05 Jul How to Carry Out Research for Your Crowdfunding Campaign – Part 1

According to Indiegogo, most backers are most active and engaged on a Monday.
Why is this important for you to know? Because a crowdfunding campaign is only successful if there are adequate research and planning to back it up.

When you decide to crowdfund your project, the first step is to research and plan.
You need to know which crowdfunding platform will suit your project best, who your target audience is and what is the scope of your project in the market.
This blog post is to help you understand how to conduct research and how to plan for your campaign.

Why do most crowdfunding projects fail?

Project creators with great products and massive potential fail to make crowdfunding work for them because they miss out on conducting the preliminary research.
If you don’t do the research, you can’t do the planning and if you don’t do the planning, you won’t succeed in crowdfunding.
As easy as crowdfunding may sound, one does not just crowdfund.
To truly make it work, you have to put in the work.
Confusing Product Market Research with Crowdfunding Research
You’re probably thinking that you’ve already got all the market research needed to justify your product.
When you launch a crowdfunding campaign though, you have to carry out a different kind of research.

Crowdfunding research involves the following:

• How do other projects in your category or industry score on crowdfunding platforms?
• What is the success/failure rates of similar projects?
• How do you get backers for your project?
• Which crowdfunding platform will suit you best?
• Where will your potential audience be found?
• What are the features/factors that made similar projects successful?
• What are the features/factors that made similar projects fail?

As an activity, we urge you to check out similar projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo to have an idea of how your project will score on crowdfunding.
All of these are important metrics to measure. You’ll learn to avoid mistakes that were made by other competitors. You’ll also be able to develop an insight for your own product and how to improve it.
The more data-centric your research is the stronger your planning. Most entrepreneurs would be so caught up in ‘building’ the product or project that they fail to record numbers that matter.

Research on Your Crowdfunding Audience

Your crowdfunding audience is invaluable to your business. They are your supporters, contributors, customers and brand evangelists!
So it’s really important to understand them and to know as much as you can about them.
The research will help you to identify with paper precision your target customer so that the rest of your crowdfunding marketing efforts can be effective and fun.
Remember, there is no product or service that is completely unique to the market. This means you are competing against giants as well as against other successful businesses. What makes yours unique enough for the audience to invest time and effort in?
Audience research is CRUCIAL to the success of your project, so don’t skip it and don’t, ‘assume’ that you know your audience.

Build a Checklist of Important Things to Research On

With thousands of businesses taking part in crowdfunding campaigns, you really don’t have to reinvent the wheels. There is ample information out there to help you know how to create the perfect launch plan. All you need to do is, research!
Create a checklist that will include:
✅ Articles covering similar products, the publications they are in, and the authors.
✅ The various projects and community to see who the backers are.
✅ Pinterest boards with ads or pictures for products similar to yours.
✅Competition analysis on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
✅ If you are on Kickstarter, use Kicktraq to get a glimpse of what happened in the course of the project.
✅Do a search for backlinks of companies raising funds on crowdfunding platforms. This will help you see where they source their links from.
✅ Look at similar projects see how they’ve organized their messaging, how much money they raised, how many backers, what date they launched.
If you’re way too busy, you can hire research specialists on Upwork and have them do all the info digging, including creating a backer’s list, a keyword search list and much more.

Staying Organized

With so much to do, chances are you’ll get overwhelmed with data.
To manage your data, we recommend using modern project management tools and cloud platforms that are designed for easy and on-the-go collaboration as well as data storage.
For project management, tools like Asana and Trello are great. They help you stay aligned with your deliverables so if you’ve got too much to do, invest in a project management tool.
For document management, nothing beats Google Drive.
For passwords, use LastPass which is a great tool to manage multiple accounts.
For taking notes, EverNote is the BEST. Screenshots, inspirations, to-do-lists can all be managed by EverNote.
Create a Google Spreadsheet as a Master Document that holds all the links and lists of your content assets.
Create processes as you go because in the longer run, your project will kaboom and by then it will be too late to create processes or to be organized.

We highly recommend that you conduct thorough research before you carry out any other activity.
Most people get to discover that crowdfunding isn’t really what they thought it was and it isn’t the best funding model for them.
On the other hand, most people discover that crowdfunding is exactly what they need to kickstart their project.

You May Also Like to Read:

How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Crowdfunding Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 2
How to Use Facebook Marketing to Boost Your Crowdfunding Campaign – A Beginner’s Guide, Part 3

Every business and project is different, which is why crowdfunding works well for some and not for others.
If you carry out thorough research, you will be able to identify what exactly works for you and how you can integrate that research in an action-oriented plan.