. By reducing such preparation mistakes, we can increase your chances of getting things right the first time, so that you can lessen your likelihood for needing revisions and/or re-launches while maximizing your fundraising potential. How does that sound?
Crowdfunding marketing is highly synergistic, as more pledges from one source normally encourages more pledges from ALL sources—so, it’s good to use all marketing techniques when feasible. And, so, we like to employ all techniques to the extent that it proves profitable for us to do so, although we also like to prioritize those techniques that they are most likely to yield pledges.
We prioritize because not all marketing techniques are of equal value. Public relations, for example, is both popular and powerful, and the news coverage that it generates is superior in both credibility and longevity; however, news usually severely lacks urgency, which renders PR a great investment for boosting long-term sales, but less effective for raising short-term funds. By contrast, social-media advertisements are exceptionally well-suited at urgently raising funds, and they are the only technique that can potentially bring a steady flow of pledging traffic to campaign pages, which encourages pledges from other sources. Ads are also the most costly and complex technique to master, so it helps to hire someone who knows how to run them effectively—and, in this case, who knows how to do so specifically for campaigns on Kickstarter and/or Indiegogo.
And Funded Today specializes in social-media advertising! We pioneered the regular effective use of social-media ads for crowdfunding campaigns, and ads still account for about half of the pledges that our marketing raises for our clients—and, although many of our competitors have gradually learned to copy us, we still maintain a small edge over them in our relative success rates. Plus, we’ve enjoyed a considerable head-start over them in accumulating a vast wealth of campaign backer lists that we’ve used to create lookalike audiences, which are often the most effective audiences to target with crowdfunding ads. These audiences are among our greatest assets, and are unlikely to be found outside of a professional crowdfunding marketing agency—and anyone who tries crowdfunding advertising without such audiences will likely struggle, regardless of how experienced they may be. We’ve probably already helped at least one campaign that resembles yours! Please contact us to find out. As soon as we’ve confirmed receipt of your payment, we can have your ads running within one weekday!
Although ads are our speciality, and although we normally start with ads before initiating other techniques, we’ve worked hard to provide comparable service in each of our other forms of crowdfunding marketing. Campaigns that amass enough backers can become part of our cross-collaborations network, within which we’ll regularly pair live campaigns to cross-promote each other, which has proven to be our second-most-effective means of raising pledges. Other campaigns that are doing well enough can get enrolled in our popular Cashback Network so that our vast pool of affiliates may choose to help market them. Our public relations team has spent years developing relationships with relevant reporters while learning which publications tend to draw the most pledges. We can use our ties with Indiegogo staff to help arrange Indiegogo newsletter features, which tend to deluge featured campaigns with pledges. We may even post our best campaigns on various social-media websites, where they may glean a few extra “organic” pledges from some of our 250,000+ followers.
From mid-2014 to present, our crowdfunding marketing has drawn more traffic to Kickstarter and/or Indiegogo, and raised more pledges on either platform, than any competitor. And we’ve seen from our own extensive experience that skilled crowdfunding marketing can potentially multiply pledges, making big campaigns huge and huge campaigns massive, and sometimes even transforming seeming failures into smashing successes. And, although great marketing can’t help every campaign, we’d love to give ours a try on yours!
Crowdfunding marketing, and especially advertisements, can be expensive. And, although some crowdfunding marketing agencies require you to spend your own money to show ads that they create for you, we allow you the option of spending OUR money to show such ads (as long as we can do it profitably) in exchange for a higher cut of pledges raised. Although we’d still require a fee to test ads on your campaign in either case, our ability to pay for your adspend may reduce your need to obtain expensive loans to market your project well. So, let’s make a deal that works for you!
All of these other advantages may seem great offhand, but the bottom line (of course) is always success. And, thankfully, Funded Today is arguably the world’s most successful crowdfunding agency, having helped raise $280,681,309 (and counting) on Kickstarter and/or Indiegogo, which is significantly more than any competitor so far. And dozens of our clients have raised over $1,000,000 with us! In 2018, our successes earned us 27th place among that year’s Inc. 5000. We can never guarantee that our success will translate into your success, since your success depends upon too many factors that remain beyond our control—but we can (and do) promise that we’ll always make our best good-faith effort for you!
If you’re still feeling a bit uncertain about hiring us, then please peruse our many positive reviews from past clients. And, if you’d like to discuss our various services and their prices, and to try to negotiate a mutually-beneficial deal with us, then please contact us right away!
