Building your first 1000 followers on Kickstarter before you launch can seem like a daunting task, however gathering an energetic crowd before you launch your Kickstarter is key to success. 

Therefore your Kickstarter marketing system needs to be focused on building a community of people who are excited for your launch and are eager to tell others about it. 

This process is often called ‘pre-marketing’. You are marketing your Kickstarter before it is live so that you fund as quickly as possible.

At Crowdfunding Nerds we specialize in helping seasoned publishers such as Modiphius Entertainment and Magpie Games, as well as first time creators such as Kinson Key Games of Galactic Cruise, to build momentum and excite future backers before launching.  

Since 2019 we have helped over 200 tabletop specific projects fund over $40 million on Kickstarter using a highly refined process we have coined the Virtuous Cycle. 

The Virtuous Cycle is a system we developed for our very own Kickstarter board game project Deliverance.

In this article, we will do a deep dive to uncover all the nitty gritty details of this important system so that you can launch with confidence! 

Let’s dive in. 

What Is The Virtuous Cycle?

In the vernacular of Norbert Wiener, the pioneer of cybernetics, the Virtuous Cycle is a positive feedback loop. 

It is a system by which your community of fans becomes a self-correcting force that snowballs your marketing efforts. 

The primary elements of the Virtuous Cycle are as follows:

1. Detailed Targeting Through Organic/Paid Advertising
2. Email Capture
3. Email Automation & Community Integration 
4. Community Mobilization

In other words, the Virtuous Cycle involves guiding interested leads to your landing page through paid and organic advertising, winning the right to communicate with that person across several platforms by engaging with and maintaining a community across said platforms, and

using an optimized, automated system to guide the whole process.

Leveraging Community Engagement

The key to success with this system is by rewarding community engagement with more access to your project and its development process.

By taking simple steps and receiving useful insights about your future launch, your community will be encouraged to continue to engage with your marketing efforts.

For example, a fan may first submit their email. They are then rewarded with access to your community space where they can directly communicate with you. 

We recommend Facebook Groups for this as Meta ads are an integral part of this process which we will cover later. The community posts that receive the highest engagement can then be used as subjects to incorporate into your email marketing. 

Once you have captured a potential backer’s email and they are in your community space, you can start to direct them to other socials so that when you launch you can reach them with many different touch points that will encourage them to back on day one.

Project Development Is Marketing

Developing your Kickstarter before launch is part of your marketing efforts. Your growing community can offer suggestions to improve your product and Kickstarter page before you hit the live button.

By doing this, your community can experience and enjoy the iteration process of project design. This creates a powerful relationship between you and your growing fans, the goal is to create an environment by which your backers feel like the success of your Kickstarter is their accomplishment too.

Meta Advertising

Meta is used for advertising due to its robust targeting options. It also has a huge demographic that you can tap into.

By properly a/b testing messaging and imagery through Meta ads, you can start to gather information that will help you shape your final Kickstarter page. 

There is so much to be said here but the key points are to:

• Capture emails through a landing page that you build (don’t use the inbuilt Meta lead forms)
• Use targeted interests (Kickstarter + product type + theme)
• Leverage segmented ad sets by prospecting (excluding page visitors) and retargeting (including page visitors) 
• Ad messaging should focus on clearly stating what your project is
• Build intrigue with compelling visuals that focus on theme/lifestyle and your best art (get a click, don’t write a book)
• Scale your spend gradually with results (this takes time)

Some of our Crowdfunding Nerds internal benchmarks to figure out if the ads are performing well are as follows:

• Unique Cost Per Click ~$0.20
• Unique Click-Through Rate ~2.00%
• Cost Per 1000 Impressions ~$5-$15
• Landing Page Conversion Rate ~10%
• Cost Per Lead (email capture) ~$3

If you are not hitting these numbers then you need to tweak your ad: 

• Imagery/videos
• Messaging
• Targeting
• Landing page

If you still can’t hit these numbers after much adjusting, then it could mean that the market is not responding well to your project. Consider retooling things before launching on Kickstarter. 

Unfortunately, Meta is moving more and more towards forcing advertisers to use AI options when setting up their ads. The need for keen senses to turn off these debilitating preferences is becoming more apparent. Ironically, these changes are making it harder for non-professionals to set up their own ads and do things themselves. Professionals who work in Meta everyday are able to notice these changes and turn them off. Long story short, you need to pay particular attention when setting up your Meta ads so that you don’t accidentally use an AI option that could unintentionally hinder the results of your Meta advertising.

Landing Page

Your landing page has one objective, to capture an email.

For this reason it is very important that an email can be captured at first without any scrolling.

Scrolling should quickly answer the question of “who I am” and “what I am doing”. For example, if you ran a tabletop game where players take on different roles from the story of Robin Hood, you could easily introduce the world by explaining outright that the object of the game is to gather a band of brigands and hide out in the woods for ill-fated tax collectors. 

Your landing page should also showcase your best art or product images. You want to build intrigue so that someone will submit their email to get more information. 

Your landing page should not have any other links which someone can click. They should only be able to submit an email, learn more about your project or go back. 

You will want to optimize your landing page for mobile devices as this will be the primary resolution on which your landing page will be experienced. 

Community Space

Now that you have captured an email, the next step is to introduce them to your community space.

By leveraging email automation you can welcome the individual, shortly introduce yourself and invite them to ask a question or meet other fans. 

The key to this automated email is to keep it short and simple. 

Once in your community space, you can pin a post to your Kickstarter at the top and encourage them to follow your pre-launch page to be notified as soon as the campaign is live. 

You can also encourage your community to spread the word and to share your project with those in their own personal and professional networks.

Email Communication

Whilst in this pre-marketing phase we recommend sending at least one email out a month, the frequency of emails can be scaled up as you get closer to launch. Once your campaign is live we would recommend sending a weekly email out. 

Segmentation is the process of email marketing which allows you to send frequent communications to those who are actually opening your emails and to start to remove those who are not.

By leveraging email segmentation, you will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and focus on those who are most likely to support you on your Kickstarter journey. You can continue to reward community engagement through opening emails by giving them a behind-the-scenes look at the development process.

Use the posts in your community with the most engagement as the bedrock of these emails. This is also a great place to cover any news coverage or reviews your project is receiving. 

Kickstarter Story Optimization

By generating a Preview Link to your Kickstarter Story, you can start to get feedback from your growing community about the layout of your page and the pledge levels you are offering.

Creating a poll in your community is also a great way to gather information that you can apply before you launch. 

Much like your email landing capture page you will want to ensure that your Kickstarter Story page is optimized for mobile devices.

You want to grab people’s attention with no more than 3 scrolls on a mobile device. You should quickly answer the questions “what is this” and “what makes this special”. 

It is also important that you list the components of your pledge and the pricing clearly on the page so the backers can work out the value of your offer. 

In Conclusion 

You need a crowd to crowdfund. In order to gather a crowd before your Kickstarter launch, you need to leverage pre-marketing. We recommend establishing a system, the Virtuous Cycle, by which you can start to use your own community to spread the word of your Kickstarter and refine your marketing messaging. 

By leveraging Meta ads, email marketing and community spaces, you can start to iterate your project, improve your service, engage your customers and build a thriving community that will back you on day one of the Kickstarter launch.

This process has been tried and tested on both small and large scale projects. There is no reason why this cannot work for you if you put in the elbow grease to set this up.

We're always here to help, so feel free to contact us at Crowdfunding Nerds if you have any questions.

We wish you the very best in your Kickstarter adventure!