No Such Thing As Free Social Media
By this I mean 2 things- Social media profiles may be free to create, but they are incredibly time consuming to maintain. What if Facebook and Twitter decide to charge businesses for profiles? This is considered unlikely.
But they could. If you are totally reliant on privately owned websites like Facebook and Twitter, you expose yourself terribly if that is all you have. You can only control content and important metrics and analytics on your own website or blog. relying solely on third party websites is foolish.
You need to keep your own blogs and website going. If you don’ t, expect to pay the big boys big bucks every time you sell a DVD or download.
Spend To Receive
Any marketing activity has a cost structure defined by the amount of time and materials required to produce and distribute your message. In the good old days at Raindance, we printed thousands of leaflets( at a set price per thousand) and then distributed them by post, or joined mail lists. The intent was to generate traffic to our festival and events. The theory became: Mail enough leaflets at so much per thousand, and enough people would subscribe to the event ensuring that it would be a success.
Your movie’ s revenue potential relies directly on the amount of traffic your site receives. Generating traffic to your website costs time and money.
I often meet filmmakers with a 10-20k budget. I always ask what the marketing budget is for their DVD release. If they answer‘ nothing’ I immediately know that they will not get any money from DVD, VOD or on-line sales.
A considered spend on Facebook and Google ads will pay off if you take the time to understand how to utilise these powerful tools. Unlike the days of
postage and leaflets, today’ s filmmakers have access to powerful tools to track the metrics of an advertising campaign and analyse them. These tools are free, but the time taken to learn how to use them is not, making it more difficult to gauge the cost of an online campaign.
Creating excellent content for your site and blog will also attract eyeballs.
Developing Your Brand
Each time you make a movie you need to launch a new brand. The principals of branding a movie are the same as they are for any widget. One of the quickest ways to create a brand is to use the tool of genre. If your film falls into one of the specific genre types, like horror, or into one of the popular genre blends like romantic / comedy, or action / adventure you will find that it is much easier to create and develop the brand for your movie
You also need to develop your personal brand, so you can attract a group of people interested in what you are doing. As movies are best branded by genre, perhaps you too should consider creating your own personal genre.
Getting a Social Media Producer In this new age, successful filmmakers need two people:
82 | WGSA MAG June 2013