Independent Filmmaker's Handbook - how do you promote your film?
Getting started
You have a great idea for a video or have just produced one. But now what? How do you get started down the road to selling and profiting from your work? Simple. You need to start with a game plan. Writing a marketing plan for your product will help you do the single most important thing that you can – FOCUS. This can’t be emphasized enough. To be successful as a special interest producer you need to reach your audience as quickly and economically as possible and the way to do that is by being focused on who wants to buy your video and where they hang out.
If you haven’t ever written a marketing plan, don’t worry, you’ve probably intuitively thought about many of the issues you’ll need to confront. Also, keep in mind that this is a working document, you don’t have to share it, so adding quick notes in some sections is all right. The goal is to create a document that helps you clarify your thoughts and empower you to make sales.
Determine your goal
The first step to success is to determine a realistic goal. What are you trying to achieve? Write you goal as clearly and quantitative as possible, identify your audience and give yourself a timeframe in which to achieve results. For instance, if you are selling a video of a high school football game that had 1000 people attend, you may write,
“In the next six weeks, I want to sell total of 100 copies of the game for $29.95 to anyone that was in the stands, anyone participating and their families.”
Coming up with these numbers isn’t always easy. It is good to first write down the goal you desire to achieve and then build a plan of how you are going to achieve it. Don’t be dishonest with yourself or unrealistic with your expectations. As you develop your plan you may realize that the price is too high or too low, the time frame isn’t right, etc, That’s okay. Come back and modify your goal until it is in line with the other sections of your marketing plan and budget.
Know your audience
Knowing who will buy your product is the key to focusing your marketing effort and successfully achieving your goal.
You want to know as much as possible about the people you are going to be selling your product to,. Data such as, how old are they on average, what’s the percentage of male to females, how much money they make, what do they like to read, where (or if) they hang-out online, etc. [Getting this information will help you paint a picture of your buyer, help you better describe your product and make package artwork that is more compelling and help you find the right venues to use in promotion].
You also want to think about which people influence the buying decision. In our high school football game example, do you have to get grandma to have her son or daughter buy the video of her favorite grand child playing in the big game? If so, your marketing plan needs to address how you are going to reach grandma and let her know the video of the big game is available.
Lastly, clearly defining an audience will help you set more realistic sales goals. If the buyer for your high school football game is predominately the parents of the players – you need to ask yourself just how many of the 1000 people in the stands you can really count on when you decide that you wish to sell the 100 units. It is a good reality check.
Know your competition
This part of the plan is often easy to over look or brush aside. You probably have a feel for what others are doing but it is generally worth your time to look first hand at competing products and write your thoughts down. Write down key points about the other guy’s products such as their price, what they look like, what’s good about them, what they missing, what other people saying about them, etc. A good technique is to include your product in the review to see how it stacks-up. Be sure to ask friends or colleagues to offer input as well. It is easy to overlook the obvious when evaluating your own product.
After you’ve made a table that let’s you see the competition at a glance, you’ll be much more confidant when positioning and pricing your own products. This confidence will allow you to close more sales and get others more willing to help promote your video.
Positioning
Positioning is the “why” or the story behind your product. Why did you create your video in the first place? What need did you see that made you think, hey I should produce a video on a subject or tell a familiar story in a new way. What were you trying to achieve? Is your video or your company concerned about a cause? Are you willing to donate a percentage of your profits to a cause in return for their support in promoting your video? These thoughts will help you clarify how your product stands out and why other people should care.
Your positioning will be the foundation for all of your messaging, your look, and your promotions. It is important that you get this as on target as possible.
The following are types of text needed to start positioning your product
- The top five benefits, highlights or selling features of your video. Focus on the BENEFIT to your audience. These are the top reasons that will cause people in your audience (and their influencers) to want to buy your video.
- The elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a couple of sentences you would say to convince someone to buy your product if you were riding in an elevator with them. Write the pitch for a short journey, say about 5 floors, and no; you can’t say the elevator got stuck between floors! You want this text to be tight, punchy and clearly convey the interesting selling points of your video and should be about one hundred words in length. Warning, these are hard to write. You may consider writing a page description (which can then be used on your packaging), then a two hundred and fifty word description and then your elevator pitch. Don’t despair, your hard work is worth it, many times the press or others will ask for, and sometimes simply reprint, a well written one hundred word description in a news section, newsletter, email or product list.
