InventureX Reviews 4 Business Hacks To Help You Succeed With Your Crowdfunding Campaign

The Reddit community weighed in with recommendations from people who have researched the crowdfunding agency market and discovered that InventureX has one of the best reputations and a proven success rate.

That’s a huge accomplishment considering that about two-thirds of all self-directed crowdfunding goals never reach their targets.

Here are four crowdfunding hacks from our team of experts at InventureX for anyone who has ever wondered about the smart way to begin a campaign:

Hack 1: Research your ideal crowdfunding agency before teaming-up.

You’d never pick a business partner without a long, careful vetting process. Nor should you choose a crowdfunding agency without detailed research and due diligence. Keep in mind that some agencies are geared toward one specific product niche, like books or household appliances. Be certain that the agency you choose has significant experience working with campaigns for products in your category or has experience with a variety of verticals should your campaign fall outside the norm.

Then, when you have the agencies narrowed down to one or two candidates, dig deeper and look at their success rate, their management team, and their promotional history, making careful notes about the types of campaigns they conduct and whether they provide comprehensive client support.

Hack 2: Come prepared to pitch your crowdfunding idea.

You should be ready to give a one-minute pitch about your product or service. This short verbal nugget should contain all the key points about why your product is unique, fills a need, and can attract enough investors to make it financially viable.

Because so many creators forget this step, they often come to agency meetings with reams of written and digital data but no pitch. In many cases, agencies don’t really want to look at other data until they’ve heard the creator talk persuasively about the product or service. Be ahead of the crowd by preparing a pitch and memorizing it.

Hack 3: Team-up with the right crowdfunding agency.

All your effort can be wasted if you end up with the wrong agency. Some entrepreneurs take the wrong road and try to raise funds for a tech product with a literary agency, for example. Think of how you’d hire a personal trainer at the gym.

You need to find someone who understands your goals, has experience with projects like yours, and knows how to navigate social media for maximum effect. Would you hire a weightlifting coach to help you run your first marathon? Or enlist the aid of a swimming teacher to learn gymnastics? Of course not. The same principle applies to crowdfunding.

Hack 4: Trust the experts and commit to following winning processes.

At some point after hiring an agency, you’ll need to put your trust in those who have trod the path before, who have, in fact, trod the path hundreds of times. A competent agency, like InventureX, can show you how to work the promotional program they develop for your campaign. Smart entrepreneurs know when to let experts lead the way, and know when to trust the team. If you make a firm commitment to following a winning process set out by your agency’s team, then your chances for ultimate financial success will increase from day one.

Be sure to check out the InventureX website for more detailed information about how to turn your idea or product into a financial success.

Our website is located at https://inventurex.com/launch and if you’re interested in working with us, feel free to message us on Facebook.

Why It’s Important to Define Your Product

Popular opinion has it that a great entrepreneur is one who has the insight to match an existing market need with a suitable product. But why is it then that history is full of products that failed despite having a great potential? This could be down to one of a million reasons, the most significant of which is arguably the lack of a clear definition.

See, here’s the deal — it’s said that behind every successful product is an elaborate, carefully-prepared vision. So how do you as the entrepreneur come up with yours? You start by outlining a comprehensive definition of the product (i.e. what it is, what it does, to whom it’s likely to appeal, and why). This acts not just a solid foundation for your strategy, but a source of inspiration for everyone involved in the product’s journey to market. On the other hand, the lack of a definition means whatever you’re creating simply has no valid reason to exist.

What Does Defining Your Product Mean?

Just like you cannot solve a problem until you first understand it, it’s very difficult to convince people to buy your product without defining your vision and its core essence. As such, it’s safe to say that definition is the most important phase of a product’s development cycle. And while details may vary across cases, a proper product definition is one that describes not just its physical appearance, but also:

-An overview of the market segment it’s meant for, and their needs

-How it will address the said needs

-How consumers will be better off with this particular product compared to other options. In other words, the reasons why they’d choose it over competing products.

Articulating Your Vision

Remember that you’ll need the buy-in of other parties make your product a success. For this to happen, you have to make a case to justify its necessity and worth. This means crafting a vision statement for your product.

This goes hand-in-hand with mastering the art of explaining this vision to others in clear, concise and convincing terms. For the sake of emphasis, it’s worth repeating that your product’s success depends on your ability to sell its mission. Whatever that is, it has to make sense to both the target audience and potential investors as well. These two might seem like an odd couple, but it’s not unusual for their needs to overlap.

