At some point in our earlier discussion, we’ve expressed our desire to do a global pre-order campaign on Indiegogo. We believe the timing is just right and we must take this opportunity, the momentum we have gathered so far forward and turn into something genuinely constructive by creating accessibility for cricketers across the globe for them to learn about this product through real experience. We think everybody or every early-stage hardware startup should do a pre-order campaign for the experience of it and learn from the process. It’s not about the result; it’s purely about the process. We see Indiegogo campaign preparation as nothing but a teaser of the company’s future actionable. We’ll primarily be doing everything possible under the sky and above the earth that we could do in our company’s lifetime all in 6–12 months. We will just be crunching the timelines and executing on things with limited deadlines leading up to the campaign. 

We believe we understand the importance and the value of the pre-order campaign and what it takes for us to be a successful one. We’ll also define “success” soon in the next part of our discussion. We will need to stretch ourselves beyond possibilities and limits to get things done and put ourselves and the company in a winning position. It could look like it’s desperation, maybe it is. We also understand that we would be making a ton of progress going through the process which we wouldn’t have otherwise done. Having said that we would take this ‘desperate’ tag happily any day knowing that we will be so much further along the process. So coming back to defining ‘success,’ the primary focus for us here is not about reaching the funding goal or raising the capital, it’s about the process and the journey, the strive to succeed. The funding goal is just a consequence and the result of the efforts we’ve put in throughout the process. We’ll be in a better position overall by doing this activity and exercise, and nothing else comes close to reaching this far if not for the desperation to reach the end goal. So a desperate deep desire hunger and having the appetite to reach the end goal in hindsight, but a genuine belief that the process itself is the victory is our attitude going into the campaign.

Here is the list of objectives we wish to accomplish by doing the Indiegogo pre-order campaign that gives us a headstart in every department of the company.

CONTENT GENERATION

I can’t stress enough on the value and importance of creating quality content for our product /service and the company. Quality is a reflection of branding and brand creation. It’s always the best dressed or the right looking person that gets the most attention in the crowd. They stand out and gets noticed so looking good matters. Same here, it’s our best chance to create high-quality content in the form of videos, pictures, written words, audio, memes, quotes, GIFs, infographics and communicate in all ways and modes human beings can ever express. It involves many things like content creation, generation, curation, and distribution.

It does not mean that we need to spend a lot of time, energy, resources, and money into creating high-quality content. However, as Gary Vee says, depth versus width, quantity over quality — any day and we agree a 100% agree and there’s no argument about this. One needs to create more content than one piece of high-quality material. However, it’s also our best chance to show and communicate it to the world about our mission, vision, passion in the best possible way ever. We see it as if we have a chance to make a 2.5-hour movie of ourselves, and how would we do that movie? Don’t we want our life movie to be the best one ever? Just like that. Story-tell in the best possible way we can in 2–5 minutes. However, all this effort going into one main thing that is — “Talking to our audience about our passion and how we can help solve their problem.” We really can’t wait to show the world how the freebowler superthrower can genuinely complete the batting practice and make the cricketing experience better.

GLOBAL BRAND AWARENESS THRO’ SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Yes, we want people to know about us. We want everyone in the cricket world to understand what we have for them to offer. We must reach out to the target audience in every part of the cricketing world. However, in our understanding, there’s the only way to do it. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING. Period. There’s no other practical and feasible way possible in this time frame to reach out to millions and millions of cricketers across the globe without the aid of Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter because every one of our target audience is on one or more of these platforms, either for cricket or non-cricket related topic consumption.

The idea here is to reach people and say ‘Hey, look we have this for you.’ Again, it’s not necessarily a sales activity, but a branding activity. Brand awareness is real, and it works. More people see ‘freebowler’ in their news feed, better are our opportunities to convert them into a potential buyer. There’s value to be present everywhere we humanly possibly can on the current social media platforms and offer to educate cricketers about the training aid. We also want all these things to work in sequential order. The reason we create high-quality content in the first step is to distribute them over the social media platforms to reach the audience by running ads in all cricket playing nations across all platforms to tell them about our offering and position freebowler as a genuinely innovative cricket brand.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

It’s essential to build a community of people who are wanting to be a part of freebowler journey. We want cricketers to be associated with us and understand that they are interested in learning more about us and allowing us to solve their problem. Once we have the content, we distribute them over the social media marketing platforms by running ads against the people whom we want to reach, and we want them to take some action. Reaching out to our target audience is one thing, but talking to them and making them a part of our journey and the process is another thing. There are going to be different categories of people interested in us; not everybody is going to buy from us. But

However, the fact of the matter is that we still want them to be hooked on to this. They might consume it or pass it along; either way, it still works for us, so we need to build a community of cricketers interested in freebowler. We need to keep them engaged by always sharing status updates and progress. Moreover, there are several ways to nurture them and get their information so that we can keep them posted. On the other hand, the feedback and insights they have on the product go a long way in shaping the product offering.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical because we want to available in front of people when they try and look us up on Google — so it’s essential to have a good SEO strategy to drive people to the website and landing pages. People might find us anywhere on social media marketing platforms because of the ads and want to learn more about us, so we are working with marketing specialists to ensure better search results for ‘non-electric, affordable and portable bowling machine’ and related keywords to find freebowler. Further, social media marketing efforts to build the database and community is curated by landing pages, email newsletter subscriptions, signups, and more. We’ll also keep them engaged through the latest updates, news, contests, and related events and bring them value.

NEWS AND MEDIA MENTIONS & FEATURED TESTIMONIALS

Every activity of campaign preparation is crucial for us. All these bring value to us and for our prospective customers. Being featured in major news and media channels, platforms, and portals are essential for us because it gives us the exposure and visibility we are looking for globally. It builds the reputation, adds credibility and weight to the entire campaign build-up. It’s great that we are reaching the audience through high-quality content aided by social media marketing efforts and trying to drive them into our marketing funnel, but what prompts them to get into the funnel is word-of-mouth and people talking about us. It happens when people of credibility and reputation talk about us. News and Media features mention backed by testimonials by cricketers go a long way in convincing other people in the space to opt-in. So it’s a important for us to be featured in global news channels and validated by some influential people in the industry which helps spread the word out to convince the people further to leave their information with us safely so that it gives us an opportunity to educate them about the training aid also over a period of time. So we will have a dedicated PR activity/press-conference with some notable names and brands before the campaign launch to ensure the launch news gets circulated in the form of communication across major sports information platforms, portals and forums.

INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencers voice matters. I made a brief mention of the importance of credible voice in the industry earlier, which helps people get over insecurities and apprehensions about this new and innovative training aid. News and media mentions and features do a great job in helping people with this to a certain extent; however, it’s truly the voice of the influencers that gets into the head and heart of millions of cricketers around the world. It’s something about the way these social media influencers communicate, translate the information, and impart knowledge to the crowd in the language that cricketers can digest and consume without taxing their brain too much. Cricketers trust these influencers confidently because of their reputation that they have gained over time through their work, art, and expertise in this field.

So we truly believe working with these influencers both online and offline, will help us help people take action for us much faster. These influencers could be anybody from a celebrity cricketer, to a coach or a product reviewer on YouTube or just anybody that has a voice in this space and built a massive following over some time capable of convincing people to take some action. We’ve identified a bunch of influencers predominantly on social media platforms because that’s where maximum attention lies these days, so we’ll explore this space by working with them to help us generate content and talk about our product and educate the cricketers about our training aid to make training experience better.

Part-II to follow with more information…