Your crowdfunding video can be the difference between your campaign successfully funding or not. It’s your opportunity to turn viewers into investors and rally the crowd behind you. Here’s our guide to perfecting your video pitch, with top tips from The Crowdfunding Agency, Raising Partners, ISQ Crowdfunding and Drop Studio, Seedrs partners and experts in the crowdfunding video pitches.
The first thing investors often engage with on your campaign page is your video. This means it’s vital to capture their attention immediately and keep it – it’s their first impression of your company, so it needs to be good. The Crowdfunding Agency advises opening strongly – get people’s attention from the very beginning by leading with your main message and getting straight to the point, and to keep it concise. Less than 5 minutes in length is ideal to avoid losing people’s attention online.
Similarly, Raising Partners, who specialise in communicating investment opportunities in creative ways, have recognised that the most effective videos they have produced have been under 4 minutes. If you are unsure of the content that should be pulled into a 3-5 minute pitch video, crowdfunding experts, ISQ Crowdfunding, recommends seeking help from people who have scripted financial promotions before.
It’s a chance to shout about your successes and showcase everything you’ve achieved so far from business growth, to press coverage to the future potential you hold. It’s also the place where you want to highlight your unique selling points whether that be your positioning in the market, your team or your unique offering.
Your video doesn’t need to cover every detail of the business but should be seen as an overview of the business. Aim to cover the following:
Product demo – this should be a quick teaser trailer giving an intro to your product more than 30 seconds in length. Ideally, the first 10 seconds should show your product, the next 10 should explain it, and the final 10 seconds should give a quick overview of key features and USPs.
Why – Use this section to show investors your founding team and tell your story, cause or belief. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why is there a problem? Raising Partners recommend showing off your wider team as well – potential investors want to see the team behind the business rather than just the CEO or founder. It’s also a good idea to get other key stakeholders involved too, such as customers or existing investors who can explain why they love you, your business, and why they think others should invest.
How – Use this part of the video to explain how your product/services solve the problem, how it works, and demonstrate any customer testimonials you might have.
What – This is the nitty-gritty part of the video where you discuss the investment, market size, press, competition, scaling options, investor testimonials as well as why your team are the best to do the job and whether you’ve had any success so far.
Call to action – End with a clear closing statement summarising your offering. Outline the future of your company and the investor’s potential contribution to it.
Considerations you need to make when thinking about your video
The two biggest things you need to remember when making your video are:
1. If you want the crowd to invest in your business, you must be willing to invest in your video. As an investor’s first introduction to your business, you need to create your video to the highest standard possible within your budget.
Raising Partners recommend investing in a good videographer – quality doesn’t come cheap! The most important thing to look for in a videographer is someone who can translate your script into an engaging film. It’s not as easy as point and shoot; they need to be great at editing, sound, colour grading and animation if you want your video to stand out from the crowd! It’s well worth investing in someone who knows what they’re doing!
Supporting this, The Crowdfunding Agency stresses the importance of investing in good sound – make sure that your audience can hear you, there’s nothing worse than a tinny voiceover or mismatched AV.
2. To keep an investor’s attention, your video must be engaging, entertaining and informative. Don’t be afraid to show a bit of personality and try not to rehearse too much – it’s very easy to sound like you’re just reading off a piece of paper.
ISQ Crowdfunding advise using short sentences. They are easier to memorise, and they provide rhythm.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that you need to get creative when putting your video together – and not just in terms of visualising your story. Imagine putting your video package together like carving up a turkey. You can use everything from the meat on the day you cook it to the bones in a nice soup a few days later. Think about how you can do the same to your video. It’s a large investment, so you want to get the most out of it.
Some further tips:
- Do you have social media specific content? (e.g. shorter videos, subtitled clips)
- Product demo videos – have you got sufficient material to produce an additional video giving investors a quick demo of your product? You should be featuring this in your pitch video as standard but as a shorter clip. A longer clip using more of the already captured footage might be valuable.
- Images – have you got clips from the footage shot to use as stills for campaign promotion?
- Use animations and graphic overlays to highlight key points and growth metrics. Drop Studio maintains that graphics and animations are an excellent way to articulate information. Numbers, graphs and statistics are vital – putting them into visual form breaks up the monotony and gives the viewer something visually stimulating to fixate on.
- As recommended by ISQ Crowdfunding, more and more people consume video content without sound, so subtitles can ensure you reach this audience.
- In the words of Drop Studio, balance graphs with laughs, charts with arts, cognition with creation and lectures with pictures. Numbers? Love them, but above 30 seconds? Cut them.
Written in collaboration with :
Raising Partners are Investment Consultants. Video scripting is one of the many things they support with when preparing clients for equity crowdfunding, and in 2019, 100% of their clients reached their target on Seedrs.
The Crowdfunding Agency helps UK businesses fund their growth through equity crowdfunding. The founder has more than six years of experience in the crowdfunding industry, having helped companies raise more than £100m.
ISQ Crowdfunding works in partnership with clients to ensure that the right levers are pulled at the right time to secure a raise on Europe’s leading crowdfunding platforms. In 2019, 95% of their clients successfully funded.
Drop Studio is a fundraising and digital marketing studio supporting entrepreneurs and leaders to grow their businesses.
