On May 18th Mitz Accessories successfully funded its new gender-equal kids clothing line on Kickstarter by 108%. We raised $37,916 with 367 backers in 30 days. During our campaign we utilized cross collaboration marketing techniques that helped us surpass our $35,000 goal.
Some of these collaborations were established well before their campaign began and some we learned from collaborating with other campaigns during their 30 day run. Below is an outline of the cross-collaboration marketing techniques that gave us the highest amount of return both during our campaign and after it ended.
1. Cross-Collaborating with other Kickstarter Campaigns
Launching a Kickstarter campaign simultaneously begins your relationship to a community of creative entrepreneurs. To support one another, Kickstarter will often ask similar simultaneously running campaigns to feature their product or service in one of their updates. Kickstarter updates go out to every single person who has backed that campaign.
Example of a cross-promotion posted in a Kickstarter update for Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls:
To see an example of the outreach template Mitz Accessories’ used, click here. It’s important that your message is quick and gives the collaborator all of the information they need to post about your campaign in their update. The easier you can make any process for someone who is promoting your campaign, the better.
2. Targeting Social Media Influencers:
Design and pitch social media updates and postings that benefit the social media influencer you’re trying to work with. Someone who has a significant following needs to be on board months in advance. Their post also needs to be in line with their target audience and branding which can be tricky at times when it comes to cross promotion.
We were lucky enough to collaborate with Marisol Morley, owner of Tiny Kitchen Treats, a cookie design service with a loyal Instagram following of 54,000. She designed a cookie bodysuit to match our popular Must Love Dinosaurs design.
3. Build a Giveaway Targeted to Your Most Popular Social Media Platform
A useful feature of the Kickstarter platform is the ability to see where the majority of your pledges are coming from. Within the first week, we could see very clearly that roughly 50% of our pledges were coming directly from Facebook shares.
To capture this momentum, we created a giveaway contest aimed at getting people to share our Kickstarter campaign on Facebook. Small contests like this helped us reach our goal exponentially.
4. Getting the Attention of Key Influencer Groups and Organizations
Before your campaign begins, create a massive list of organizations who share a relevant relationship and similar target market audience to what you’re trying to get funded. Then, reach out to each and every one of them 2-3 months before your campaign. If you can, offer to send them product samples when relevant or allow them to see your video before anyone else.
Be strategic in the way in which you reach out to these groups. Our biggest tweet came from A Mighty Girl. This inspiring organization dedicated to featuring products that promote courageous confident girls has 1.8 million followers on Facebook. On Twitter, they have 22,000 followers. By reaching out to A Mighty Girl on Twitter, we were able to get their attention.
5. Follow-Up with Previous Collaborators to Boost Your Campaign
Every time we cross-collaborated with another Kickstarter campaign, we pledged to their project. This shows a level of support that’s very appreciated. Also, every time you pledge to a campaign, you’ll automatically start receiving their updates – a great way to check in on their progress.
We imagined this group of collaborators as a team. We emailed them and called them when they had a victory. We rooted for them by sharing their campaign regularly on our social media. Very few know the stress of running a Kickstarter campaign and we were on their side.
Toward the end of our campaign when we were so close to our goal we started emailing, tweeting, and calling on this incredible group and their response was inspiring! They had our backs too and we met our goal because of their final push.
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