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Marketing Advice!

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Marketing Advice!

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delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Offline Joined: Jul 28 2012, 7:38 pm Posts: 3448 Website:	delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Mar 04 2014, 1:41 pm Marketing Advice! Quote Marketing! Talking about yourself and your work in compelling ways! Making stuff that people actually want, and getting noticed when you do stuff! All those subjects fascinate me deeply, and I'm happy to offer my perspective from my professional career working as a designer in marketing departments, as well as my own experiences with my art. Whether you have a general question or a specific question, bring it on and I'll answer it to the best of my ability (and I encourage other folks to chime in too; there is something to be learned from every experience, good or bad!).
varethane There are NEVER Too Many Men With Pointy Ears And Glowy Eyes Offline Joined: Jul 02 2009, 3:27 pm Posts: 2681 Website:	varethane There are NEVER Too Many Men With Pointy Ears And Glowy Eyes Mar 04 2014, 5:42 pm Re: Marketing Advice! Quote Wooo! A thread about the thing I suck at! I am super un-knowledgeable about marketing in all of its forms (have yet to try actual advertising, and whenever I do have an actual project I want to promote, such as a new minicomic printed or the patreon campaign begun, I run out of ideas after posting an update on the webcomic's news section and an update on one of the comic's tumblr page, and maaaaybe a post on a forum if there happens to be a relevant thread already made). I am super curious about what sort of things you learned or made use of over the course of your kickstarter campaign! Like if there are any factors that you can identify as having made a big push, that sort of thing. (I am also curious about how to put together promotional materials-- choosing the right images, writing pitches/enticing descriptions of things, and so on, but I'll stick with just places to go for promotion or to reach new people for now, since they are separate issues and I am such a marketing noob that my questions could easily turn into 'TELL ME ALL OF THE THINGS T_T' )
delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Offline Joined: Jul 28 2012, 7:38 pm Posts: 3448 Website:	delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Mar 04 2014, 8:34 pm Re: Marketing Advice! Quote All right, so Kickstarter marketing is like regular marketing, only on steroids. Everything has to be crunched into a few weeks, unlike almost every other type of marketing you want to do over the long-term. I'm still trying to unpack everything I've learned, and I'm going to be sending around surveys to people to find out more about where they found me. Here are the things I knew and expected going into it: I knew I would be banking on some of my current readers to contribute, but I was also expecting a lot of new people from my fellow artists and some of my friends/family that don't necessarily read the comic but want to see me succeed. Most of my graphics were built around trying to explain what the book would be about in the simplest terms possible. It was a lot easier than trying to describe my whole comic. I knew I had to constantly update all over the internet. I had planned graphics for Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, my forum signatures, etc. featuring art and tier rewards. The things that worked the best were of the "we're so close!" messaging: "only $8 more and we'll be at 1337!", "Will we make it to 75% before the end of the day?", "Only X books to go! Who's gonna be the one that tips it?" I knew I wanted to reach out to other artists. Getting their art directly tied to the rewards would allow their actions to speak for their endorsement of me, moreso than, "Here's Del, she's my friend, give her money!", and I was able to call on a lot of my friends for advice on tiers, donations of artwork, and promotion. I knew I wanted my revised pages online before I started the campaign. I assumed I would be getting a lot of hits to my comic, and I wanted the beginning to be easy to understand. I knew how to work with printers and get quotes from them because I had done it in my career. I could write a whole post on this, but the short of it is, know what you want and check with at least three or four of them for the best price. Also, don't be afraid of the telephone; some of the best printers I've worked with are rubbish at email. I knew I wanted to start it at a particular time of the year so I would have stock for convention season. I also wanted the sting of holiday spending to wear off a little. I knew it was my first Kickstarter and I knew I wanted to make it as low-stress as a Kickstarter could be. I went with a three-week campaign instead of a four-week campaign, I set a very minimal goal for myself, and I make sure all my less-than-$100 tiers could fit in a single padded envelope and wouldn't cost me much time or effort to create. I knew I didn't want a lot of physical junk in my tiers (t-shirts, jewelry, charms, greeting cards) because they don't seem to do so well and they're just more work to try to ship. The things I included were things I had already made (the postcards), things I was planning to make anyway (the card game), or things I could delegate to another artist to make (bookmark, the Reggie statue). I had heard at a Kickstarter advice panel in October some kind of crude advice that "people really hate losers, but people really love winners", and there was a study analyzing the language most correlated with successful Kickstarters I found particularly helpful in terms of using phrases that sounded confident in your success versus unsure/desperate. This was another great reason to have other artists involved; when I couldn't muster the energy to be confident, I often found it easier to talk about other