- Review the title. Given what you know now, does the title you originally thought up still make senses? Should you consider a subtitle? Whatever your decision a good title is a requirement before offering your product for sale. Successful titles clearly tell your audience what they are getting and why it is of value, i.e. in our example, a title might be “Montgomery versus Piner – The biggest game of the 2005 football season” For a training video you might try, “Mastering the English Rose Garden – the definitive guide to growing your favorite varieties”
Pricing
Pricing is key. Price sets a tone with your audience and they’ll immediately form opinions about your product from just this one number. Price too low and people won’t take you seriously or feel that it couldn’t possibly be of value; price too high and your sales may vanish. If you want to price at either extreme, then you should do so consciously and make sure that your promotional material points supports your pricing. Also, you should decide upfront if you want to market your product at a higher price and offer a discount and special offers. Planning for special offers ahead of time as a sales tool will let you more accurately predict how much money you are going to make and helps avoid any “gotcha’s” down the road. Knowing your audience, and what they expect to pay for the type of content you have is your best barometer in setting a final price.
A last word on pricing; it is generally easier to come down in price than to raise it.
The Package
Less is more. Images and text on your artwork should be kept to a minimum in order to have a stronger impact – especially if you have to promote your title online with a stamp size image. Pictures of faces or those that evoke the imagery of the title are always a strong choice. Also, think about your audience and who is buying the product. If grandma is really the one purchasing the football game, then a less violent team shot might be appropriate, if it is the young guys on the team, then you might consider more aggressive shots of tackling or the addition of a cheer leader. Whatever you decide, it is best to keep the number of images to a minimum and use those that help to promote your key selling points.
Placement.
Where are all of the places that you plan to sell you product. Is it exclusively online or will you also need a small amount on hand for a special promotion or event. Do any of your partners, you plan to ask to help you market, require you to offer a discount to their members? It is good to think about these things early and roll the costs of creating physical goods and discounts into your marketing budget upfront.
Budget.
Having an understanding of your audience size and how much they will pay can give you a sense of how much you can expect to sell – and therefore, how much you should spend. To estimate sales, you should figure that any marketing campaign you do will yield anywhere from one to five percent depending on how targeted you program is. If a partner actively helps promote you, your result could be even better.
For example, a flyer passed around the stands of the football game might get you 2% response and 1% sell-through. That’s ten sales. If you make $200 off of those sales and creating and passing out the flyer costs you only $20 – you made out all right. To get to your goal of 100 sales however, you’ll need to run more promotions. To create your budget, list the promotions you plan to run and a conservative estimate of the number of sales that they will generate.
List your promotions in order of effectiveness and budget accordingly. Monitor the results of each program so you know which are working and which aren’t. This is great feedback if you offer similar product at a later date or need to decide to run a promotion twice. Don’t forget to budget for the creation and mailing of promotional materials and your time.
Create the Trailer
Distilling hours of video to make a short trailer, (just like writing your elevator pitch) will be time consuming but worth it. Creating a powerful sixty-second streaming trailer is easily one of the best ways to tell your story and influence people to buy your video.
Make sure that the trailer is consistent with the positioning you’ve created and is compelling to the audience you want to have purchase. Take some time before you sit down at your production system to have a clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish and what types of material you’re looking for. It will help expedite the process and help you stay focused on making a piece that appeals to your potential customer – not to yourself.
As in your product description, don’t be vague but don’t give away the whole story either — especially the ending. Be sure to build up the anticipation and leave the viewer wanting more (that’s why you’ve so conveniently provided that “BUY” button). Also, don’t oversell a small section of your video if your final product doesn’t necessarily support it as this is sure to make unhappy customers and likely result is returns.
Other pointers, make sure the trailer clearly displays who made the video and your website. If you get lucky, your trailer will be spread all over the net and you want to make sure that when that happens, everyone knows where to find you. Make sure you have a clear call to action – get people to come to your site to purchase. With QuickTime, you can embed a link on the last frame of your video. Ask viewers to click on the video and it will immediately launch their browser and bring them to your site.
Build your website
It is highly recommended to point people directly to your own website so that all of your marketing efforts go into building your brand. That said, in order to drive sales, you need to make sure that you prominently promote sales of your products right from your home page. You need to check and double check that it is easy for a new visitor to find and buy the product you are advertising. Ideally, they should be able to buy in no more than two clicks after landing on your home page. Promoting your product on your home page and linking directly to the product e-store, ensures that the second click the person makes can be the “BUY NOW” button.
