Anna discusses how the Bay of Quinte Regional Marketing Board leverages giveaways to increase tourism and how these strategies have shaped the growth of their brand and the businesses in their region. You'll hear about different types of marketing campaigns, from big prize giveaways to weekly promotions, and how each is targeted to a specific audience. 

Fraiberg also offers an overview of the diverse region of Bay of Quinte in southeastern Ontario, detailing its urban and rural amenities, and emphasising how agritourism plays an integral part in their community. 

Discover how their marketing strategies have evolved, incorporating tools such as Facebook, Instagram, MailChimp, and KickoffLabs. Plus, get a glimpse into their partnership with local news sites, chambers of commerce, and local radio stations that amplify their reach. 

Lastly, we learn how their biweekly newsletter, full of quality content, further reinforces their connection with their audience and encourages ongoing participation.

Ready to feel inspired and fill your marketing knowledge toolbox to the brim? Then don't hesitate to hit the subscribe button and stay tuned for more episodes of the On Growth Podcast. We promise to deliver incredible insights from industry professionals right to your screen! You don't want to miss it! Subscribe now!

Perhaps, one of the most exciting moments in Victor's journey was their stint on the popular show, Shark Tank, which is discussed in-depth, giving viewers an insider's perspective on what it's really like to be on the show.

Furthermore, Victor discusses how they targeted a specific demographic—first-generation Latinos—creating a product that speaks to their nostalgia. He offers valuable tips about product development, like conducting surveys, reverse engineering product ideas, and keeping the audience actively engaged throughout.

The conversation also provides actionable insights into crowdfunding campaigns like Kickstarter while highlighting the benefits of using the KickoffLabs platform to generate viral referrals with its ease of sharing, providing a terrific boost to their email signups.

So, get ready to up your content marketing game by watching this  exchange between Victor Macias and KickoffLabs founder Josh Ledgard. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for our YouTube channel to stay updated with more such engaging and informative content. Hope to see you soon, happy marketing!

You can give away anything that you think your ideal audience will like, regardless of the cost. Often samples of your product, experiences, or simply being the first to get something is enough to capture an audience. This also means themed simple items such as fireworks on the Fourth of July or a limited edition of your product to bring the audience back to you.

Give a complete gift or experience.

It is often best to offer a complete experience for your grand prize instead of a discount or an item that requires add-ons. For example, a boutique offering a gift card for the standard price of a complete outfit or VIP tickets to a festival that includes any add-on fees there may be.

Create a Budget

Stick to your budget. You can get creative with packages and prizes being items or services that don't cost you much as long as they are things your audience would be interested in. For example, if you want to stay low-budget for your bakery's grand opening- offer a free cookie package for leads that are a fan of your product.

Have a friend win too.

Encouraging referrals can look like offering "if you win, they also win" items and experiences. This can be a couple's Valentine's Day-themed dinner package, a day at the spa for the winner and their friend, or even work for a service like lawn care- one wins a freshly mowed lawn- they both do.

Exclusivity

When it comes to a waitlist for a new product launch, exclusivity can even be a prize in itself. Offering the top of your list to be the first to receive your product or a limited edition item can be enough to drive a competitive crowd. You can also offer a one-of-a-kind product style for your winner for extra bragging rights.

https://kickofflabs.com/podcast/waitlist-and-idea-validation-with-a-sales-webinar-signup

Market Research

The Pronti.AI team spent countless hours interviewing hundreds of people and taking in all of the responses and reviews the app received.

Experiment

They experimented hundreds of times on social platforms leading to their TikTok platform going viral.

Dig Deep + Understand Marketing

Understand what works best for your brand and know the differences in what content to push for various platforms. Pronti.AI had amazing success on TikTok and pulled a lot of growth from the market they built there.

Be Agile

Start with what you have and continue to evolve with your consumer. Pronti.Ai put a lot of focus on continuous improvement within their app, which created a very communicative environment as the app developed.

Listen to Customers
Listen to what your customers are looking for. Note their comments and use that data to refine your product.

