By Stanley Meytin
Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular funding option, for upstarts and established businesses alike. But with so many entrepreneurs turning to crowdfunding, how exactly do you make your campaign stand out?
The short answer: Leverage the advantages of video to get your message across.
Having a video is incredibly important -- in fact, it’s borderline essential. Research from MWP points out that creating a video increases your chances of getting funded by nearly 85 percent. Here's how to create a more effective video and campaign, step by step.
Introduce the Face(s) Behind the Idea
Many people looking to back an idea want to feel comfortable with not only the idea itself but the people behind the idea. It happens all the time in real life; just watch "Shark Tank" or "The Profit." Investors want to learn more about the entrepreneur’s history, how they came up with their business idea, what motivates them, their ability to make good decisions, the amount of work they have put in already and the amount of work they are willing to put in going forward.
The Solution: In your video, introduce yourself and provide some insight into you as a person in addition to your business idea.
Show the Business Idea in Action
Whether you’re offering a service or a product, you’ll definitely want to show it in action. If it’s a business service, explain how it works, why it’s a good idea, what value it brings to its clients and how it turns a profit. If it’s a product, show the product by itself, explain how it works, show it being used, explain how’s it made and explain why its worthy of buying. This part of the video is essential and often focused on for the right reasons. Make sure that you convey everything in an attention-grabbing manner as well.
The Solution: Highlight a common problem or issue and explain how your product or service addresses this issue. Show how everything works so the viewer understands what the customer will get.
Explain What You Want and Why You Want It
The climate of crowdsourcing is evolving; startups aren’t the only types of businesses securing funding anymore.Asking for too much or too little can be harmful so you really have to get your facts straight and be clear when conveying the point across.
The solution: Explain to the viewers why you need the money, what the funding will be used for and provide some past information as well as future projections to help strengthen your reasoning. It doesn’t hurt to have a call to action either with encouragement to invest, donate and/or simply just help spread the word.
Be Entertaining Where Possible
Be interesting and grab your audience's attention. This goes a long way in practice. Whether you make your video creative, funny or just simply package it in a unique way, your video will be much more successful if people want to watch it. Ultimately, if you want your viewers to stick around until your call to action, keep them engaged. Otherwise they won’t make it that far.
The Solution: Incorporate some humor into your video by either presenting a problem or introducing your product or service in a comedic way, throwing in some witty puns, or perhaps even use some satire.
Get to the Point
You have a limited amount of time to capture your audience’s attention and encourage them to watch the rest of your video. Be concise. Don’t take more time than needed to get your point across. Last but not least, keep in mind that you can use annotations, descriptions and photos to help get less important parts across too.
The Solution: Present the problem, introduce your product/service, show how it solves the problem, share what the purpose of your campaign is, explain why you are looking for money and then explain what you will do with it. For an added bonus, you can share information about things you may do in the future with the product or service. But don’t embellish and don’t digress!
Offer Tiered Rewards
Utilizing and giving away desirable tiered awards can be an excellent way to get larger pledges. In the case of the actual video, spending a bit of time telling backers about some of the interesting and limited things you may be giving away may push them to pledge a larger amount for exclusivity.
The Solution: Incentivize backers with rewards that are enticing and worth the increased donation. Get creative and try to offer something of value or something that is exclusive and otherwise not available.
Finally, Model Your Campaign After Other Successful Projects
Much like everything else, we can take a look at where others have succeeded and learn from it. Take the Micro 3D Printer, an affordable consumer 3D printer, which raised $3,401,361 from a $50,000 goal. Or the PonoPlayer/PonoMusic, a music device and service that raised $6,225,354 from a $800,000 goal.
So, what’s stopping you from funding the business of your dreams?
Stanley Meytin is the founder and Creative Director at True Film Production, a New York City-based video production company that creates videos for businesses and brands all over the world.