artists and the rewards they had contributed, because then I could be excited about them instead of me. I knew that there's a psychology to how much funding you get in the first part of the campaign and people extrapolating how well the campaign would do based on that, so I emailed a bunch of people before it started and specifically encouraged them to donate on the first day to boost that number. *Here's what I didn't* expect to happen, but it did:** There is nothing I have EVER tried to do traffic wise that got me as many new eyes on my comic as this Kickstarter campaign. Even if my campaign hadn't funded and I didn't get a dime, I was absolutely thrilled at the response I got and the new readers hopping into my comic. Kickstarter represents a lot of dreams and ambitions of all of us creators to make money for doing what we love, and when our friends succeed, we feel like we can, too. It's very powerful stuff. All the artist shout-outs did help to varying degrees, but context really matters. My campaign shot from 53% to 95% in two days when a friend mentioned me in a Kickstarter campaign update, but similar reblogs he made to his (substantial) audience on Google Plus were not nearly as effective. I don't think I got much backing from my own readers at all; everything in the big spendy tiers that I intended to be for the "super fans" went to family and friends who hadn't read it (the one exception was our own super-generous Eric Menge). I don't think I'll STOP doing Sombulus, but I think Isabelle Melançon had the right idea where she started to make shorter, more impactful stand-alone stories and pieces like Knot that would be very close in style and content to her big ongoing story as a way to build her audience. Because of all the traffic, I got a big chunk of Project Wonderful money! Last week, I got the idea of making some "final days" banner ads and using that money to post them around to expensive sites like Gunnerkrigg Court and dreamscar that I'm normally too cheap for. The ones that performed the best for me... were sites that had already talked about me in their news posts! THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE.* There were a lot of long-time friends who I thought FOR SURE would give me some money because they were always super-interested in my art, and they never did. I've been that person and I know budgets can be tight, but after this Kickstarter, I will never EVER ignore the campaigns of people I care about again. Even if it's a dollar, just knowing that your friends are rooting for you means the world. There were a lot of short-time acquaintances who I thought wouldn't even give me a retweet, and they gave me a TON of promotion and money. Most of these people have also run Kickstarters. THIS IS ALSO NOT A COINCIDENCE. Make friends with people who have done Kickstarters, and tell them when you do yours, even if you don't think their audience is right for you. It turns out that "people who pay for stuff on the internet" is just as valid a category as "people who like fantasy comics". Stretch goals sneak up on you like a NINJA, and they really should be things that improve the quality of the book versus add-on stuff that you have to cram into the same envelope. I didn't have any quotes for what the additional pages for a bonus story would be, and part of the reason I didn't push very hard for the final bonus story stretch goal was because I wasn't sure if I had accounted for enough money for it (the price of adding 8 pages was literally $1000 more expensive from one printer, which I KNEW was ridiculous, but I didn't have time to get other quotes to compare it.) I may have more to share after I get my survey results and more time to think about what I would do next time (I keep adding more as I think about them), but it was a very exciting experience!
bukittyan SF Creator Offline Joined: Aug 15 2011, 6:52 am Posts: 410 Website:	bukittyan SF Creator Mar 05 2014, 8:38 am Re: Marketing Advice! Quote I'm gonna be like Thane and just sit and camp in this thread and learn all the things. And thanks for sharing your experience Delphina! I thought it was really smart of you to reach out to other creators for the various tiers in your Kickstarter. I would never have thought of that at all. http://lasalleslegacy.com
delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Offline Joined: Jul 28 2012, 7:38 pm Posts: 3448 Website:	delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Mar 05 2014, 10:41 am Re: Marketing Advice! Quote Okay, new thing I just learned! You can't ask marketing questions! I mean, I guess I see that it could make the surveys very daunting by asking too many or insensitive questions. But I really want to know where people heard about my comic, dangit! And if I had KNOWN they would stop me, I could have just thrown all the marketing stuff I wanted to ask in the Bonus Comic survey. ARRRGGG~! bukittyan wrote: I'm gonna be like Thane and just sit and camp in this thread and learn all the things. And thanks for sharing your experience Delphina! I thought it was really smart of you to reach out to other creators for the various tiers in your Kickstarter. I would never have thought of that at all. Yeah, this was an idea I stole from a couple places. Mr. Delphina has contributed rewards a few times to various stretch goals of board game Kickstarters, and the Lilith Dark guy did prints from his collective. Because you can raise lots of money, stretch goals make sense to feature other artists because then you can pay them with that instead of out of your own pocket/project money. Tiers work too, but make sure you're not spending more money than you make. Also, try not to launch into a bunch of guest artist tiers from the get-go or overdo it; give people a chance to see your art and ideas first. Also, don't leave reaching out to other artists to the last minute, because people might not be able to respond in time and it's a lot of trouble to math out pricing for their tiers mid-campaign.
