Using Crowdfunding as a Marketing Tool

Crowdfunding is not only a platform for raising money, it can also be used as a tool to spread awareness for your brandIt was a campaign for Chapel Down on Seedrs, the UK-based crowdfunding platform, which caught Collider's interest. They had orchestrated a community of strangers to participate in their mission and vision – and people had responded by investing in their campaign. We wanted to do that for the Collider Class of 2015.

One of the things we take pride in at Collider is investing in smart people with smart tech - but only with the smartest money. Our investor portfolio has some of the biggest names in MadTech behind it: Richard Fearn, Andy Porteous, and Deb Hennessy to name a few. But we wanted more. We wanted not just specialist angel investors but the whole ad community to get behind Collider. How could we do that? Seedrs was the answer. One of the more interesting things we found was the ability to use our campaign as a marketing tool.

Crowdfunding is a tool, not only a platform

First off, it’s perfect for market validation. As Dr. Phil Windley notes in this Forbes article, “The big payoff [to a crowdfunding campaign] is the information about the potential market we’ll get.” The Seedrs campaign showed us the sheer depth of enthusiasm for new digital marketing tech. MadTech is working for advertisers and marketers; the community not only wants more of it but also wants to support it. In only 13 days we were able to raise 100% of the funds. By the time the campaign closed, in a following 14 days, we were almost £100,000 over capacity and had over 100 investors from across Europe.

Secondly, the Seedrs campaign allows us to better relate to and reach our investors, brands and startups. The campaign embraced a new and innovative way of doing business, just as we encourage our brands to do with the startups. What better way to support innovation than to embrace the same values we teach to the startups?

Finally, it is an interactive addition to traditional press. It allows people to become a part of your greater marketing strategy by letting them participate in a small part of it. Philips used a crowdfunding campaign to actively engage with their customers through competitions, and we want to get the marketing and advertising community just as engaged with our startups by having a small equity stake in them. It was a risk to take on a crowdfunding campaign as a means for investment. There’s no testing to be done to figure out if it will work – no A/B testing, no focus group options.

In retrospect:

Calling the process stressful would be an understatement. After our campaign reached around 58%, we had a completely funded campaign within 25 hours. It was mental not being able to keep up with all of the investment coming in. Within 13 days we had exceeded our £330,000 goal – less than half the average time of a crowdfunding campaign. There were scary moments where things didn't look to be moving at all. But we kept pushing forward and being proactive to make things happen.