Free marketing - earn it

I received an email this morning containing this:

I'll tee some coverage for around that time but if anything changes, please just let me know! Thanks again.

That was one of the best messages I’ve had all week. It’s a reply from the editor of a lifestyle site that I’d approached to cover the launch of my next Kickstarter. Not one of the biggest websites in the world, but one with a great Instagram account with a few hundred thousand followers, and I believe the perfect audience for my product.

That cost me nothing but the time to write a few emails.

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There’s a common misconception that simply by putting a good product on Kickstarter, backers will flock to you and you’ll raise loads of money.

As with pretty much anything online, sadly it doesn’t work like that. It’s up to you to bring your audience to Kickstarter.

Your first backers are likely to be people you already know - friends and family, people on a mailing list you already have from a previous Kickstarter or an existing website. But that will only get you so far.

Another way to drive more people to your page is to pay for ads on Facebook or Google.

And then there’s the holy grail - getting coverage from a blog, news site or influencer in your product area. Free exposure with a potentially massive reach. Even better still, an editorial piece about your product can convey a lot more trust than an ad could.

This kind of exposure can be referred to as earned media - because you earned it rather than paid for it. The kind of thing Donald Trump is very good at, love him or hate him! He doesn’t need to pay for political ads because he makes himself the story and news outlets (and social media algorithms) can’t get enough of it.

How to get free marketing?

I’m not a professional marketer and had no experience with any of this before my first Kickstarter campaign, but here’s what I’ve learned. And it’s been enough to get my products featured in places like BuzzFeed, Gizmodo, Wired, and on Australian national radio. I’ve even had journalists getting in touch with me to see if I had any new products coming along.

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You can be charged a lot of money by agencies who will say they’ll send your press release to lots of influential people. I’m sure there are some good ones out there, but many won’t be worth it. Luckily there’s a lot you can do yourself. When launching a Kickstarter you’ll often have more time than money, so use that to get your own earned media.

When I first started out, people would suggest that you need to cultivate relationships with journalists and bloggers in your product area. That sounded near to impossible to me at the time - how on earth do you even start that? It is possible though - but you’ll need patience and perseverance.

So where do you begin?

My approach is similar to an approach I would use to design products.

Firstly there’s the divergent thinking phase where you widen your focus and absorb as much as you can about the area you’re in and what kind of places might want to talk about you. Understand the playing field.

Then there’s the convergent phase where you narrow down your options and focus on what you think will give you the best results. Execute.

My first efforts were not pretty. Below is what my list of potential marketing targets looked like when I ran my first Kickstarter.

Target list

That product was a razor, so I was looking for men’s lifestyle sites, blogs covering gear, product design and that sort of thing.

Search for some key competitors or complimentary products and see where they’ve been mentioned. Also try and look for places that have covered Kickstarter products before. Some websites specifically say they don’t share crowdfunding projects, so take the time to read the ‘about’ or ‘contact’ pages.

Finding the email address of an actual person is great, but a contact form or emailing via contact@ or tips@ can also work.

Optimise your process for quality over quantity. Chose your targets carefully and take the time to understand them and tailor your message specifically for them. For example I could open with something like “I enjoyed your recent piece about the super duper space razor and I thought you’d like my one”.

In practice it will still involve plenty of copy & pasting, but make sure it doesn’t feel like that. Show them you’ve done your research and make sure you sound like a human. I’m sure things will change, but for now, people can smell lazy ChatCPT usage a mile off.

Put yourself into the shoes of the person you’re contacting. Remember, their job is to write about things. If good content comes to them, you’re doing them a favour.

Be polite. Even when someone says no, if they’ve taken the time to reply then that’s great. Say thank you and who knows where that connection might lead next time.

Sometimes people will say they love your idea and that they’re going to write about it and then they don’t. Don’t take that to heart. People have busy schedules and something else might have come up that took priority.

Send a few follow-up messages. Not every day for two weeks, but a few is fine. Have you ever responded to someone after they’ve messaged you two or three times trying to get your attention? I definitely have.

Most people will ignore you. That’s just something you’ll have to deal with.

I’ve found that the process can all be quite addictive. I’ll just send one more email because that could be the one…

Results

It can be very disheartening when it feels like you’re firing off emails into an abyss.

Keep going though. For my first Kickstarter I didn’t get a particularly good start to the campaign and was feeling pretty down about the whole thing. My funding target was high for a debut Kickstarter and after the first week I didn’t think I was going to make it.

Bumpy ride

Then I woke up one morning in the second week of the campaign to see a significant jump in my pledges.

My Kickstarter had been mentioned in Uncrate, a men’s site covering gear, style and tech.

Another great thing about that was that it subsequently got more coverage because other journalists and bloggers had seen it in that first article. All these kind of sites are reading each other’s content so if you’re lucky, one mention could have a multiplying effect.

In the end, that campaign just made it over the line, as you can see in the graph above. Without that bump in week two I think it would’ve failed.

A similar thing happened with my second Kickstarter. An article in Gizmodo got my project past the 100% mark in the second week of the campaign.

Another bumpy ride

I will admit that these early projects of mine were not brilliantly run. But I spent nothing on marketing and the point is that with some effort you can succeed with a low-budget Kickstarter campaign.

Think outside the box

And finally, as well as looking for obvious targets such as people who have covered similar Kickstarter projects to yours, think about other angles.

Perhaps there’s a local dimension to your story, or something interesting about where your idea came from. Ultimately, the question is: who might care about your project?

Here are a couple of examples, again from my razor campaign.

3D printing

Back in 2015, 3D printing was a hot topic. I can’t exactly remember how I found them, but my Kickstarter ended up getting featured on 3DPrint.com. They were interested in my use of 3D printing for prototyping. Again, that’s not necessarily going to have the reach of the BBC, but it’s an engaged niche and it got quite a lot of traction in the end.

Australian radio

Also not the BBC, but ABC, the Australian equivalent. This was another random marketing angle that I got some mileage from.

My product is called the Ockham Razor. I found a programme on ABC Radio National called Ockham's Razor - “a soap box for all things scientific, with short talks about research, industry and policy from people with something thoughtful to say about science”.

I fired off an email and a few weeks later I was in a radio studio in central London recording a piece about crowdfunding and the launch of my new product.

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Kickstarter is all about telling people a story that makes them believe in you and your product.

Part of your job is to sell that story to every potential backer looking at your Kickstarter page. But those potential backers have to get there first.

It’s a numbers game in the end. The more people who see your page, the more chance you’ll have of your project succeeding.

One tactic is to pay to put your idea in front of people via ads.

Another other is to make it happen for free.

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