The BEST Way Brands Can Use Kickstarter For Their Next Product Launch

Are you an existing brand that is looking to use Kickstarter for your next product launch, but you’re not quite sure how the process works? 

No worries, you’ve come to the right place. I’m going to walk you through the process of what that looks like–covering how you should market your product when you already have an existing audience and you’re selling existing products, but you’re using a third party platform to launch those products. 

Why Kickstarter?

First off, a brand would want to use Kickstarter because it’s an excellent way to get your inventory covered through a pre-order campaign. It also allows you to get your art and product in front of more people, thus helping you grow your audience and grow your list using the built-in organic engine. 

When you have an existing audience and you’re looking to do a product launch, Kickstarter is going to be a really good platform for you.

How it Works – Two Kinds of Marketing

Now that you know the reason for choosing Kickstarter, let’s jump into how it works. 

When you are an existing brand, you have two things to account for–the new and the old. 

You’re looking at two kinds of marketing, new and existing. Existing means an email list or social media following or people who have already used and loved your products. If your product is intended to serve those who already know about the brand then this should be easy since they’ve been with you from day one! And there is adding a new audience as well! Thinking outside of the box and promoting your product and brand to people who haven’t heard of you yet!

Existing Audience

Kickstarter isn’t just going to hand you success, you have to launch your product. Within the first 24 hours, you need to prove traction on the platform. This means you need to have a certain amount of pre-orders that come in to show Kickstarter the popularity of your product so that they will rank you on their platform and give you more organic traffic. 

But how do we achieve this?

Remember that you have two audiences, so we look at building out a marketing strategy by saying, what can we do to enroll the existing audience around this new product launch?

What type of communication can you send out to your pre-existing email list? 

What kind of VIP opportunities are you going to offer existing customers?

How are you going to encourage them to back your product? 

New Audience

The second thing you want to look at is how to build a waitlist of new people around the new products. This is important, even if your existing audience is large enough because this new waitlist is going to allow you to test your marketing message in front of a cold audience. 

The messaging that will resonate with your existing audience–who already know and trust you, and understand what your product does–is going to be very different from your marketing message to inform, educate, and nurture someone who has never heard of your brand before. 

You need to have a framework to test your headlines, your messaging, the demographics, and the offer. This is to really get a sense of what is going to convert for you through Kickstarter. If you don’t test this, you risk missing the mark of your product resonating with the Kickstarter community–meaning your launch will not do as well as you had hoped. And we don’t want that. 

Success & Profitability

But why go through all this work? Kickstarter, when done properly, can be a launch engine for your products. If you look back at some of the biggest and most successful Kickstarter campaigns, you are going to notice on the Creator profile that they’ve actually done multiple campaigns over the last decade and become very successful.

It can be very favorable and profitable to use Kickstarter, not as a one-off product launch mechanism, but as a thing that you can go to over and over again. Considering the built-in audience that Kickstarter has, it is really great to be able to introduce your brand to new buyers anytime you have a new launch coming up. 

Shopify -or- Kickstarter? That is the question!

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