Are Crowdfunding Promotion Services a Scam? [And What to Do]
A whole industry of crowdfunding promotion has emerged but what are you really getting for your money?
Media attention to huge crowdfunding campaign success stories has convinced thousands to jump into online funding before they really understand what it takes to raise money from the crowd.
This contributes to the fact that two-thirds of campaigns fail to meet their goals and that 12% never raise anything.
Enter the crowdfunding promotion services and lofty promises to get your message to thousands of bloggers, journalists, influencers and ultimately crowdfunding supporters. These crowdfunding promotion sites charge from hundreds to thousands of dollars on the idea that you’ll raise many times more on your campaign.
You shop around and decide to try out a seemingly reasonably-priced crowdfunding promotion service that offers high hopes and the potential to take your crowdfunding campaign viral…and then it’s nothing but crickets chirping in the background.
Why are some of these crowdfunding promotion strategies doomed to fail? What really works and what is just a fantasy in promoting your campaign to the crowd?
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Crowdfunding Promotion Services: Press Releases
Press releases are probably the most popular crowdfunding promotion service offered online. Why? Because they’re easy and can be done at little cost to the promotion service provider.
Crowdfunding service providers promise to blast your press release out to their list of thousands in media, blogging and other online groups. Being in the crowdfunding biz for years, you’d think they would make the connections that would make this possible.
The results? Take a look at what one campaign owner posted on the internet. I’ve deleted the name of the crowdfunding promotion service provider for legal reasons.
Crowdfunding Promotion Fail
Nearly 6,000 referrals to a campaign came from the press release but not a single contribution.
The first problem is that your press release is likely going to the same mailing list used for every other crowdfunding campaign. What makes you think a journalist is going to open one particular email about a campaign among the hundreds they may receive every week? Most crowdfunding service providers do nothing to build relationships with people on their lists.
As great as your idea is, it isn’t going to be news unless you make the effort to reach out and explain why people should be interested.
The second problem with this type of crowdfunding promotion is that the list often has little to do with your topic or your campaign. Just because a journalist has covered crowdfunding before does not mean they want to interview every campaign that gets launched on Kickstarter.
An outreach list of 100 people, customized to target a relevant audience, is better than a list of thousands if they aren’t going to have the slightest care about your campaign. I covered how to build your own targeted outreach list in a huge post about how to draw people to your crowdfunding blog.
What about a few of the other promises for crowdfunding press releases?
- Crowdfunding service providers promise to submit your press release to search engines, implying that you could get thousands of visitors from Google and Yahoo. Any page on the internet is available to search engines and service providers really aren’t doing much except indexing your page from their website. There is almost no way that your release is going to get much traffic from search though unless someone searches for the title. Most releases are not long enough and do not include the right factors (backlinks, keyword strength, quality content) to get ranked on the first pages of Google. The only way to promote your crowdfunding campaign through Google search is to create a blog and post regularly for a few months before the campaign.
- Press releases blasted out to bloggers and other websites carry no real value to the recipients. A blogger that constantly posts spammy press releases to their audience with no regard to quality is going to see their traffic plummet. Blog and website content needs to be engaging and offer something of value to the readers. This is why I ask campaign owners to write about their experience crowdfunding for my readers rather than a simple commercial about their campaign. Promote your crowdfunding campaign with what it means for someone else and they’ll sit up and listen!
Crowdfunding Promotion Services: Social Media Campaigns
Social media is the Holy Grail of crowdfunding promotion. Where else but Facebook can you reach a potential audience in the billions for free?
Crowdfunding service providers promise to get you hundreds and thousands of followers or to get your message tweeted out to their massive list of crowdfunding enthusiasts.
The problem is, that’s not social! Social media is about engaging and interacting with people. Blasting a tweet out to thousands and expecting anyone to care is like walking through an auditorium of people for 30 seconds and expecting Mr. or Mrs. Right to follow you out the door. Most have no interest in your message and the rest are not given enough to find out about it.
