Breaking through on Kickstarter can be a challenge for any publisher, and as the platform becomes more professional, we see the growing importance of having an existing audience for your project, with advertising playing an important role in gathering support.
Where to build your audience? There are three main routes here:
A website landing page to collect emails: expensive but highly engaged.
Collecting emails on the advertising platform: cheaper but less engaged.
Kickstarter pre-launch followers: existing platform users, but no communication control.
Meta is a good starting place, but depending on your audience and the creative materials you have there are advertising options for YouTube, Reddit, TikTok etc. especially if you're active on those platforms.
Building ads. It's best not to second guess here, and you should test out a variety of ad material at a small scale before expanding your budget.
Try to have a mixture of at least 5 different images and videos tested, and at least 3 different post texts and taglines to go with them.
The ad material should make it crystal clear what your project is about, with an image of the box and game laid out being a good baseline graphic to test against.
You can also use social media posts to guide what aspects of your game people are responding to, as well as reviewers' material (with their permission.)
Use “Leads” ads for building your audience, and “Sales” ads during the live campaign (once you're funded.)
How many people do I need? We estimate that around 10% of your audience will become backers, so you need 10 times the number of people on your list than the number you’re hoping will support your project in the first few days.
Advertising can be an expensive and complicated process, so give yourself plenty of time to test things out, and adjust as you learn. It's best to go into your launch a bit later, than rush ahead with an arbitrary launch date if your audience isn't robust enough. Slow and steady wins the race.
Happy advertising!
Looking for help with your ads?