đ Day 11: Behind the Scenes of a Viral Giveaway
King Sumo; My Lump Dog⢠Campaign Journal
Important links
The Lump Dog⢠Kickstarter. Thank you to everyone who has backed the campaign already! With three weeks to go, we are 65% funded.
The Lump Dog⢠contest. You can enter for, you know,
space-related Legoresearch purposes.
Transcript, and by transcript, I mean a more coherent, edited, less off-the-cuff, telling that follows along with the video.
I've been talking about King Sumo and viral giveaways, and I realized that some of you have never seen one before.
When people use my viral contest link, potential backers see this screen. There's a graphic at the top, the actual prize, how much time is left, a description of the contest, and a button at the bottom where they can enter the contest.
If you go to the KingSumo site, you're going to see a page to sign up. It's actually relatively inexpensive - $49 for a lifetime subscription - so if you've got more than one campaign, it doesn't take long to amortize that spend and make it worth your while.
There is also a plug-in for WordPress to integrate KingSumo it into your own site. I believe that still exists. I didn't use that tool this time. It's just easier to use their platform, but you can potentially use the website approach. Once you register and log in, you're going to end up on the dashboard screen.
To start, click on âNew Giveaway.â This will take you to the contest creation screen, where you add the title and the prize.
Something subtle about the prize. I always try to select something that I can gift via Amazon so they can deliver it for me, saving shipping fees. I also used a gift certificate from my store. So yes, in this contest, I am offering a $250 prize, but I'm not paying a lot for shipping. Because I'm using my store for the $150 gift certificate - where there are profit margins built into the price of each item â what I am actually paying out of pocket is not actually $150. The prize is a $250 value, but it is costing me less than that to offer it. So, just something to consider.
You will want to have a good description of what's in the prize package and what they can do to help. Youâll put in your start time and end time. I plan to end the contest at noon on the last day of the Kickstarter campaign and make it part of the end-of-campaign celebration. I will award it that evening, probably in a live stream.
The images you use for the contest need to have a 2 to 1 width-to-height ratio and be a minimum of 680px wide. You can have multiple images that rotate through that carousel.
You can require people to supply their phone numbers and names to enter your contest, but I do not. I simply communicate via email.
In the next section, you select where they will earn bonus points if they share. I've selected Twitter and Facebook, but you might consider other options.
In the next section, I've added some ways contestants can earn bonus entries. The most important bonus asks contestants to visit the Lump Dog⢠Kickstarter page. Be sure to generate a tagged link via your Kickstarter promotions page for this. This task gives contestants 10 extra entries. (By default, extra items get one additional entry.) I also offer bonus entries for Instagram and Twitter âfollows.â Additionally, they can watch the Lump Dog⢠promotional YouTube video for additional entries. Finally, I encourage contestants to visit The Lump Sum Saga on GlobalComix. https://globalcomix.com/c/the-lump-sum-saga
By tweaking the number of entries a contestant gets for each special task, you encourage them to do what is most important to you. In this case, the most valuable task is simply going to the Lump Dog Kickstarter page.
Somewhat ironically, based on what I just said, what ended up paying off for me in terms of verifiable sales was a link in the contest text that sent people to my store. I suspect contestants were checking out what they could buy with the gift certificate if they won.
On the bottom of the page there is an integration with ConvertKit. I'm no longer using ConvertKit, as I've moved over to Substack, so hopefully KingSumo will add that option at some point in the future. But for now, Iâd have to import the e-mail addresses manually from a CSV file.
Below this are some specific rules and terms. Once youâve filled out everything, you just have to save.
The trickiest part for me is writing the ad copy. You want that to represent your product and compel people to do the tasks that matter most. At the same time, you want people to feel that taking the time to do the extra tasks is worthwhile.
Going back to the dashboard, we see that this contest has been running for a few days now, and I already have 450 contestants. (Note: On this screen, you can see that you can have more than one campaign running at a time if you want.) If you click on the number of contestants, you will see their actual e-mail addresses. This is also where you can download the addresses in a CSV file.
