We all know that a picture says a thousand words. That would make the visuals of a crowdfunding campaign one of the primary ways to communicate with your prospective backers.
Marcus Stabenow has made a name for himself at Techartista as a go-to guy for visual graphics. Even with no formal education in his field he has mastered his craft as the Cofounder and Creative Director of visual content consulting company, Visitor Assembly. We sat down with Marcus to find out more about what goes into creating killer visual graphics for a crowdfunding campaign.

Keys to Effective Visual Graphics

According to Marcus there are several different components to effective visual graphics: determining the art direction to generate visual content, creating a badass campaign video, and using the visual content to share and connect with as large of an audience as possible.

Creating Visual Content

When determining the art direction it is important to consider your target audience as well as the story that you want your visuals to tell. Marcus offers some general tips on the subject, “Be open to ideas and have consistent flow, style, tone and theme.” He also stresses the significance of the narrative surrounding your product when creating visual content. ”What the product is for and how it can be used is more important than how it looks... Capture how it is used and how people interact around the product.” Obviously this doesn’t mean snap some photos with your 1mp camera phone and call it a day. You want quality photos that capture the story you are telling as well as the audience you are speaking to.

Campaign Video

Several essential things to consider in creating an awesome campaign video are having a good crew, video length (try to keep it under 2:30), and most importantly generating an engaging story, or as Marcus puts it “the meat.” To refer back to Part 1 and 2 of the Crowdfunding Series, John and Mary mentioned the importance of creating a narrative surrounding your product to offer the audience the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Marcus agrees saying, “It can look really good but people won’t be interested if there is no meat to it.” Because the campaign’s story is so vital, giving each part of the narrative an appropriate amount of attention and appreciation is a must. The narrative that is constructed in the video as well as the campaign’s other visual content will transcend the campaign page itself and continue to grow into every context in which it is shared.

What Now?

So now that you have kickass visual graphics what do you do with them? Marcus suggests reaching out to more people than just the Kickstarter demographic. Using instagram and publications as platforms to display visuals is a great way to reach out to a wider audience as well as generate some publicity for your campaign.

Another way to build your campaign outside of Kickstarter is to construct several different social media contests. This not only offers free publicity, but a contest’s interactive nature also creates excitement about your campaign.

Next week

Marcus offered us some great visual graphics advice that rounds out our series on Crowdfunding. Hopefully the information provided by our in-house experts has been enough to get you started on your Kickstarter project. Next week we'll wrap things up with Post Funding Strategy to give you an idea of what to do after your Crowdfunding campaign is successfully funded.

About Marcus

Shortly after enrolling in the Police Academy, Marcus discovered it wasn’t for him. He wanted to help people but hadn’t quite figured out how he could best do that. “When I was twenty, I got into UI (user interface) and UX ( user experience) design.” He was able to learn a lot and enjoyed the work he was doing but it wasn’t quite enough for him. After a year at this job he left to start work as a freelancer, developing content, creating a marketing strategy, and “making it happen.” His first experience thus far with crowdfunding was Collin Garrity’s The everyday folding table, which was wildly successful. This project marked the beginning of Visitor Assembly, a visual content consulting company, of which Marcus is Cofounder and Creative Director.

If you want to pick Marcus’ brain yourself, you can email him or message him on Slack. marcus@visitorassembly.com

Crowdfunding Series Part 3: Visual Graphics