How To Do A Press Outreach PR Campaign For Kickstarter

Walkthrough Video 

How are you shaking up the industry? Seek out editors that would relate to you and your story. Homophily, the tendency to associate with similar people, involves age, gender, ethnicity, social class, values, or beliefs. 

For example: a woman who is founder of a company in an industry dominated by men, will more easily land an interview with editors who are also women, and have previously written about topics like women’s rights.

You can watch this video walkthrough of how to find and catalog editors.

Search Methods

To find editors who write about Kickstarters & your product's category:

• List your expertise regarding matters of public interest on HARO (workplace diversity, trending industry topic, etc.)
  
  
• Click "Discover" on Kickstarter to find competitor projects.
  
  
• Google their project title to find editors who are actively writing about Kickstarters in your product category.
  
  
• Reverse Image Search a promotional image associated with a comparable Kickstarter, to find other publications which wrote about that Kickstarter project.
  

• Google your product category + the word ‘Kickstarter’
  
  
• Google, 'Kickstarter "Roundup"', with Round Up in quotes. Also try other phrases in conjunction with the product-type: "Top 10", "Best Upcoming", or “Coming to Kickstarter”
  
  
• Reverse image-search promotional images from a known article written about a competitor product.
  
  
• Spotify or Clubhouse, search for your product category + “podcast”

To organize your outreach efforts, use a media list. A media list is a spreadsheet of contacts you want to reach out to, and their current status. 

You can download the media contact list template, here: 

Media Contact 📑 List - [Project Name]

Press Kits

Provide editors with a prepared media kit that gets them important information quickly, makes their job easier, and a paid affiliate link. 

Here are example press kits, created in Google Docs:

Press Kit - Example

Press Kit - Velaflame

Press Kit - Kristala

Press Kit - Kristala (Coming to Consoles)

Press Kit - Kristala (Celebrity Guest Composer)

If there is an embargo, include a reminder in the press kit:

To host media kit assets, create a Google Drive folder with your trailers, key art, clip art, logos, GIFs, screenshots, wallpapers, music, etc.

Remember to enable “Public Sharing” on both the doc and drive folder:

Example Outreach Email

The press needs a story to hook readers. A basic story angle is social proof:

• preview reactions by influencers
  “Markiplier recently played our game, and said…[link]”
• community membership size and activity
  “Over 100,000 fans can’t be wrong…”
• campaign funds raised or sales to date
  “We launched and have already raised $150,000 from over 1,100 backers”

The best way to start the email is by using an ice-breaker. An effective ice-breaker is connecting their recent work to something you're doing:

• Did they attend a relevant event recently? Discuss it!
• Does their social media show they’ve a keen interest in a topic? Nerd out!
• Provide an editorial correction that you may have noticed on an article they wrote
• Connect their recent work to something you’re doing at your business

Here is a press email template for the first outreach: