Crowdfunding Basics Part 6 By Nick Ferris

Nick Ferris- Senior Media Executive & Global Digital Marketing Director, continues to look into the world of Crowdfunding and marketing tips to maximize your return and money raised.

Press Releases can be very be very daunting if you haven’t done one before, but for any crowdfunder you should consider writing and sending one out. For one, it makes your product or company look legitimate and it’s also another potential way of driving traffic and even potentially getting some publicity. Don’t forget to check out my other pieces such as Nick Ferris, KPIs An Overview too.

Writing a press release is nowhere near as hard as it sounds. For starters, there are many sites out on the internet that will give you easy templates to fill in. There’s no point re-inventing the wheel so take a look at other press releases, especially if there is a similar product or company in your industry and see how they structured and worded the release. Then you simply use that as a template and re-word to fit your product.

Press releases are also great ways to focus your copy-writing skills. What is the USP of your product? What are the features and benefits? It’s so important to think about your product and make sure you have the elevator pitch as well as bullet points - what is unique, what problem is it solving, why should people buy it and so on. Tag line is another good thing to include. Most products (Nike - Just Do it) (Home Depot - More Savings, More Doing) etc all have tag lines and the press release writing will help you focus on that too says Nick Ferris.

Once you have the release written, sending it out is also easy. There are many services that will send it out for you relatively cheaply. Many websites automatically pick up press releases so it will help you get the word out there and if you select the core industry you are in via the sending service you may get a journalist seeing the press release and writing about you. You’ll instantaneously get a boost in fundraising then. It may or may not happen but it’s worth a try!

Nick Ferris continues his insights into crowdfunding with a look at videos.

Part 2 Crowdfunding Basics By Nick Ferris

Nick Ferris – An expert in Digital Marketing continues to delve into the world of crowdfunding, where dreams can come true and new products find their audience.

We’ve talked about websites and landing pages in other articles such as Nick Ferris’s Marketing Tips, It’s Always Time To Test. But one of the basics before you even decide where to launch your crowdfunding campaign is to build a website.

So what should the website be? Well many people will want to visit your website before deciding to invest. It should be clean and concise. Make sure it captures emails of visitors, so if they don’t invest immediately you can market to them later. Make sure the website has stunning images of your product so it speaks / sells itself. Ideally have a video at the very top of the page too. So many websites these days have videos as the first thing people see. It can summarize your product or services in 30-45 seconds (make sure it is short and not 10 minutes says Nick Ferris!).

Always have an About Us section too. Whether you are a one person team or there are 10 of you, the more personality you can add to the site, the more people can create a relationship with you and your product. So have headshots and short bios. Have an FAQ too, as that can really help minimize your customer service issues. Especially if you are crowdfunding you want to minimize the questions you get from potentially thousands of people, so a thorough FAQ can really help reduce people asking you things.

Most important of all (especially these days) is to have your website mobile. You could have over 50% of your crowdfunders looking at your site via a mobile device and so it is so important to make sure you have tested and optimized it for mobile.

But we are not done just yet. There is one more important thing you should add to your website before, after and during the crowdfunding campaign which we will talk about in the next article.

Thanks again for reading this series of articles by Nick Ferris. We hope you enjoy them. You can also find more on Nick Ferris on Dailymotion.

The Launch of the Financial Net Continued by Nick Ferris - Part 8

Nick Ferris’s Marketing Tips, It’s Always Time To Test. Well the launch of The Financial Net was one of the biggest tests of his life and the most expensive and time consuming.

We just talked about the revolutionary conference set up in the Financial Net. Nick Ferris - The Best Leader And Mentor In The Marketing And Media Department and his incredible team also built many other groundbreaking areas of functionality at the time.  Users could select different levels of association (just like Facebook does now), they could send private messages, and another uig part of the network was the forums.

The Forums were the hub of the network. That’s where people could view news (so if you worked in Hedge Funds you could see the latest Hedge Fund news). You could see conferences that were coming up, recalls Nick Ferris. You could read featured articles, white papers, and many other areas.

Polls and surveys were another big part of the network. There were regular member polls on hot topics of the day so you could stay up to date with the latest news and opinions.

Another great part of the platform, recalls Nick Ferris, was that the company he worked for at the time mainly produced subscription products. These were magazines, newsletters and other premium products that were also transitioning to the new online environment and dealing with that challenge. The Financial Net opened up a whole new marketing channel for these products as well. Within the forums, Nick could post free content and teaser content from these publications, enabling a flow of trials and conversions to members of the forum to these premium products. As such it was creating an incredible marketing machine with daily exposure to thousands of users.

Next we will talk about all the revenue opportunities that The Financial Net opened up.

For many more articles on Nick Ferris and his many years of insights in publishing and marketing please read his dozens of blog posts that describe many different ideas and approaches to marketing.