Promote to Your Audience
Matt has an active YouTube following so when sharing about his campaign, he mentioned it in his YouTube content daily to get them engaged and sharing.

Audience Growth is Science
Pay attention to what works for yourself and others. Matt paid attention to top videos from other popular channels to find their formula. He posted his own videos and kept tweaking the thumbnails, SEO, captions, and video itself until it worked etc, and got more views. Great content is only great if it's viewed.

Pay Attention to Your Highest Referrals
Even if they do not win the giveaway, notice the customer who had a high amount of successful referrals. Let them know you see them and that they are important to your brand!

Make Your Giveaway Unique
Haugen Racing gave away a drift simulator. Matt credits a lot of success from the uniqueness of this opportunity. Listen to how he plans to level up when he reaches 200k followers.

Make Winning Accessible

Consider making your contest actions weighted toward referrals. Matt chose to make this campaign referral forward as opposed to purchasing weighted, more followers had the opportunity to win. This caused more brand sharing across other followers' accounts and a more successful growth campaign.

Here's a short run down of things you'll learn.

**Call 10-20 signups a day**
Learn more about them and get them engaged.

**Do reach out on Instagram/Facebook**
Follow people who comment on competitors and suggest your product.

**Advertise on Instagram**
$10 a day bringing 200-300 signups a day.

**Make referrals worth it**
1 referral worth $30 credit. 2 gets early access to the card. 

https://kickofflabs.com/podcast/how-zenus-collected-25000-leads-without-advertising-with-a-KickoffLabs-contest

Thanks! 

If knowing a leads location important for your business then ask in a dropdown with limited choices or confirm with a checkbox.

You Set the Rules

Consider making the rewards for referrals generous, but limited to the first 10-50 people that earn them.

A Winner Every Week?

Great idea! Conssider announcing weekly winners to your whole list to keep them engaged and excited.

Worried About Qualified Leads?

Have enough copy on your page so people understand who your product is for. They will qualify themselves from there.

For a complete transcript check out https://kickofflabs.com/podcast/how-do-i-make-sure-all-my-leads-are-qualified-and-tell-their-friends

"Are there risks if the value prop changes a few times between now and launch with folks who have already seen this?"

"Is it ok if I do this 3-4 months?"

"I'm not sure what the right CTA should be? "

"What do you think is the best way to get audiences to the landing page?"

Get all the answers in this episode and find the full transcript at https://kickofflabs.com/podcast. 

https://kickofflabs.com/podcast/how-to-crowdfund-a-100k-launch-without-a-product-yet

That's precisely the task I set myself up for when I said they'd have a summer project like this—one where they create and ultimately sell something. The summer is winding down, and we're getting closer to the launch. This conversation was taken the day we walked through setting up the first website for their creation.

Enjoy and send any feedback to josh@kickofflabs.com

Full transcript and key takeaways are available here: https://kickofflabs.com/podcast/how-would-you-teach-a-9-year-old-how-to-position-their-new-product

Since we recorded the interview they’ve gone on to launch the service in 6 countries and over 100+ cities. They’ve also leveraged their larger audience as social proof to raise a larger funding round. It’s been a success and when you listen to Rossa you’ll understand why. 

I learned a lot just editing this interview about writing great landing page copy, rallying an audience around a mission, facebook advertising, and how to hack crowdfunding and app launches. 

If you enjoy this interview let us know subscribing and leaving a review in the Apple Podcast app. You can also send any feedback along to josh@kickofflabs.com. 

Full transcript and key takeaways are available at: https://kickofflabs.com/podcast/how-did-rossa-collect-100-thousand-leads-crowdfunding-and-300-thousand-fans/

Bootstrap for freedom

No one gives you 20 million in funding without some sort of strings and expectations attached.

Understand your personal priorities

If it's important for you to spend time with your family then make sure your business is setup to support that as a founding principle.

Turn practicality into a strength

Eliminate debt. Save money in advance. Set goals and have a fallback plan, but don’t be afraid to put yourself out there.

Make money talk

If someone says they need a feature and are willing to pay for it's development... then others might too.

