In 2012 Amanda Palmer made history by raising $1.2 million on Kickstarter. The secret to her success in her words: “my backers— almost twenty-five thousand of them— had been following my personal story for years”.
Marketers often get obsessed with targeting, the main headline on the landing page, sales letter, video script, etc.. and forget about the most important part which is building relationships and trust.
In this article, I’ll share the story of my friend Emaline Delapaix where for a total of only $24 spent, she ran a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Not only that but for each €1 spent on Facebook ads she made €37.48 back.
The secret? She is no stranger to her fans. Through the years she has shared her personal story with them, from her struggle with depression and bad relationships, to her activism against animal cruelty.
There was a point in her career where she got sick for two months that affected her income negatively; not just the inability to work but also in the form of medical bills. Consequently, she was not able to fly back home to see her family after five years of living abroad.
Having experience with FB ads, I suggested running ads targeting her FB page fans and how it wouldn’t cost much to reach her 3000+ fans via ads.
Emaline made a post on her fan page which I promoted via Facebook ads to make sure a maximum of fans would see it.
So how did the campaign go?
For a $24 ad spent, we reached 956 fans and got 103 clicks to the crowdfunding page.
But most importantly €815 was raised as a result. 100% of the Traffic came from Facebook.
Most importantly, as a result of the campaign, she was able to visit her family in Australia.
One of her fans even sent a private message apologizing for not being able to help before the beginning of the next week.
Now how often do marketers get messages saying: ‘I am out of money, I am sorry for not being able to buy your product yet.’ Most likely when marketers get messages, it is people complaining about seeing their ads.
When marketing a service or a product, there are two possible approaches:
- Throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will stick: spend a lot of money trying to reach a large audience while pushing a sale message.
- Spend as little as $1 a day, building a relationship and trust over time. An audience you’ve built a relationship with is more likely to convert, and at a lower cost.
A while ago a friend got her laptop infected by Malware. It blocked her screen, saying it was the police and she needed to pay a fine.
I helped her get rid of Malware, and later while talking with her father, he revealed that he asked if she trusted that the cleaned everything. She replied that it’s not that she trusted the software, but that she trusted her friend.
It is the same with marketing. People trust their friend’s endorsements over any other form of marketing.
In the A.D.D age, where companies bombard users with thousands of ads, if you want to get noticed and influence people to take action, then you’d be wise to start by focusing on building trust.
So ask yourself: are you building trust with your audiences, or just blindly serving content?
Want to read more by Dennis Yu? For more content follow him here:
https://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/author/dennis