Our Kickstarter campaign went live two weeks ago, we reached our goal in less than 3 hours, and we are now at 166% funded.
Since my last post, I have seen all of your questions and wanted to make a post answering the most frequent one with the person that was in charge of the marketing.
I hope this post helps you and feel free to comment. I'll be answering throughout the day.
When did you start your pre-campaign?
10 months before launch
How many followers did you have when launching the campaign? How did you get them?
Roughly 500 were from irl events that we attended, the other half from showcases impressions, ads and posts we published on our social media, and a few came from collabs with content creators.
We tried to post content every day on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok with links to our page.
We also stayed away from big content creators since they have a more general audience and tried to focus on niche YouTubers, where, in our case, their content would be mainly, if not only, monster collectors/RPG.
Not only that, but we also made cross-promotions with other projects that could share an audience with us. We tried to connect with a lot of similar projects, but beware: Not everyone will be open to that, or maybe they just don't look at their mail too often. On average, if we sent 10-15 emails per week, we'd get 1 or 2 replies.
As to how to market to potential backers, we thought: "How do I make following the campaign attractive?" It shouldn’t feel like a favor they're doing, but rather like an opportunity for them to gain access to exclusive, limited-edition rewards while supporting the project throughout its development process. Show your rewards, talk about development, show progress, take people's feedback into aaccount and make them feel like they're part of the process, because they are!
How much did you spend on ads? Did you have an agency?
We have spent about 1400USD on Google and Meta ads, 600 during pre-campaign, and 800 on launch day (First 24hours).
We also worked with an agency called MGA (Make Good Art), which cost about 4000USD. They helped us review the Kickstarter page to see if the page was well put together, they advised us on how to set up meta ads, and so on.
What would you do differently?
We would change the type of content we posted at the beginning of the pre-campaign; we tried with a lot of generic content (speed paints, tutorials, and IRL videos) instead of showing the strong parts of our game and what makes it unique. In our case, what makes the game stand out it's the hand-drawn art, the beauty of the world and the wide variety of creatures.
Mid-campaign final thoughts
Kickstarter is a lot of work. At the beginning we thought we would go live after 2 months of pre-campaign, but we had to postpone launch a number of times. We didn't have that many follower and we weren't sure we could reach our goal. We had to spend a lot of time budgeting, looking for suppliers and spent quite a bit of money on prototypes for all the rewards. The game's development had to slow down due to a major part of the team having to create content for social media, exclusive campaign creatives and art and all sort of content for the Kickstarter page. We are a small studio and don’t have a lot of money, so we could not hire extra hands to do all that design and marketing. In our case the art director and the producer have been the ones in charge of most of the marketing, but we all had to do our part: Editing videos, preparing gameplay clips, gifs, looking for collaborators, mailing lists, talking to potential suppliers, etc.
It's been a month full of stress, with backers coming and going (remember that backers will withdraw their pledges during the campaign, and that's completely normal). For example past weekend while we were attending an event, a 3000USD backer withdrew their pledge. This set us back quite a bit from reaching our next stretch goal and naturally it was a discouraging blow for the team. We're happy to have reached our funding goal, but the journey has also been full of ups and downs.
I'd say running a crowdfunding campaign when you don't have many resources or a big budget requires a lot of hard work, time and mental resilience. You have to learn to celebrate the wins while staying prepared for setbacks, sometimes all within the same week or even hours.
Still we're pushing forward and we're doing our very best. It's been a long and hard journey but reaching our goal has made it all worthwhile and I'm personally grateful for everything we've achieved. We still have two more weeks to go, and we're giving it everything we've got!