Clear and simple communication in crowdfunding is essential to properly reach the target audience. If what you propose is too difficult to understand and you don't know how to communicate it clearly, it is not “crowd.”.
Communication in crowdfunding is critical because you give money to someone you trust. How does a company demonstrate that it is trustworthy? First by clear communication and saying things that users can verify and understand.
Recurring mistakes and best practices in communication
1. One mistake that startups in particular often make is to propose unattainable things or to set unrealistic goals. People, sooner or later, notice this. And since an investment in startups is often an investment in a compelling team, it is critical to Do not break personal trust.
2. A crucial guiding principle for making communication clear and simple, not only in crowdfunding but in marketing in general, is the One Selling Proposition: it is not useful, indeed counterproductive, to tell too much to convey the value of the product or service a company makes and the investment opportunity it proposes. Too much information should not be given all at once, because the potential investor does not have time and a way to assimilate it and ends up being disoriented.
In addition, the interlocutor is often not a regular investor, but an ordinary small saver or a first-time user of investments, so the first message must be meager, essential but powerful. Only after hooking the attention of the interlocutor with the OSP can the dialogue be continued by enriching it with information.
3. Within the communication for crowdfunding, the reward are an important lever: they are immediate rewards, which are easier to assimilate than the technical dynamics of investing, and make clear at once a concrete benefit of the action being proposed. A benefit, moreover, that is fundamental in equity, where the capital gain from the investment is future and only potential.
4. In the early years of the crowdfunding boom, very little advertising was needed to do equity crowdfunding, it was easy to get space in even nationally prominent newspapers and media outlets, and investment came right away, after one or two appearances. Today, however, users have become more wary and space in the media is more difficult to achieve, because equity crowdfunding has lost that aura of a miracle tool when tested by reality.
What's more, with the advent of AI in SEO the visibility is achieved by first proving to AI and then consequently to sites and news outlets that you are authoritative in your field, so that you get a space and get mentioned. Paid advertising campaigns work only as long as they are on, then their effect wanes. L’authority, on the other hand, is a durable asset.
Building authority and positioning yourself in a niche as a source that knows, however, takes time: here's why communication is a job that takes months and years, and for a crowdfunding campaign it needs to be started long before the campaign is launched. One must present oneself polished, flawless, work relentlessly on the online image through coordinated site and social and citations from third-party sources that are themselves authoritative.
5. A very common mistake is to coldly ask someone for money: it is impossible to gain trust at a first approach. First it is necessary to make the unknown interlocutor understand what the company does, in stages, talking about both the product or service and the crowdfunding campaign: only when the contact is “warm” can the request for money be made. The Call to Action, that is, it needs to be segmented, diversified by channel and audience and by stage of communication.
This is what the expressions of interest: requesting an expression of interest in the submitted project is the first step, and for the user it is a simple and undemanding action. Both before and during the campaign, it also serves to collect contact data that can be reused for subsequent marketing and investor and/or potential customer engagement activities.
We discussed this in our webinar with Salvatore Vioa, founder of the communications agency Dynamo Lab.
WEBINAR TOPICS
0:00 Introduction
1:56 What is meant by “clear communication”
7:00 The concept of reward as a driver of communication for the crowd
12:00 The evolution of the equity crowdfunding audience over time
14:35 The communication plan to gain visibility online and in the media
19:00 The most common mistakes in crowdfunding communication
22:43 The importance of the expression of interest in communicating with investors
26:53 The pillars of the new era of crowdfunding
SPEAKERS
Claudio Grimoldi, Founder of Turbo Crowd
Salvatore Viola, Founder of Dynamo Lab