Keep your partner in the Loop

Consider your partner as an investor in your business that needs to be kept abreast of how things are going. Be open.

Your time isn't free

It may look like your business is making money... but can it afford to pay you what you're worth?

Read the full transcript here:

https://kickofflabs.com/podcast/how-to-build-a-business-that-supports-your-life-plan/

Remember, if you enjoy this episode, write us a review in the podcast listening app of your choice and send any feedback to josh@kickofflabs.com

Set Marketing Goals

Do some research and understand what success would mean for you at the end and work backwards from that to set goals.

Get In Front of People

Tim never missed an opportunity to present his idea to school competitions, online forums, and even when he was pulled over by the police!

Build, Demo, and Iterate

Timmy has built 30 different prototype versions of their product before landing on the winner.

Disruption Requires a Different Message

Most of the gun industry peddles in fear so Vara Safety struck a warmer, family friendly, tone with their advertising.

Offer Discounts for Sharing

They drove a TON traffic to their campaign through the KickoffLabs viral tools by offering a discount for sharing.

Find Partner Communities

Timmy and his team built relationships with managers of facebook groups and other online communities.

Here’s just a sample of what you’ll learn in this episode.  

1. Use Google Trends to Validate People Looking for an idea. 
2. Track cost for lead generated, conversion rate, and whether or not people shared using KickoffLabs. 
3. You can do influencer marketing without paying for influencer marketing. Engage communities where your customers hang out.
4. Optimize your campaigns by testing fewer, but more meaningful changes to ads and landing pages. 
5. Take a pro-active approach to email (at least once per week) to keep your list engaged as you build your product. 
6. 7% conversion rate from the initial list. Made back the $350 worth of chocolate in the first month. 
7. A website that converts is more important than something that’s pretty. :) 

Mass adoption requires simplicity. If you are going for a mass market like the payment app space you need a dead simple message with a value proposition that's easy to explain.

You need to overcome objections. With a financial product people are going to be skeptical. Doubly so if it's a space like crypto. They needed to explain how a users money would be safe. 

Early access waitlists work. "Having an early access leaderboard/waitlist worked pretty fantastically to get people sharing and referring friends." 

Beta testing is a reward. People who are enthusiastic influencers are also the same people who want to be a part of your team and give great feedback!

1. A huge number of your first impressions are going to be from a mobile device with a slower browser and network than you think. 

2. If any part of your customer experience is slow it will impact the customer perception of your business. You want to get out of the way of your customer and let them get down to business ASAP. 

3. SEO. Google will rank you higher. 

4. When you improve performance you end up making things simpler to maintain by removing stuff you don't need and reducing complexity. 

Give a listen and let us know what you think about how we went about improving the performance of the KickoffLabs customer experience. 

To be clear, this was not on Kickstarter. There was no huge Kickstarter community to draw from. Starting from a small list, Glowforge needed to build up their audience size to good condition before the official launch.

They used KickoffLabs to generate more than 10,000 emails to seed their initial list and kickoff the crowdfunding campaign.

Here’s how they did it…

Lots of images from the interview can be found here: https://kickofflabs.com/blog/biggest-30-day-crowdfunding-campaign-in-history/

Three years ago Will started his own agency that specializes in managing these crowdfunding launches for companies, has grown to 7 employees, and helped their clients raise millions of dollars. 

We’ll go step by step through the system they’ve developed, how they’ve used KickoffLabs, and important lessons like how you get people to signup and share your campaign before you’ve even launched the pre-sale. 

If you enjoy this episode write us a review in iTunes or your podcasting service of choice. 

Nicolas Aagaard and his co-founders learned from their previous mistakes to design a simple solution that's good for the earth and good for consumers. Then they went ahead with a referral campaign to generate emails ahead of their Kickstarter Launch using KickoffLabs.

Using the emails they generated from KickoffLabs they've gone on to raise a ton on money on Kickstarter for LastSwab. An easy to clean, sanitary, and reusable alternative to the cotton swab. 

Learn how they failed first, tested headlines, and marketed their product through each phase of their launch.