By Rieva Lesonsky
Are you a business-to-business marketer looking for new prospects who own growing firms? Are you a trend-watcher looking to spy up-and-coming new trends your business can profit from? If either of these descriptions fits you, you could benefit from paying attention to the growing trend of crowdfunding, the Enterprise Council on Small Business (ECSB) reports.
If you’re not familiar with crowdfunding, it’s a relatively new way to obtain capital by getting small amounts of money from a large number of people. Crowdfunding typically operates via online communities and websites; IndieGoGo, Kickstarter and SoKap are a few that ECSB cites.
Startups or companies ready to expand use the sites to pitch their business ideas or reason for seeking funding. Then members of the “crowd” have the chance to invest whatever they choose. In essence, they vote with their dollars, funding the businesses and ideas that they believe have the most potential.
Crowdfunding has several uses for your small business even if you’re not seeking financing, ECSB contends. Because these sites act as a kind of referendum on viable ideas, they enable you to see new business ideas in action and how the crowd responds to them. By seeing what investors think is (and isn’t) fundable, you get a good idea of what products, services and markets have growth potential as hot future trends. For instance, the growing market for smartphone apps is one that you could have spotted by watching crowdfunding trends a few years ago.
If you’re a BtoB marketer, watching crowdfunding sites is also a great way to find potential customers. Crowdfunding sites give you access to people who are, or are going to become, entrepreneurs—and lets you access them right at the moment when they’re launching or undergoing growth. Both situations are times when they’re likely to need new products and services and be more open to making a change to new vendors.
If you’re in a high-tech industry or other arena that caters to young entrepreneurs, crowdfunding sites can be particularly valuable to you. The people seeking crowdfunding, by nature, tend to be younger and more tech-savvy, ECSB points out. Participating on crowdfunding sites helps you see what these business owners are thinking and what their business hopes and dreams are—all of which can help you market to them more effectively.
Image by Flickr user Vinoth Chandar (Creative Commons)
Google+Web.com is now offering forums designed to support small businesses in cities throughout the US. Learn more about these forums here: http://Businessforum.web.com/
Tags: crowdfunding, small business financing, small business marketing, social media
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