Of importance here is the confirmed email address indicator. Forcing email verification keeps you from being inundated with duplicate spam entries. Throughout the campaign, you can resend confirmation requests. KingSumo selects the eventual winner from confirmed addresses only.
There are a couple of other things to point out. A conversion rate is indicated. I believe this is the number of people who saw the landing page, clicked on that button at the bottom, and took the time to enter, which is quite high in this caseâ12%. The Number of Entries reflects how many of these contestants did what they needed to to get more than just one entry for signing up. If you divide entries by the number of contestants, youâll have a general sense of how many of the other tasks each contestant is doing. A 1:1 ratio would mean that the only thing each contestant was doing was entering the contest with their email address. As I type this, the ratio is 19.54, which suggests significantly more active engagement.
Something really fascinating happened during this particular contest. I got up to about 82 quickly, then things slowed. Then, all of a sudden, in a 24-hour period, the draw got almost 250 more contestants. One of the things you'll find is that there are social media groups for contests, and all it takes is for one person to distribute your link to their friends in a group like that, and all of a sudden, you have an entire group of people on a particular forum or Reddit or Facebook feed that enter, and so with very little effort I've got quite a few more people coming in here.
In terms of conversions to actual pledges on Kickstarter, I'm not entirely sure it has done much for me so far. But there will be other benefits. Iâll have to have a look at a couple of other things, like the global comics, like to see if my number of subscribers has gone up there. My Instagram follower count is definitely up significantly. As mentioned earlier, I also know for a fact that at least one person purchased something from my store. That single purchase paid for all of the advertising I've done on Instagram to support this contest.
So, in summary, a KingSumo contest requires minimal effort, is fun, and offers a way to bring new people to your comic who wouldn't have found it otherwise. Some people are just entering the contest, and that's totally okay. That's the nature of any advertising. Not everyone who sees your ad will follow through how youâd like them to.
If I were going to do it again, I would probably run either one contest or maybe an additional contest before the project's launch to support signups on the prelaunch page.
Anyways, that's KingSumo from behind the scenes. It is definitely a useful tool.
My Kickstarter Journal
You know a campaign is firmly in the mid-campaign dead zone when a single backer can make your day. Ha!
Tasks
I created a new Instagram post for the lenticular cover. Writerly sorts, if you are feeling cheeky, Iâd love your reply to the comment: âMarina has a pouch on her shoulder. What do you think she carries in it? Wrong answers only. đâ
This KumoSpace post.
More contract refining.
I sat in on a great BackerKit marketing session.
What I am waiting for
A reply from an artist I am trying to recruit for another project. (If you are an artist who loves drawing contemporary humans, especially military personnel, hit me up just in case I donât hear back!)
Gratitude
I am very grateful for good friends who clearly have my best interests at heart.
Lessons learned
Do a viral giveaway before your campaign to increase prelaunch signups.
If you are setting up a custom audience for an ad via the Instagram app, you want to add âCrowdfundingâ as a category first and then âKickstarter.â When I searched for âKickstarterâ first, it did not show as an available audience.
Snapshot (What Iâm currently monitoring)
Current status: 46 backers for $1308 CAD. 65% of my $2000 funding goal. 20 days to go. Note that all of these values are slightly below projections and have been for two days now. More hustle needed.
Cumulative Instagram ad spend:
âViral Giveawayâ: 7977 accounts, 10 visits, $45 $0.72 per visit
NEW: âLenticular Marinaâ: 650 accounts, 8 visits, $9.14 $1.31 per visit
PAUSED: âRelative Sizeâ: 4924 accounts, 53 visits, $39.98 $0.75 per visit.
PAUSED: âLandingâ: 5214 accounts, 58 visits, $40 $0.69 per visit.
PAUSED: âAlienâ: 8661 accounts, 326 visits, $100 $0.31 per visit. â If I spend more, it would be on an ad similar to this.
KingSumo Campaign: 459 contestants, 8970 Entries, 11.94% conversion rate
Creative Recharge
OK, it turns out the Jinxworld Book Club went a different direction and I missed the memo. Thank you, Jerry for the heads up! Next up for me is âThe Killer.â Weâll be reading the book and watching the movie (on Netflix) as a backdrop to a discussion on adaptation.