How to Use Analytics to Bolster Your Crowdfunding Campaigns

Analytics is the key to success for any fast growing company. Any successful crowdfunding campaign consists of 4 parts:

• Great idea
• Correct marketing
• Perks, worthy to buy
• Social interactions

It is impossible to create an interesting product without a great idea. Your future buyers will not want to buy perks of a uninteresting product. And even if you have both, an idea and a product, how will your future buyers discover you? Marketing will bring you buyers and social interactions that will lower your acquisition price.

Crowdfunding ROI

Let’s try to understand, what is marketing for crowdfunding and how you can analyze it to increase our ROI.

• Homework. Gather as much data about your competitors as you can.
• Plan. You have only 30 days and you have to plan everything in advance.
• Action. Get your marketing plan to fruition with the best performance you can.
• Analytics. Understand your target market and better engage them.
• Corrections. Measure and learn so you can better segment and target your users.

Do Your Homework!

To create a plan and to bring it to life – do your homework! Always start with gathering maximum information possible. Analyze your competitors and predecessors. Why they failed and how they succeeded? This process is called deconstruction.

Step 1: Find campaigns to deconstruct:

• Search crowdfunding platforms using keywords that correspond to your project
• Search in Google for crowdfunding campaigns using the same keywords
• Search popular blogs and websites that correspond to your project (i.e. if you are making a technology product, look on popular technology sites) for other crowdfunding campaigns they’ve mentioned.

Step 2: Deconstruct campaigns

• Images / Video
  What kind of images and videos are similar campaigns using? Did the campaign have a video of the product in action? What did their photos look like? This can vary widely depending on what you’re raising for.
• Page Design
  Study the similarities in the page design of each campaign. Is there a lot of text on each page explaining the features of the product or are they using images to communicate their idea? How frequently do they use graphics? What do they use graphics to communicate?
• Rewards
  What kind of rewards did they offer backers? If you are creating a product, the exchange is usually the following: money for the product at a reduced price. Or a discount on accessories related to that product.
• Number of Backers Relative to Reward
  Look at how many backers the campaign had and which rewards they chose. Did they have a small number of backers who chose high-level rewards? Did they have a large group of backers who received low-level rewards?
• Why Do We Need the Money
  On most campaign pages, there is going to be an explanation of what that team plans to do with the money should they be successful. Study the language used by other successful campaigns. How did they create consumer confidence?
• About Us
  How does each campaign market the members of their team? You need to show potential backers that you have the ability and expertise to deliver on your promises. Analyze the positioning of each campaign and figure out how they market each team member and their skill-sets.

Ready, Set… Action!

After the homework is done and materials are produced, it’s time for action! This is the most important part. Remember, that you have only 30 days to do your best and gather as many backers as possible.

Understanding Your Analytics & Implementing Corrections

While performing your marketing plan, your main priority is to collate as much data as possible and consider corrections. You do not have a chance for a mistake and your data should be accurate and in time.

• Funnel your users
  Define and set the route of a visitor to become your backer. Understand how users travel along the Funnel of conversions from viewing an ad to paying you money. Spot your weak and strong points between different user behaviors, categories, geography or other customer types.

• Cohort users by their behavior
  Using cohorts to split your customers will identify the most converting behavior, spot loyal users and calculate your retention rates. Understanding feature’s stickiness will help you manage marketing.

• Use attribution to find the best user acquisition channel
  Each marketing campaign is searching for the most important and effective channel of user acquisition. And it all starts with correct user attribution. Identify how the user found out about you and help others to follow the same route.

• Understand your user
  We know almost everything about internet users. Understanding who is your most loyal customer is a key to building an army of loyal followers.

• Calculate bounces and rejects
  Spot the bounce place, understand why user rejected you and fix these places. Improving your rejects and bounces will be much more effective than increasing your marketing volumes. Underperformance is worse than spendings.

But… How?

The Internet is able to propose incredible possibilities. We know almost everything about our customers and you just need to know where to look and how to look at this data. Search for the best services you can find that will suit you or follow the leaders and their support for best performance. Crowdfunding is mature enough to have professionals to help your campaign.