Marketing your Pre-registration
Your pre-registration phase takes place before a campaign goes live for fundraising. It’s the golden opportunity to warm up your community to what’s coming next!
Get them excited about being part of your brand in a new way, educate them on why they should invest and most importantly, build up a database of warm investor leads for when your campaign goes live.
What’s in this toolkit:
1. Perfecting your pre-registration page
2. How to leverage your community
3. Educating potential investors
Crafting the Perfect Pre-registration Page
A pre-registration campaign (also known as a ‘Launching soon’ campaign) gives a sneak peak of your pitch before it goes live. All of the bespoke pre-registration campaigns we’re currently running can be found in the ‘Launching soon’ section on our Seedrs site.
Your pre-registration page is essentially a lead generation tool. Direct your potential investors to this page to encourage them to sign up for priority access to your campaign – putting them on the email marketing list and guaranteeing them live updates as you progress. It’s so important to put the most engaging information possible on your pre-registration page!
Our top tips for your pre-registration page
Beware the 'About us' page
This is not the chance to sell your product or service, this is the chance to sell your investment opportunity.
You should be able to summarise what you do in a couple of sentences, and then focus the rest of the content on why this company shows great potential for investment.
DO: demonstrate your company’s potential for growth
DON’T: just describe what your company does
Inspire with your Mission
Your mission statement is a chance to inspire your community and bring them into your vision for the future.
You probably started your company to make things a little better – describe the gap you are seeing in your industry/market and how your business solves the problem in a new and exciting way.
Follow the 3 T's
From our 2023 investor survey, we know that our audience mainly care about the following factors when it comes to weighing up an investment opportunity:
- TAM (Total Addressable Market): outline what your market opportunity is and why you’re uniquely positioned to take advantage of it.
- TEAM: demonstrate how you have the right team to make your business successful and why investors should back your team.
- TRACTION: whether it’s your revenue figures, customer growth or established partnerships, demonstrate that your business is on the right track.
These are guidelines and there may be other information that you want to include. But whatever you do, make sure you focus on the investment opportunity rather than your product or service.
Bring your Page to Life with Pictures
Images are key to bringing your page to life!
Make sure you’re including your best brand imagery that aligns with the key points you’re trying to illustrate.
If you don’t have good brand imagery, there are plenty of places to source free content.
Explore sites like Unsplash or Pexels to find the right image to illustrate your content.
Pre-registration Page Examples
Leveraging your community
Your reachable community is made up of different levels of investors, with different levels of understanding of your brand. That’s why it’s really important to tailor your marketing towards the different groups so that you hit all the right notes!
Understanding your audience
A useful first exercise can be to divide your audience into different categories, depending on their relationship with your brand. The below categories can be used as a broad starting point.
Customers (A.K.A. superfans)
Whether you’re building an app, a brewery or a football club, your existing customers can be your most receptive audience. They already know and trust your brand, and crowdfunding will allow them to become financially invested in its future.
Engaged community
Your personal network (friends and family), your professional network (anyone who you’ve interacted with in a business capacity) and your existing shareholders are all vital pools of leads for your crowdfunding campaign.
Total reachable audience
Your followers and the people you can reach via marketing, whilst the largest audience size, is the least directly engaged and will need the most outreach and education to convert.
Using your Channels Effectively
Your key marketing channels will reach different audiences, who will not all know and interact with your brand in the same way.
Think about a marketing strategy that will best leverage your channels to reach your community most effectively:
| Channel | Role |
|---|---|
| Organic social media | Awareness, engagement |
| Paid social media | Awareness, conversion |
| Events | Engagement, consideration, conversion |
| Website | Consideration, conversion |
| Email marketing | Consideration, conversion |
The best marketing strategies use a combination of the above channels to thoughtfully reach a wide audience.
How to Use your Channels
We recommend a mixture of channels aimed at driving awareness, consideration, and conversion to maximize performance.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways to leverage your community. Your subscribers have already chosen to hear updates from your brand – via email, you can direct them straight to your pre-registration page to consider the investment opportunity.
Social Media
Your social media activity can be divided by:
- ‘organic’ – when you post on your social channels without putting any budget behind it – and
- ‘paid’ – when you pay to boost a post or pay for social media advertising to promote beyond your follower community.
Both can help you leverage your community for your fundraising campaign!
Organic social should be used to create awareness and buzz around your campaign. Posts across your accounts like Instagram, Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok will reach your already engaged followers, who are likely to be interested in the investment opportunity.
Paid social should be used to extend your reach on social media, targeting your key audience via audience interests, demographic, location and previous website visitors to leverage a community that, whilst they may not already know about your brand, would certainly be interested in what you’re trying to achieve.
Website Content
Your online hub is the perfect place to tell visitors about your crowdfunding campaign.
Think about the user journey for finding out more, and how you want to track that user journey all the way through to your campaign page on Seedrs.
Via your campaign dashboard, you can download the code for the widget that will promote your Seedrs campaign seamlessly on your website homepage.
Events
Use webinars or live events to invite the core members of your community to hear about your campaign live. There are different types of events to consider:
- Online webinar: a chance to present your pitch and include a Q&A
- In-person event: if your community is mainly local or in one area, it could be a good idea to present your campaign in person!
Think about why your fans would want to come to this event – is it a chance to meet you, to meet each other or to learn about more about the campaign?
Educate your Investors
Your audience is likely to be made up of a very varied level of experience with investing. They might be new to startup investing completely, or just new to the Seedrs platform.
Part of your marketing strategy should be educating your community, so that you can convert your fans to investors.
Joining the Seedrs Platform
Some of your community may be new to Seedrs, and need a bit more support through the onboarding process.
Include these relevant links in your marketing content to help guide them through:
How to create your investor account
How to start investing on Seedrs
Understanding the different types of investor
You can always point your community towards [email protected] for any issues they are having!
Becoming a Startup Investor
Some of your community may be first time investors, whether on Seedrs or not. It’s important to make sure they understand what to expect from startup investing.
This will help to manage their expectations about your own campaign, and keep them as satisfied investors, who may potentially go on to re-invest in the future!
What are the risks of investing in startups?
What to expect as a startup investor
For more information on beginning to invest in startups, you can point your community towards our Investor Resource Hub