Helpful Tips For Your Campaign — Part 1
Building a campaign on Fanmix can be a daunting experience.
We created this document to help you design your campaign in order to maximize your potential for success! Of course if this document isn’t enough you’re more than welcome to contact us and we will help you through it.
There are three primary components to your campaign and we will go through them one at a time.
Step 1 — The Raise
What are you planning to create: a single or an album?
If you’re an established artist with a few hundred hours in the studio under your belt you’ve probably got a good idea on the amount of effort it takes to create either an album or a single. If you’ve never recorded in the studio you might not have an idea of what it might take. For a truly professional recording, including mixing and post production, it could take 1–3 weeks at 8 hours a day, five days a week. A top level recording studio can cost upwards of $450 per day, and mastering might cost you another $1,000.
5 days* $450 + $1,000 = $3,250
When you enter the studio you need to be ready to record because the clock is running, and time is money!
We can see that if you’re going to record a single, a minimum of $5,000 is a good idea, and $10,000 is probably a better idea.
That’s where the length of time of your campaign and the number of fans that follow you come into play. To raise $5,000, we recommend a minimum of 180 days if you have at least 10,000 followers across social media platforms. We strongly recommend building a social media following before attempting to raise money for an album. You can’t bring your fans into the mix if you have no fans! We’re not going to get into building a fanbase in the 21st century, but creating a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram strategy is vital because it will directly impact your ability to raise money. In short, think of your social media following as the evidence of your career, a trail of your presence in the minds of others.
There’s no formula for raising money via an appeal on social media that works 100% of the time, but we can give you an idea of what to expect.
Direct appeals typically have a 4% conversion rate, which means for every 100 people you ask for money only 4 will say “yes.” If you have 10,000 followers that means you can maybe expect 400 people to open their wallets to support you. The minimum pledge Fanmix will allow is $15, and 400 pledges will get you in the studio making music.
We’ve found it’s easier to ask people to support you through pledges than it is to ask people to buy an album that is already created. There’s a unique sense of joy and ownership when you listen to a piece of music you helped to create, and when you engage your fans with updates during the process that sense of participation is a very real thing. If you haven’t been able to sell 400 copies of your music before Fanmix, you will once you begin to participate in the Fanmix ecosystem.
Prior to starting your raise, Fanmix can help you build the profile you need by unifying your social media and streaming presence into a single platform. Direct your fans to Fanmix to follow your career, and when you’re ready to raise money they will be ready to support you! We call it a “positive feedback loop.”
We hope you enjoyed this primer on Fanmix crowdfunding. In our next article, we’ll discuss Step 2 of building your campaign: the promotional materials.