Check out the Twitter feed of some of the crowdfunding service providers. They tweet up to hundreds of times a day. What makes you think your message is going to get noticed out of the hundreds tweeted by the company every day?
Worse still is the crowdfunding service providers’ claim of an engaged and interested audience in their social followers. Want to know how these companies built that huge following for their Twitter or Facebook pages? Do a Google search for “buy Twitter followers” or “buy Facebook likes.” I can get 18,000 Twitter “followers” for $15 and 10,000 FB likes for just a little more. It looks great if you are trying to sell services but does nothing for reaching an audience for real crowdfunding promotion.
Crowdfunding Promotion Services on Social Media
All those fake Facebook likes may actually keep you from getting your message seen by people that really care. Facebook only sends out posts to a portion of the page’s follower list. If people from that first group like or share the content, then Facebook sends it out to more of the group. If your message is only received by uninterested followers that are going to do nothing with the post, then it may never reach those few interested followers.
Even the service providers that offer to target and engage social media groups with a message may not be offering much that will convert to funding for your campaign. Check out crowdfunding promotion pages on Facebook or LinkedIn and you’ll see post after post of, “Support my Campaign,” followed by a link.
These posts offer no reason for people to even click through the link. Social media is about being social, duh! You need to actively engage people with questions and give people a reason to be a part of your team.
Check out a previous post on Crowdfunding Campaign Marketing for how to get the most out of your social media strategy and which marketing strategies offer the most bang for your buck.
How to do Crowdfunding Promotion Right
Almost all crowdfunding promotion revolves around massive quantity of blasts but just doesn’t get you anywhere. If you could easily raise thousands by giving someone a few hundred to promote your campaign, wouldn’t everyone be doing it? The fact is that crowdfunding takes work and real crowdfunding promotion is a process of building a relationship with the right people.
The fact is that nobody is going to promote your crowdfunding campaign like you could. The online fundraising promoters are going to do the bare minimum they promised just to get paid. Check out their rates, do you really think someone could spend days or weeks promoting a campaign on just a few hundred dollars.
Paid crowdfunding promotion works on quantity, not quality, and there is very little accountability in the industry.
But the good news is that you can promote your own crowdfunding campaign without quitting your day job. If you learn the process behind raising money in the crowd, the individual tasks become much less time-consuming.
Using your Email List for Crowdfunding Promotion
Your email list is pure gold for promoting your crowdfunding campaign and some of the best marketing you’ll do is through regular newsletters and special email messages.
But you need to use your email list strategically. Get people onboard with your campaign months before the launch by asking their opinion or input on different parts of the campaign. Talk to them actively about your thoughts on the cause and why it’s so important.
Leading up to the campaign, send out a series of emails highlighting a specific person’s story that has been effected by the cause (or has been helped by the product). Make it personal and make a connection.
Fiverr.com is a favorite of mine for marketing and smaller promotion tasks. Fiverr is a freelancer marketplace where ‘gigs’ are posted starting at $5 with upgrades for a little more. Not all of the promotion gigs are worth your money but it can be an extremely cheap way to try out different services. I would much rather spend $5 on something and find out it doesn’t work than spend hundreds. Try out a few gigs to help design and promote your campaign to find which ones work best.
Crowdfunding promotion has gotten a bad name with the growing list of spammers and false promises but I really believe that you can do promotion correctly and it can help your reach your crowdfunding goal. If you decide to seek crowdfunding services from a third-party, be critical of the offer and the promise of huge traffic to your campaign. Ask questions about the relevance of distribution lists and how the provider will actually drive engagement and interaction with people on the list.
Plan your campaign out with time for pre-launch and you won’t need crowdfunding promotion services. You can get your message out for free with these 19 ways to promote your crowdfunding campaign I highlighted in a recent post. Don’t forget to check out some of the crowdfunding resources on our ebook & services page to put your crowdfunding promotion campaign on auto-pilot.