Targeting Your Audience

It’s perhaps the most critical step of the definition process — singling out the market segment to which you want your product to appeal. This could be defined by any criteria (age, gender, income, interests etc), but it could also be a group of people who share a similar experience/challenge. Either way, what’s important is to understand where their needs and your product vision converge.

This will of course involve researching marketing dynamics to get inside the heads and hearts of your customers. Try to pinpoint what exactly they’re looking for, why, and the factors that influence the decision to choose a product like yours. There’s no defined rule of thumb regarding the extent of your efforts, but it’s definitely worthwhile going as deep as you can. The higher the quantity and quality of your findings, the more relevant your product definition will be.

How Do You Stand Out?

As competition keeps climbing, so does the standard to which products have to conform to stand a chance in the marketplace. This is just a way of saying that driving sales will require more than being good at what you do. From a consumer’s perspective, your offerings have to provide a unique selling proposition (USP) to be worth their money.

This is basically a value-added distinguisher that makes your product worth choosing over other options. And don’t just highlight one point — list down as many unique benefits it has to offer as you can identify. As long as you can pack them into a statement that can be shared in your messaging, you’ll have stumbled upon a goldmine.

Your Website Should Be a Marketing Tool

Nearly every entrepreneur today understands that you need to have a website if you hope to compete in an increasingly digital marketplace. That’s great! Unfortunately, just having a site isn’t enough to compete with companies that are using theirs effectively. The guide below will help you make sure that your website is a marketing tool.

Setting Up A Sales Funnel

Some business owners think that sales funnels are only for companies with an e-commerce component to their business. If you’re selling things online, you should definitely have a funnel that guides visitors from your homepage all the way to the checkout button. It’s a great way to increase revenue. (Update 10/29/18: Experts state that by 2022 $638 million in US Retail sales will be done online. Check out the full article on the Benefits of an E-Commerce Model here.)

However, your site should have some sort of goal even if you’re not selling online. Are you looking to increase your email newsletter’s circulation? Perhaps spread awareness about the e-book about your company or industry? Encourage visitors to make an account on your site? Your site has the potential to funnel web traffic to all of these things and more, so make sure you take advantage of the value your site can provide!

Build Brand Awareness

Once upon a time, stores had to use their brick-and-mortar location to present an attractive storefront to get customers to come inside. Today, your website can serve this purpose if it’s visually attractive, engaging, and responsive. If you have a physical storefront, beautifying both it and your website gives you two points of contact instead of one. If you’re online only, your site needs to replace the traditional storefront in your search for customers.

Either way, a pretty website can help you build a brand, allowing you to save on everyday marketing expenses such as flyers and other print ads. If something on your page goes viral, you’ll have more eyeballs on your site than you know what to do with!

Keep It Social

Customers are more likely to patronize brands that they feel a personal connection with, so talking to them on social media can be a great way to convert prospective customers into actual ones. Nowadays, most every business needs to understand the importance of social media. How do you build awareness of all of the social platforms your company is on? Your website, of course!

A simple link to your Facebook or Twitter account can help legitimize your business accounts as your official business accounts, establishing them as a trustworthy source of information from and about your company. Your site may also incorporate a funnel to get more social media subscribers, increasing your odds of going viral while simultaneously appealing to a larger potential audience with every post.

Mobility

Finally, it is absolutely imperative that your site loads well on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Over half of all internet searches are now performed on a mobile device, and prospective customers won’t hesitate to move on if you force them to stare at the spinning circle of death for longer than a second. Mobile optimization is taking over how we view websites.

That means that you’ve lost a lead, but it’s actually worse than that. Modern SEO algorithms penalize sites that users click on only to quickly navigate away from because that site has failed to provide the information that user was searching for. Multiple mobile searchers could hurt your overall SEO rankings, making your website less effective in everything that it is trying to do.

Ultimately, your website is a marketing tool. Make the most of it and watch your company grow!

How Do You Measure Business Success?

As an entrepreneur, you know how significant it is to discern what works and what doesn’t at your business. The industry you are in is quite unpredictable, so you need to constantly gauge your firm’s performance to determine which efforts are successful and which ones need to improve or get eliminated.

There are a few trusted methods (though not the only ones!) to measure business success and among them are the following:

Are Your Customers (Truly) Satisfied?

There may be different ways to know if your customers are satisfied with your products or services, but their reviews are one of the most effective. However, reviews don’t tell the whole story. 

While it’s certainly easy to look at stars next to a product or service, one of the best ways to find out how you’re actually performing is to simply talk to your customers. Engage with them. See what they liked or disliked and use that as a way to make alterations. This can let you know if you’re already on a successful track or if you need to switch up the path you’re on to get towards success.

