Facebook Ads for Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaign

Facebook ads for Kickstarter are usually underestimated when it comes to advertising for Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns. If there’s one marketing platform that works exceptionally well to help your Kickstarter campaign, it’s Facebook. The channel has everything you need to get high-quality leads and backers for your project – 1.4 billion people, demographically targeted advertising, dozens of ad styles and formats, plenty of room to test and have fun with your advertisement! 

All you need is a well-executed strategy that covers your campaign timeline, your objectives, and your budget. Here’s our quick guide to help you understand the basics of Facebook ads for Kickstarter. 

Divide Your Facebook Ad Strategy into Three Campaign Phases

When it comes to Facebook advertising for Kickstarter campaigns, it is always recommended that you break down your ad strategy into three essential phases: 

• Before Launch: You will need backers and a solid email list before you actually launch your campaign. The reason? You want money to roll in right from the moment of launch. You don’t have the time then to hunt for backers. So you need to have a campaign ready before launch to attract backers. Once you’ve created awareness and built an email list, you can then launch your campaign. 
• During Launch: During the campaign, the goal is to get more noise, more backers. The more, the better, however, at this stage, you also need to start establishing your reputation and target only specific people who can be considered as hot leads. 
• After Launch: This is now the real deal! So you’ve had a successful run on Kickstarter. It is now time to get more customers, the people who will buy your product/service while being fully confident of your credibility – thanks to your Kickstarter campaign. Remember, Kickstarter helps build credibility! 

Create a Target Audience Profile

When you’re just setting out, you won’t need very detailed targeting as the purpose is to keep a broad audience, however, even if it’s a broad audience, you still need to know who is your ideal target. 

So for example, for a smart weighing scale, you might want to target fitness experts and enthusiasts of a certain age, or perhaps belonging to a certain country or city. 

With this information, you create your first pre-launch ad with the objective of creating awareness. Facebook has multiple objectives to choose from, but for a new business that’s just setting out, Awareness is one of the best objectives to choose from. 

During the launch phase, you can target:

• People on your email list 
• Website visitors who didn’t opt-in for subscription 
• Lookalike audiences based on your first set of successful audience 

After the launch, you can target: 

• Your email list including supporters and backers
• New people who you want to attract as potential customers
• New website visitors after the campaign

Using the Right Types of Facebook Ads for Kickstarter Campaign

Facebook has at least a dozen ad formats and types to choose from. For your pre-launch ads, use video ads to talk about your brand, carousel ads to highlight your products and lead ads to capture emails. 

When you move into Phase 2 (during the campaign), you can use single image ads to talk about your product – keep the focus only on your product. Create special offer ads, create Kickstarter campaign support ads, create product ads. At this stage, people want to know as much as they can about your product, so give them the reason they need to buy or back your products. 

Post-launch ads are much more focused on selling your products and highlighting your credibility as a successful Kickstarter campaign. You will be banking on your reputation so video ads can also make for a good investment in post-launch ads. 

Tracking Your Conversion

When you’re sending traffic to your website, you’ll need to do two things: 

• Conversion tracking: Know how your ad spend is transitioning into sales 
• Growing your audience: Continuously grow your audience with look-alike audience targeting 

Kickstarter, unfortunately, does not allow for Facebook Pixel tracking (cookies used on your website to track conversions from Facebook ads) which is a huge bummer! 

But, there’s a workaround. 

Use Google Analytics for detailed conversion tracking. This may require you to reach out to a Kickstarter marketing freelancer or specialist as you’ll need to set up specific parameters for your ad links. 

For growing your audience using Facebook’s Look-alike audience set, send out a survey to your existing email accounts and ask them what they think about your product, why they bought or backed it, etc. Based on the information gathered, you can then create a look-alike audience and generate ads that will target new audiences. 

Keep Gathering and Testing

Throughout the campaign, keep observing your ads. Some ads may be your winning ads (measured by lower cost of spend but highest conversions), some may be losing ads (measured by the high cost of spending but low conversions). 

You May Also Like to Read:

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

Choose the winning ones and build on them by A/B testing various variables in the ad. So say you have a winning ad that targets men between the age of 25 – 45. Now, as a test, change just one variable in the ad – that is the age. The next time you run the ad, change the age to 60 and measure your response. 

Keep gathering new insights to build new audiences. Keep testing and measuring the performance of your ads against new data and create a sort of record that documents your perfect target audience, your winning ads, your best copy, etc. 

Facebook ads for Kickstarter campaigns are a different ball game and requires strategic effort, but once you have a clear strategy, you can make your campaign a sounding success. 

If you’d like to discuss your campaign with a marketing agency that specializes in Kickstarter campaigns, feel free to reach out to us by filling out the contact form below. We’d love to know how we can help you on this journey!  

Check out the videos below for more.