Lessons

Lesson Info

Create the Campaign Page

So as we get into the campaign pays, then we're going to create this campaign page there's some choices you need to make early on, so first you need to make your choice about your tone of your campaign. There are some common things, and in a little bit we're going to look at a few campaigns that hit on some of these variants that you can go with, but what's your tone so first of all, the tone that always works as part of it, whether you're going to be a reverent of cool or whatever his authenticity, I have not yet seen a slick campaign do well by slick I mean something that looks like a broadcast television commercial with actors people want to see part of crowdfunding, something is going back to like the other, you know, the reasons why people are supporting it because they feel like they're connected to the people. If it's a big corporation where they don't feel connected than people are much less likely to vote, you know, back the campaign. So even like g did the opel icemaker it's,...

a nugget ice maker that makes nugget ice like you get it sonic that like, good old fashioned I love that ice and that people would like go to sonic specifically by that they wanted to create a home unit that created opel ice but they wanted to test it through their first build organization to make sure before they rolled it out you know, what's very expensive for a company like g that people were interested in the product and they raised over two million dollars on indiegogo, so that was great proof that consumers wanted this product but their campaign video it was g e you know are spent off of tea but like clearly they could have had a commercial that look justice professional is any commercial you see by procter and gamble on television for you know, the gillette fusion or whatever so they could have created a very slick campaign. Instead they created something that involved the rio people involved in making the product, you know, talking about the product that they were passing about, you know the question marie for a campaign like that? What do they promise? The backers example of the product so they were pre purchasing the product of a discount of what it would eventually cost so but the video was authentic like it didn't show up is a slick, highly produced thing and it could have been saved with pebble like pebble time when they came out pebble was a big company because their first success they've grown into a significant consumer electronics company and could have created a very high end, super expensively produced video, and now that doesn't mean things don't look shoddy, they want like a really professional, but they won't look authentic it's a way of being that we all recognize when you see it's not too slick it's not to pause, you know, hiring professional actors who are like, really good at delivering their lines just perfectly it shows up is real people talking about something they're really interested in and really excited about, so people times video if you watch it it's great and it's not too slicks and with coolest, same with many of the most successful campaigns, so this also shows up in the graphic design and the photography that you put your creating unauthentic vibe where people feel like they're really connecting with creators the campaign hitting on that reason why people back because they want to support to the creators not just because they want the thing you want to get both I want the thing and I want to support these people because they look like good people like people I might like and I want to be a part of it, so you got it. First of all, start with that next you have to pick out your marketing angle so you've got your tones, your tone choices I should back up a little tone choices are like, irreverent or funny, so there was an airplane called the power up, which is little a little thing you could put on a paper airplane turned into remote control plane propeller and a little redder and it's super funny and like it's hilarious like it makes you laugh out loud when you see the video we did in the campaign for the carbon fire the carbon fiber airplane airplane and we didn't go for funny at all we went for cool this is something like it's a tech toy that you're gonna want because it's made out of carbon fiber and is awesome and so it wasn't funny at all it was going forward towards like a cool aspect the coolest cooler wasn't funny, but it was like in sort of irreverent and so you want to pick one though not just like create the video but having intention for the vibe you're trying to create because that men goes throughout the whole campaign it plays into the video it plays into the copy you know are you having like straightforward copy or you're being funny or you you know, swearing in your copy or you're keeping it very g there's a lot of options for your tone based on your brand and who you are and what type of product it is and who the potential customer for the product is so you want to be very intentional about choosing your tone based on who your target market is and why they would choose to buy it so picking a tone and in choosing your marketing angle and value propositions so what do I mean by that? Let's? Use the quickie as an example, so the quickie marking angle that we chose that worked the best in the end was the key that opens everything but doors. So we're talking about, like, the vast, you know, cornucopia of ways you can use the quickie, so we could have gone with the handy multi tool that fits in your pocket, which is related. But, you know, it's a different angle, you're talking about the portability, you're talking about the convenience to truck men always having that thing on you, you know, this just like a slight different angle, and you contest these different angles and we'll get into that a little later through split testing, but you can, you know, come up with several different angles, so a little assignment for anyone who is looking at doing their campaign like if you're doing the rain collector is to come up with what are three or four different marketing angles that you could use when you're talking about your product? So it might be if it's a rain collector and go one might be it's the ecological thing to do it's the right thing to do another thing might be it's going to reduce your water bills because you're collecting water and so, like these air, different angles on the same product, one of them might resonate dramatically more powerfully than another one with your target market and so it's an important choice, and you don't want to leave it to chance, so you want to think about it, consider it, come up with as many as, well, so then you're choosing based on a number of possibilities, you follow what I'm saying, and then the