How do you get the word out about your crowdfunding project?
Family and friends can give you a first push—but even the most connected, popular creator will eventually run out of people they know. What’s next? Well, you will need to start converting people who don’t know you and might at first not trust you. You’re going to tell people to spend their hard-earned money on a product that, by the definition of crowdfunding, might never get built.
Sounds scary, doesn’t it?
That’s why, be it from digital advertising or affiliate marketing, conversion rates are often low and return on investment is severely capped. Fortunately, there is a fairly simple way to give your product validation and overcome the challenge of fulfillment uncertainty. This simple way is media coverage.
At Funded Today, we’ve been landing our clients media coverage for years, and our clients have been featured in quality online publications thousands of times. And yes, our clients have been given validation from small niche magazines to big hitters, like Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Mashable.
Today, we want to introduce you to three publications you might not first have on your radar—but that do amazing with crowdfunding based on rapport-building and conversion rates.
#1: Yanko Design. Yanko Design is an online publication focusing on product design. Whether your product is a novel kind of ice cube maker or a water-saving shower head, they got you covered with great reach towards relevant, innovative audiences. Early adopters, like the ones who often back Kickstarter campaigns, roam this site frequently. One thing they look at specifically is visual content—your campaign video and photography make-or-break your feature on Yanko Design a bit more than your features on other websites. Definitely make sure you nail those if you want to get in and be successful!
#2 Cool Material. Who typically backs crowdfunding campaigns? The most represented demographic on Kickstarter are relatively-affluent urban men between 25 and 40. Guess who is the core demographic of Cool Material readers? Relatively-affluent urban men between 25 and 40. There is perhaps no other publication on the planet (at least not with this kind of reach) that nails the core Kickstarter demographic so perfectly. It’s no wonder that Cool Material and its newsletters (such as Shift, Elevator, and a few others) produce some of the highest conversion rates for crowdfunding projects. Japanese bath towels and a basketball hoop you can take anywhere are some of the dozens of successful campaigns we’ve landed Cool Material for.
#3: New Atlas. The absolute pinnacle, the cream of the crop, the cherry on top, the undisputed master of conversion rates for crowdfunding campaigns is… New Atlas. This is a real shocker for many creators, but while some of the other publications we’ve listed here top out at amazing 8 to 10% conversion rates at scale, New Atlas has produced as high as 25% for us. While we ultimately can only make educated guesses for the reason of those astronomically-high conversion rates, we believe that it comes from the different make-up of the publication. Most articles on New Atlas are not about new products, so those articles that feature innovative ones stand out much more here than elsewhere. In either case, New Atlas is perhaps the best publication on the internet for crowdfunding projects, be they superb rechargeable batteries or rubber band miniguns.
We will be discussing how to write the perfect pitch to journalists working at these publications in one of our upcoming blog posts, but before we go, we’d like to invite you to think about what getting featured in Yanko Design, Cool Material, and New Atlas could mean for your campaign. Then, we’d like you to reach out to one of our client specialists and discuss how we can help you to make it happen. We have partnered with all three of these top-notch publications, along with several others, and can actually guarantee you to get featured in them. Let’s lift your campaign to the next level together!
About The Author
Pascal Friedmann joined Funded Today in 2016, and was appointed as Earned Media/PR Director shortly thereafter. He’s a PR and Advertising graduate of Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. Before joining Funded Today, he sharpened his marketing skills in political campaigning, the insurance industry, and higher education. In his free time, he enjoys cooking and being a mediocre basketball player.
