How to get PR / Coverage for Your Crowdfunding Campaign
A good story goes a long way, but it’s even more powerful when paired with the right kind of distribution. If you’re launching a crowdfunding campaign, one channel that you need to pay attention to is direct outreach to bloggers, journalists, and other influencers. When used correctly it can be a powerful driver of traffic to your crowdfunding page.
The truth is, very few people do it well, and most of the process requires manual work. But there are some ways to make it faster, easier, and more useful to the people you’re contacting.
Let’s take a deep dive into how to write a good hook and story, provide references and background materials, and craft a relevant pitch that fits an individual influencer’s beat or publication, and how to structure the conversation so that you don’t go too fast too early.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind…
- Be in their world before asking for anything
- Short, to the point, and story focused
- Personalize by theme/category
- Easy access to video/photos/copy
- Offer to provide more info, if they need it
Be in Their World Before Asking for Anything
Although you may not have a lot of time for this, the single most powerful driver of coverage is an existing relationship. If at all possible, develop one with your list of influencers before you email or message them with your story and link to your campaign.
This can include things like commenting on their blog, sharing something they wrote on a social channel with a “hat tip to @twitterhandle,” or simply emailing them something that you think they would find extremely interesting but may not have come across. Be careful not to waste their time — if you’re genuinely connecting over something that has value to them that’s one thing; if you’re just another person trying to grab their attention with a cheap hook, you’ll go right to their spam folder (sometimes mentally, and sometimes literally).
Short, to the Point, and Story Focused
Influencers are busy people; they are constantly receiving long-winded, boring pitches from self-serving entrepreneurs. If you can nail your product down to 1–3 sentences and a story they might actually care about, they are more likely to pay attention.
The same goes for things like email headlines, which should be descriptive and favor directness over linkbait or catchy titles. Catchy titles can sometimes work, but most often they’ll annoy the person you’re sending them to, and unless you’re a truly amazing copywriter and content creator they’ll click through to something much less interesting than they expected.
Personalize by Theme / Category
Along the lines of reaching out on something that a journalist or blogger might care about, find themes and categories, and personalize your outreach based on those.
If you’re already creating content for your Kickstarter page and sharing on social channels, you should be able to easily use the themes there to write a quick email for each category of influencer that you can tweak and lightly personalize. Providing them with a relevant idea / pitch that is based on a topic they already cover is the most likely way you’ll get them to open, read, and care about your email.
Easy Access to Video, Photos, Copy
Whatever you do, always provide simple, direct access to any assets you have. Sometimes the person you’re reaching out to might be willing to do a longer story, but sometimes they only have time to post a quick paragraph and link to your campaign, so make it easy for them to do so.
This could include having a press kit on your website, making assets easily available on Dropbox or Google Drive, or simply including a list of assets they can request directly from you. Don’t make them guess what you might have or what might be useful; they simply don’t have the time and yours is one of tens if not hundreds of ideas they’ll receive on a given day.
Offer to Provide More Info, if They Need It
This is a very subtle part of outreach. If you think your story is worthy of more space, and that it would resonate with the individual journalist / blogger / influencer, say so in direct and simple terms. If at all possible, let your backers or current customers and users speak for you.
Here are a couple of examples:
“If you need more info or want to connect to one of our early users / customers, let me know — there are some powerful stories about what we’re doing, including Laura Miera who’s using our test version already to XY.”
“Think this could be a deeper story that fits [influencer / journalist coverage area] — happy to provide more info, but honestly our [backers, customers] often provide the best stories about what we do, like this tweet or this video.”
And last but not least, the golden rule of outreach is to be respectful of the time of each person you contact. If they aren’t available to cover your story or pass it along to someone else, that’s ok. Move on to the next contact, and recognize that just like you they’ve got multiple priorities in their professional and personal lives going on at a given moment.
In addition to crafting a succinct, clear story and reaching the right people, understand that you’ll encounter a lot of rejection, or worse, silence. Everyone, including the people you are trying to reach, is insanely busy. There is a ton of content coming at all of us every second of the day. So be prepared and keep plugging away at your outreach; it only takes one influencer to bring you a lot of attention.
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