Muninn Spider Guest Offline Joined: Aug 01 2013, 4:48 pm Posts: 38 Website:	Muninn Spider Guest Mar 07 2014, 8:32 pm Re: Marketing Advice! Quote This is really awesome info. And : Aaah I've completely missed your KS due to real life circumstances. Much sad
delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Offline Joined: Jul 28 2012, 7:38 pm Posts: 3448 Website:	delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Mar 08 2014, 3:18 am Re: Marketing Advice! Quote Yeah, I think now that I've seen how a campaign goes, I will have more ideas with what to do with a 4-week campaign. I'd like to do more interviews, more articles, and just give people more time to find me. Now, some of you asked about contests, so I'm going to share my absolute-handsdown-supercool-and-easy giveaway contest widget I found about at my last job. It's called Rafflecopter. You set a prize (or several prizes) for a random drawing. Then you decide how people will enter it; maybe it's following you someplace, maybe it's writing a review. Depending on how complex you're asking for the entry to be, you can give someone MORE entries for doing something harder. You can also have things like tweeting that a person can do once per day for an entry! Or hey, make up trivia questions that they have to answer about your comic! Here's a screenshot of a raffle I ran a few years ago for Sombulus where I gave away a commission: It's all very user-friendly and doesn't require any code, and there's a very low barrier to entry for new readers. So if you've got some old prints or a a book or something to give away and you'd like a little more attention on your social media, this is definitely a way to boost your audience and get them excited about your work. That said, I think it's one of those tactics used best in moderation for us webcomics (maybe once or twice a year), because like Kickstarter, it relies on lots of announcements and pelting people with "only X days left" messages, and those get numbing after a while.
Duskglass Breaker of Hearts Offline Joined: Aug 27 2013, 11:34 pm Posts: 895 Website:	Duskglass Breaker of Hearts Mar 08 2014, 5:15 am Re: Marketing Advice! Quote Huh, that's interesting... but I'm curious, how does the widget know if someone has done those things? (and what if someone was already following on twitter/tumblr/DA/whatever?) {art blog}
delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Offline Joined: Jul 28 2012, 7:38 pm Posts: 3448 Website:	delphina Semi-Phenomenal Cosmic Powers Mar 08 2014, 11:49 am Re: Marketing Advice! Quote You can log in with your email address to the widget (or connect it with Facebook, but I personally hate doing that) and then you get a list of things available to you. The entrant just goes down the list and clicks on the things they want to do. The integration for popular things like Facebook and Twitter is really smooth, for example (and as you can see, the Facebook one does account for if you're already a follower). But even the more obscure things that you make up for yourself (like this person's "leave a comment on a blog entry") just ask for a link back to the post or your Tumblr/DA/whatever username to verify if you're chosen as a winner. (And on the admin side, if you see someone giving you bad entries, you can remove them.)
Malaak SF Creator Offline Joined: Aug 06 2010, 8:43 am Posts: 828 Website:	Malaak SF Creator Mar 25 2014, 4:06 am Re: Marketing Advice! Quote Such awesome insights... It makes me want to do a Kickstarter campaign again, even though I have nothing to make it for at present! -- Joumana
Beanjamish Orbweaver Offline Joined: Nov 02 2008, 5:55 pm Posts: 38 Website:	Beanjamish Orbweaver Mar 08 2016, 7:18 pm Re: Marketing Advice! Quote This is some quality kickstarter advice. Thank you.
SophiePf Formerly Kyu Offline Joined: Sep 03 2015, 1:36 am Posts: 616 Website:	SophiePf Formerly Kyu Mar 09 2016, 12:34 pm Re: Marketing Advice! Quote This might not be marketing advice as in reaching people, but I wrote a blogpost last month describing a few tools from business studies, that might help figuring out what it is that makes a company/an artist special. This in return can help with the putting yourself out there part of marketing. Here's the gist: Quote: What I want to highlight most in this post are USP, VRIO and the Blue Ocean Strategy. Let me explain the terms first: USP: Unique Selling Point -> What is it that makes a company and/or their product special? VRIO: A method to define a core competence, in other words something you can turn into your USP. The methods asks companies and their products Blue Ocean Strategy: Staying ahead of your competition by creating new markets and generate a desire for the product in potential customers by putting your USP into action. The three of them are just one possible way of putting your strengths into words. But I find them rather easy to grasp and thus they are probably best suited to start out with. In order to find your USP you can go by the VRIO criteria, which are: Value (What is it, that adds value to you, your work and/or your products? Make a list and try branching out into several directions, such as quality, work ethic, speed, communication, innovation, tone/mood, etc.) Rareness/Rarity (Scratch the stuff, that you feel is found commonly on the market. If just a select few possess this trait, it will still count as rare!) Imitable (Make sure these traits are difficult to imitate, that way you have a headstart in in this development and others will have a hard time to catch up.) Organisational Implementation (Highlight the traits that only reach their full potential in your own work and workflow. So even if others are able to copy them, they will never be able to live up to the potential.) [...] Equipped with your USP, or at least a basic idea of what your USP can be, we will venture into the Blue Ocean Strategy, which was created by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne! This strategy concept works a lot with metaphors and images. One reason why I see it working well with the minds of artists. So imagine: A blue ocean, no fish or other aquatic animals around, just you in the vastness of water. Then slowly, but steady fish, whales, turtles and possibly sea gulls start swarming the place, fighting for their share of space and turning that blue ocean red with blood. For those interested in the full post here's the link: http://blog.gerritianchronicles.com/2016/02/business-musings-i.html My Webcomic "Soul's Journey" \| Portfolio \| Twitter
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