How to 'sell' your crowdfunding campaign

Have you ever thought about it? A crowdfunding campaign is in effect a marketing campaign where, instead of selling products or services, you sell company shares. Crowdfunding therefore means finding people interested in "buying" (metaphorically) your company, that is, investing their own money in its growth and becoming your partners. In this article, let's look together at how best to "sell" your crowdfunding campaign, turning people interested in your project into investors.

Where to find investors for your campaign

If your company is already active, the first place to look for investors is definitely your customer base. In fact, those who already appreciate and know your products/services will certainly be more inclined to invest in you, especially if the choice to invest involves a series of additional bonuses, such as discounts on the purchase of your products/services or the chance to test new features in advance. These are called rewards, or special rewards that you can offer as part of crowdfunding, with the aim of making the prospect of investing in your company even more attractive and speeding up the decision-making process. Ideally, in fact, you should limit rewards only to the initial phase of the campaign and reserve them for a small number of people, so as to incentivize potential investors to proceed as quickly as possible. For example, a company that sells SaaS might offer its investors free use of the software for a specified period, a company that makes leather bags and accessories might offer discounts on the purchase of the bags or send free pieces, etc.

What if your company is just starting up?

When actual customers do not yet exist, you need to target those who might have an interest in becoming them. In other words, you need to talk to potential customers-that is, people who have interests, characteristics, and habits that are compatible with the product/service you are about to launch (or have just launched) on the market.

How to turn customers (or potential customers) into investors

Now that you know where to look for your potential investors, all that remains is to figure out how to push them to invest. Since crowdfunding is effectively equivalent to selling something (the shares), what you need to do is to organize a structured and effective sales process.

How? It is best to use marketing automation software or better yet, a CRM (customer relationship management) system that allows you to develop and initiate email marketing campaigns, track the activities of current and potential customers, and gradually engage interested people by placing them within an organized database.

Using marketing automation will enable you to:

• communicate with your audience of potential investors in a more targeted and effective way, keeping track of their entire journey (where they came from, what and how much communication they received, etc.);
• assess as you go along what their real interests and needs are and what strategies to put in place to make communication increasingly efficient and achieve your goal;
• "filter" your contacts, excluding those who are not on target with your product/service.

Building a relationship with potential investors

The decision to invest in a crowdfunding campaign is almost never straightforward, especially if the person considering the decision had never heard of your company before.

Describing your project well and accurately on the platform where crowdfunding takes place is important, but it will never be enough: the path to turning people potentially interested in your company into investors is much more complex and requires time, perseverance and commitment. You have to build a real relationship with them, which, just as happens in everyday life, has to be deepened and nurtured day by day. The goal is to gradually increase your audience's interest and desire to learn more and more about your project.

The important part of this relationship is sending out information: your audience of potential investors needs to be constantly fed with in-depth and comprehensive data about your company and project. You can, for example, produce e-books, reports or infographics, hold webinars, create weekly update newsletters, etc.

The goal is to gradually provide your audience with all the information they need to consider investing in you, gradually taking them from the consideration stage to the conversion stage (joining crowdfunding).