After Sharon Kim's mom passed away from cancer, she made it her goal to give other fighters a chance to have a different end to their story. Thus, she quit her corporate job to spend the next two years of her life creating CanPlan, a one of a kind planner made to help patients and caregivers fight cancer day by day. Her vision was to give all those who've been touched by cancer a voice by allowing them to play an active role in her project. Kickstarter was the perfect platform to not only start a social uprising, but to also help people feel apart of a project greater than themselves. The marketing objective was to focus on getting the word of CanPlan to spread organically by emphasizing on the profound impact a simple share could make. The overall goal was to highlight an unmet need within the cancer industry and to empower the community to work together towards bringing CanPlan to life.
Since our budget was trivial, we had to focus on budget-friendly strategies and ask ourselves how we could reach our target audience organically. We decided to focus on the power of sharing and offered a free version of the planner if people simply shared our project on social media. We also knew that in order to compel people to share our project, we had to put out good content. So we utilized the success strategy of other big companies such as Apple and Zappos and focused our entire marketing campaign on the concept of why. Why were we doing what we were doing? What got us to spend every waking minute on this and why should people care? Once we were able to distinguish and develop our purpose, our message spread like wildfire. Our brand voice was authentic, genuine, raw and vulnerable, which resonated with our audience well.
Thankfully Gregory Markel and the Infuse Creative agency team advised on us on social strategy and assisted us with our paid marketing efforts. With their help, we were able to directly speak to our target audience and get the message out quick and efficiently.
Since there's nothing else out there in the market similar to CanPlan, we had to really highlight the unmet need within the cancer industry and be clear about how CanPlan is a resolution for it.
Facebook was the perfect platform to dive into the details of the planner and motivate people to share as well as tag their friends in our posts. The first step in bringing a new product to market is education. So we spent a lot of our time creating useful content in the form of blogs and short videos, and adjusted our strategy based on the community's response. It was a great platform to get the community talking, collaborating and generating new content ideas. Paid advertising turned out to be highly effective on Facebook since we could get extremely specific with our targeting. Instagram was the platform we used to spread short but impactful visual messages. We teamed up with huge cancer influencers and other successful cancer organizations by creating cobranded images/banners and getting them to share it with their audience. Twitter was the platform we used to engage in quick conversations, formulate the most effective hashtags and handle customer service inquires. Lastly, Youtube was the platform we used to promote our main videos. One week before our Kickstarter campaign was set to launch, we realized that our video wasn't compelling enough thanks to YouTube's analytics. We took a huge risk and completely redid the video in order to showcase real footage from Sharon's cancer journey. Turns out this was the best decision we made. Our video reached over 15,000 views within the first week and is without a doubt, one of the main reasons our campaign was successful.
Our Kickstarter project ended up getting fully funded 7 days before the campaign was set to end. We earned $14,000 from the Kickstarter campaign and $11,500 from external sources. Our project has been shared over 670 times on various social media platforms and has reached well known media outlets such as the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed. It has also allowed us to develop relationships with game changing cancer organizations such as Stand Up 2 Cancer, Susan G Komen and American Cancer Society.
