Key Idea: Cross promos are 100% free, and can bring a lot of sales. Every Kickstarter should use them!
Cross Promotions
As you research Kickstarter marketing strategies, you’ll probably come across people recommending cross promotions.
Once you start running your campaign, you’ll also start receiving email requests from people wanting to do cross promos. And as you talk to marketing agencies, they’ll likely also pitch you on managing your cross promos.
In our campaign, which raised over $200,000, about $5,000 came from cross promotions. That said, unlike other strategies which cost money, these were completely free sales.
How Do Cross Promotions Work?
There is a lively ecosystem of Kickstarter campaigns, all cross-promoting one another. Once your campaign passes $25,000 in backing, expect to get several messages every day from other campaigns asking to cross-promote with you.
We also did a little bit of outreach ourselves. Our marketing agency also helped us coordinate some of our cross promotions.
This is what a cross promo invite might look like:
Putting Cross Promos in Action
Cross promos are a pretty simple channel. Here’s how it works.
1) Outreach
Either you reach out to them, or the reach out to you. One way or another, you find a project that you want to work with on cross promotions.
2) Add Them to Your Updates
Once you have 3-4 projects you want to cross promote with, write an update to your Kickstarter backers. At the bottom of your updates, add in the images, links, and descriptions for your cross promo partners.
In the beginning, when you’re cross-promoting with projects that have more backers than you, you’ll likely have to post first. Once your campaign is larger and you’re working with projects with fewer backers than you, you can ask them to post first.
3) Track
Ideally, create separate tracking links for each of your cross promotion partners. This way you can see which promotions worked the best. This can help inform which other projects you reach out to. Also, you can ask the projects that converted well for you to cross-promote a second time.
Should You Do Cross Promotions?
It’s a fairly labor intensive channel, since you have to correspond with a bunch of projects and manage a lot of logistics.
Ideally, this is something you hand to an assistant on your team, or a marketing agency, rather than doing yourself. For us, this channel was worth the time, though it wasn’t really a home run.
All in all, cross promos can be summed up in 5 words: “It’s free, so why not?”