Also, your customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is your average rating based on the responses of your customers. You can also ask people to refer your business to their friends and determine why they would do so. Take the opportunity to learn which aspect of your business your customers are happy about and which ones they would like you to improve on.

Keep It Current

Another way to measure how well your business is doing is to know how the market is trending. If you find yourself consistently falling behind the curve, that could be an indication that you are not succeeding at keeping your business up to date. Positioning yourself at the forefront of industry changes makes you more adaptable and capable of handling shifts in your market.

A business owner should also be a lifelong learner so make sure you’re doing your utmost to stay up to date, constantly develop, and do your research. These will be important factors in weighing your potential successes.

Financials Are (and Aren’t) Everything

Should the goal for your business be to make money? Probably. That is, unless you’re a nonprofit or some other type of volunteer-based organization. So yeah, ultimately money is good. But here’s something to keep in mind: money doesn’t always define success with your business. 

Sure, if money is your overall goal and how you personally measure and chart your success and your business’ health, then that’s a key metric to observe. But even if you’re not crushing every sales goal or if you’re a little frustrated by the cash flow, find other things that you’re really excelling at to help motivate you and keep you going.

While the money you have for your business is essential, it doesn’t have to be your primary focus. In fact, customer engagement, ratings, and performance are also incredibly useful in discerning how well your company is doing.

Ultimately Up to You

Businesses have goals, and you can set your own metrics because ultimately you choose what truly matters to you. For some companies, they focus on the satisfaction of their customers, while others rely on their financials. You can set specific key performance indicators (KPIs) including leads generated and converted, frequency and volume of your product sales, and your profits where you subtract your expenses from your revenue.

You should also consider how happy you are with your business’ situation and the direction it is going. You can use all these indicators to determine which facets to need changes to further the success of your brand. And remember, your success ultimately comes down to how you define it.

How to Develop Your Business’ Vision

Nearly everyone agrees that successful entrepreneurs have a strong small business vision at the heart of their success, but what does this term mean? Wikipedia defines vision as the foresight to envision future market trends and act accordingly. Merriam-Webster defines vision as anything you can see or dream. However, the best business definition of small business vision may be found on Entrepreneur.com: Vision is the energy that drives successful entrepreneurs.

When identifying the vision behind your startup, it is important to keep the following steps in mind:

Assess Your Values

You need to understand exactly what you want your company to stand for before attempting to articulate it as a vision. The good news is that there’s really no wrong answer here. Every company believes in different things, and nearly any belief system can produce a good vision if you believe in it strongly enough.

For example, a tech company that hopes to be doing something three years from now that no one’s heard of yet might use a broad concept such as “innovation” as their vision. By contrast, a business in the service industry looking to set itself apart with superior service might say that their vision is providing personalized service to every customer. Anything is fine as long as it defines who you are and what you are trying to accomplish.

Keep It Simple

Both examples above are concise and to the point, very much by design. If you have a complicated vision demanding paragraphs to explain, it’s probably more complicated than it needs to be. This means that other areas of your business are likely to be overcomplicated as well, creating an unnecessary barrier between you and success.

Visions also need to be shared with your staff, a task that becomes much simpler if it’s easy to articulate. “We believe in innovation” is a concept that’s very easy for tech developers to get behind, ensuring that your entire company is a united front. If you need to have a company meeting just to explain why everyone is there, you’re more likely to have competing visions damaging the cohesiveness of your operation.

Finally, companies reaching in too many directions at once are more likely to leave each branch with too few resources to accomplish anything. Therefore, a simpler vision is easier to bring to fruition than a more complicated one.

Give Yourself Timeframes

Your company’s vision is like a goal. It shouldn’t be something that you hope to achieve eventually, but instead something attainable within a set timeframe. This allows you to periodically update your vision as your company’s needs evolve.

It’s important to set a realistic time table too. For example, allowing yourself years to accomplish something that could be done in months will artificially stall your growth. Likewise, allowing too little time will ensure that you fail to reach it, hurting company morale. It’s important to get the balance just right to grow aggressively, but realistically.

Be Able To Answer The “Why?”

Nearly anyone your company ends up working with will first ask why it exists. Why should customers choose you? Why should potential investors believe in you? You should anticipate these questions and be able to answer them with minimal hesitation.

This means knowing exactly why you are doing everything your company does. If you know the intrinsic purpose behind every decision you make, the questions above will be among the easiest you ever need to answer. Good luck with your small business vision!