This post was put together by our friends at Drop – The Crowdfunding Studio who specialise in crowdfunding campaign videos. You can find out more about their work here.
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.
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 needs to be good.
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 cover the following:
Product demo – this should be a quick teaser trailer giving an intro to your product more 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?
How – Use this part of the video to explain how your product/services solves 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:
- 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.
- 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.
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 food for thought:
- 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?