next thing is value propositions so what's the value proposition it's related to the marketing angle, but it's, like, what are the different values that you get out of the light? The quick he number one value is that it can, you know, it opens beer bottles, is that also can open mail, it can also scratch lotto tickets. It can also be a screwdriver, so the order of value propositions so we're going to a cornucopia, but which one do we lead with, you know, what's, the killer application that's going to say, cause someone to say, I want to buy that key, and again, you contest these things through various testing using landing pages, which were hit on, but we, you know, so we decided in the end, you know, actually to end with a bear, you'll see when we watched the video, but it's really about opening packages, so that was our lead proposition is, like let's open up with packages and then introduce the other things that it can do all through the angle of this thing can do everything, so we've got a marketing angle. We've got an order value propositions based on which one we think is going to land best. In addition, the different value propositions might land with different markets, so you might be like, well, iko people that's our number one market, so we're going after that and that's our top value proposition because that's the number one market but there's also like penny pinchers, and there are secondary markets that we're going to follow with that one, and then, you know, maybe they're three and four and so can order those based on who's, your most attractive market. Who or you think is going to be in your most attractive market makes sense. So that's, the first step is making these overarching sort of contextual decisions about your campaign and then the next, you know, then another step is researching existing campaigns that are doing some similar products, so and it doesn't even have to be similar because there's enough variety that it might be a product. You know, someone selling something having nothing to do with what you're doing but you really like what they're doing but you want to take the time to do their research this actually reminds me of the thing about the patents where I'm always shocked at the number of people who are willing to invest time and effort and money into a product but don't want to spend the time doing thorough research well, I'm also surprised the number of people who want to run a crowdfunding campaign but haven't taken the time to look at a lot of other crowdfunding campaigns and identify what they're liking and not liking about those campaigns and like trying toe sort of analytically pull out the lessons of like I really like the way they did their video I really like the way their perks structure was and I'm going to emulate that and so we'll go through a little bit of that in the second another general guideline is your building your campaign is using less words and more images like if you're looking through campaigns and you see what's working most the campaigns that work really well have very little packs drought dip to the amount of imagery that you see people like pictures pretty pictures that they can get immediately they don't like to take the time to read if you look at a campaign it's like page after page of text no one's reading that we're very, very few, and I've never seen a campaign that had a huge amount of text that was also doing very well, so you want to see pictures and if you're not, and if there's not a clear type of picture like my things, not got that pictures than, you know, spend some time brainstorming, get some feedback from designer types on what kind of pictures could support what you're up to, and in the last general guideline and I sort of touched on this already is you've got to execute with excellence, the bar has been raised and raised in raise, so even though you're going for an authentic vibe, that does not mean low quality, it means very high quality just in that authentic world view because you really need things to look professional now, even two years ago, things didn't need to look that professional. I look back on our quickie campaign, it was a great success, and today I doubt it would fly like the level of quality of all the different components was not up to par with the best campaigns today. The video, the graphic design, all these things, it was good, but the bar keeps rising and rising and is more corporations come in it's going to continue to elevate, so if you're going to succeed, you have to do it. At a high level you want great copy great imagery great photography, great video smart perk structure all these things really well thought out and it's not worth doing if you're not going to take the time to do it right just don't even bother doing it if you're not going to really take the time to do it right because you're putting all the effort like the half ass job takes almost as much time as the full effort job but it produces you're a percent of the results so you might as well not even do anything so if you're not going to a break don't do it all you got to be committed to doing it with excellence so given those general guidelines let's talk about the campaign page itself so one of the bonus materials is the campaign page wire frame so this breaks down the page we're just seeing a little screenshot of it here but it's it shows the whole campaign top to bottom and each one of the different elements of the campaign the different components so there's the headline there's the video there's the tagline there's the introducing the product highlighting the key benefits highlighting the features the story of where it came from you know who created it? Why your crowd funding one of the possible things that could go wrong and we sort of distill these from looking at dozens and dozens of campaigns so that we could, like extract what of the key components of almost any campaign, regardless of what you're selling or what you're promoting with your campaign there's like some consistent elements, there are some possible moments that we didn't include and there's some campaigns that have things that, you know may not be relevant to every case campaign. But so obviously, this isn't like everything that you need to have, depending on what you're doing, you might have some other things that you want to include. But this applies to almost every you know, campaign. You want these parts for sure, and we give you also like a few little guidelines from our own experience about what's gonna work there and what's not going to work there. And so I'm going to show you a few campaigns that I think that we think are very good, some of which we did, and some of which one of which was done by a good friend of ours and just sort of talk through some of these pieces.