Geotekk: Kickstarter Campaign
Launching Limpet – The Ultimate Smart Alarm
Tech startup Geotekk has spent the past 3 years developing a revolutionary, best-in-class smart alarm and asked us to support them with the product launch. Rather than trying to do everything at once, we created a 12-month roadmap based on 3 phases – raising awareness ahead of a Kickstarter launch (targeting bicycle and motorcycle owners); taking pre-orders via an e-commerce website; and direct sales once the product is ready for distribution.
Fully Integrated Marketing Campaign
Phase 1 was successfully completed at the end of 2018 and involved the following:
– Landing page design for mailing list signups
– PPC – Google Ads and social advertising
– Social media management
– Content creation and curation
– Video and photography
– Email marketing and CRM management
– Copywriting and PR support
– Kickstarter campaign management
Landing Page Design
The primary goal of the landing page was to generate mailing list signups in the 3-4 months leading up to the Kickstarter launch. The goal was to achieve a list of 3,000 relevant subscribers, but thanks to our PR efforts, targeted social ads and lead gen forms, we ended up with closer to 4,500 – 50% more than expected.
In the absence of product photography we started off with a conceptual CGI lander, but the analytics data, heatmaps and user recordings made it clear the page wasn’t converting. This insight gave us the impetus to get the video and photography sorted asap! With the shoot complete, we set about redesigning the landing page, incorporating the new visual assets and providing an expanded narrative around the product’s key benefits. The conversion rate leapt from <8% to 25-30% for core activity.
The landing page had almost 16,000 unique visits in the run-up to Kickstarter, with almost 50% coming via social media. Social drove a further 8,000 unique visits to the Kickstarter page when the campaign was live.
Social Media Management
Our social media activity began several months before the Kickstarter launch and, wary of exhausting our supply of content, our strategy was to start small and gradually ramp everything up as we entered the final 4-6 weeks. This approach paid dividends as we had ample time to A/B test our ad creative, audience targeting and channel artwork while avoiding the dreaded “content fatigue”.
Our research showed that Facebook and Instagram were likely to give the best results, so they became our primary platforms, but we also maintained a presence on Twitter and LinkedIn. We changed up the ad creative regularly to keep it feeling fresh and maintained a very healthy ad relevance score of 10 while keeping the cost per click to just a few pence.
In the run-up to Kickstarter, our most successful content from an engagement perspective were our #ThrowbackThursday posts where we highlighted and built a narrative around the key milestones from 3 years of R&D and prototyping.
Our social ads reached 1.4m people over the course of the campaign from 2.5m total impressions. This resulted in 45k video views, 27k link clicks, 2.5k post engagements and 2.2k mailing list subscribers. We gained 2.5k Facebook and 1.5k Instagram followers, and our videos had almost 7k views on YouTube.
Email Marketing & PR Support
The incentive for signing up to our mailing list was that subscribers would be the first to be notified when the Kickstarter launched, so they could get in early and secure a Limpet for a massive 65% off the RRP. We designed a branded HTML email template which could be adapted for a wide range of uses before and during the Kickstarter campaign. Our regular emails included embedded countdown timers, animated GIFs and cinemagraphs, and we frequently saw open rates of 40-50% and click-throughs of >10%.
We also created a custom press release document and multimedia pack, which was outreached a few weeks before the Kickstarter launched. This resulted in extensive coverage by high-profile media outlets, including The Times and The Sunday Times (where it was featured as ‘Gadget of the Week’), BBC Radio, Motorcycle News, New Atlas, British Motorcyclists Federation, More Bikes, Visor Down and Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS affiliate TV stations in the United States.
Kickstarter Launch Campaign Management
As well as building the Kickstarter page, crafting the narrative, deciding the reward tiers and making ongoing tweaks and refinements to optimise engagement, we created regular update posts to keep backers and other interested parties engaged as the campaign progressed.
During the Kickstarter, we designed social posts and ads around Cyber Monday and the 12 Days of Christmas, which were very well received. We also maintained an ‘always on’ approach to social comms in the build-up to and throughout the Kickstarter campaign as we were fielding a lot of technical questions from potential buyers.
Although Limpet experienced the usual mid-campaign lull, it was rarely found outside the Top 10 Most Popular Technology Projects, which was quite an achievement.
The Results
The Kickstarter funding goal was £10,000, which is what was needed to complete the development of Limpet’s encrypted app. This target was achieved within 23 minutes, which was incredible. The project was almost 300% funded when it finished on 20th December and further pre-order sales have since been made via the Geotekk website, which shows brand awareness is growing and word-of-mouth is spreading.
This bodes very well for Limpet’s ongoing development and has given the entire project team huge confidence as we enter Phase 2!
