Kickstarter Videos & Marketing

A long time ago, I decided to make my adventure PDFs free. I believed that my content would do a better job at marketing itself than I could trying to sell people on something they couldn't see.

(If you just wanna see the videos, scroll down to the bottom!)

Running a Kickstarter challenges this approach. There's a defined funding period, and I need to get interested parties to the Kickstarter page within that period. Not before, and not after! This means actual marketing. Uh oh!

Thanks to the workspace I'm sitting in these days, I'm getting some quick 'n' dirty mentoring in marketing. Yay serendipity!

This has helped me understand that I need very different messages for different groups of people, which is a challenge with my limited manpower! I'd rather be drawing or writing. Surely you'd rather I was drawing or writing too!

Different Dice for Different Mice

For people who already know what I do (maybe you've downloaded, maybe played, or even supported me on Patreon), the message is, "It's happening now," and "tell your friends."

Beyond this, there's a halo of people who kinda know what I'm doing, and may not know whether it's applicable to them. They might have seen my stuff or even played one at a con, but don't remember my name or my blog name. Or maybe they saw one but don't realize how big the collection is. Maybe they saw multiple pieces and didn't realize they were by the same person. (Branding fail.)

For this group, the message has to start earlier in the awareness process. Yep, this is me, this is where you get them, and by the way.. now.

Then there's are people who haven't heard of me, but would love my content. Maybe they weren't on G+ (my main stomping ground, may it rest in peace). This group needs awareness building, which is apparently time-consuming and expensive.

In a way, I suppose you could view the last five years as exactly this sort of awareness building, a crazily slow word-of-mouth campaign for this book. In any case, it's a bit late to be energetically targeting this group at this point in time.

Even so, I want to make sure that any messages they do see still work for them.

The Call-to-Action Hydra

The other complexity is the "call to action." Apparently, unless you're doing long-term brand awareness, marketing messaging needs to urge you to do something. The trick is, that something changes based on who I'm talking to and when I'm talking to them.

I can put out a video spreading awareness of the Kickstarter before it starts, but unless people have a way of book marking their intention to become backers, it's easy to miss a 30-day window. That mechanism varies from place to place.

Liking a Facebook page, following on Twitter, subscribe to my notification mailing list, add this to your blog roll, visit the Kickstarter page. All of these are different messages. That's not too bad in text, but it's way more labour intensive for video content.

Add to all of this that I can't even send people to the Kickstarter page before it launches; there's nothing for them to do. That means on launch day, all my messaging needs to change. Fun times!

Video Punchline

Anyways, here's the punchline to all of this: two slightly different videos, one meant for pre-launch sharing, and another that sits on the Kickstarter page itself.

I'm curious if you think they do the job - communicating what I'm doing, when, while engaging people who already know what I'm all about. Suitable for a possibly wide audience (in case I get a lot of reshares), but not so slick ad advertising-like that they alienate people who've been supporting me for a long time.

Here's video one, the "pre-launch" video:

Here's the video that gets embedded in the Kickstarter page itself. It's exactly the same for the first 90 seconds, but then has a different ending. (I obviously don't want to send people who are watching this on Kickstarter over to trilemma.com! Although the video might get shared outside of KS.. so I can't even take that for granted!)

If any of this works and the Kickstarter is a success, when the dust has cleared I'll have to draw up my "communication map" that shows how it all fits together.

b.r.b. drawing a communication map