If you don’t have a site, we suggest you spend a bit of time and your marketing budget to create one. There are many tools available on the market and many service providers that will provide templates for you if you agree to pay them to host your site. If you are new at building web sites, avoid frames; they make it harder for your site to be indexed fully by search engines.
Promotional materials
Creating your promotional materials is the last step before you can get out and make a product announcement. The following list is the most commonly used types of materials used in promotion, which ones you’ll use depend on your audience.
- Press release or news flash. Your press release or news flash is used to get editors or reviewers to consider your video for coverage. These people are very busy and receive many submissions so you need to make sure to catch their attention. Do this right off the bat with a catchy headline and sub-head if required. Get your most important messaging right into the first paragraph, then support it with quotes and then the secondary information. Be sure to include pricing, availability (when and where), and a bio on yourself or your company. A press release should never be more than two pages and should end with “###.” If you go over to two pages, be sure to include “(more)” at the bottom of the first page. A news flash should never be more than a paragraph or two. On both pieces, you should include the date and location of where the news is being generated and the words “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” just above the headline. A good way to get a sense of how to write a release is to visit the web sites of major companies in your market. Look at and imitate how they craft their news and you should create documents that make you look like a pro.
- Endorsements. Endorsements are the probably the single most powerful form of promotion that you can secure. These help separate you from the pack immediately and are well worth the time and effort to obtain. Although it sounds backwards, it is generally better to ask for, and in some cases write, exactly what you’d like someone to say about your product. It helps them by saving them time and getting a better understanding of what you’re looking for. If you’re thinking this is kind of underhanded, don’t worry, any person worth getting an endorsement from will tell you very clearly if they are okay with what you’ve written and suggest changes.
- Review copies (with “For Review Stickers”). Review copies are an easy and if given to the right people, an inexpensive form of marketing. To control expense, it is good if you can create a list of people that you want to have copies and send them the press release along with a copy your product prior to, or in conjunction with making your announcement. If you’re not sure someone is agreeable to receiving a copy, then email and double check upfront as a courtesy.
Brochure. With artwork already created, you can pretty much just use this as a background, add info on your e-store and presto - you’ve nearly got a quick and easy brochure to promote your title. You should add your website and other sales contact information at the bottom and any other pertinent information such as a brief bio on yourself.
- Biography. Your video tells a story. Generally, your customers are interested in knowing a bit about the person or company behind the lens. A one-pager with picture, if appropriate, provides a nice personal touch and can help sales. In our example of the high school A/V team covering the big football game; the story of a group of young aspiring video enthusiasts working to raise funds to help buy the new camera for next year’s season is something that allows you to now get the booster club on-board and gives parents a reason to feel good about buying a video they may not have otherwise. A local broadcast station covering the game could also tell a powerful story of how they support the community and give back to the athletes by selling copies of the game. No matter what video you’ve produced, chances are your story is a compelling part of what will help make it sell.
- Business cards, letterhead, etc. Don’t forget the small stuff. If you want others to take you seriously, then you need to look the part. Allow a modest amount of time and money in your budget for creating these types of materials to support your sales.
Reciprocal linking and banner ads
Paid advertising. Generally, buying print or online advertising is expensive and may not help you achieve your immediate sales goals. You may find some sites that cater to independent filmmakers for instance, like FilmThreat.com, offer fairly affordable rates. However, know that for advertising to work, you need to do enough of it, overtime, to matter. A single one-page ad isn’t going to be as effective as three one-third-page ads. Think about how ads work (or don’t) on you. Do you blindly believe or even read ads? Probably not. Paid advertising is much better at building your brand up over the long-term than helping you achieve a short-term sales goal. It helps you keep competition out of you space and have a group recognize you as the market leader. Therefore, be sure to carefully consider spending your budget on paid advertising unless you can commit to a full program. If you can, great. Paid advertising if used correctly can be very powerful tools in your marketing program – just ask McDonald's and more recently Apple Computer.
Partners
Getting the right partners is probably the single most important thing you can do to increase the sales of your video. The discussion of partners has intentionally been left as the last step in your marketing plan. Before approaching partners, you need to have worked out all of the other issues in the plan first in order to put your best foot forward with a certain level of credibility before you can expect others will act on your behalf. The right partner is someone that has direct access to the kind of customers that you want to speak to and benefits from the fact that you are providing their customers with something of value. These partners will generally promote you to their installed base for little or in some cases no money on your part. For instance, if you create a training video, then a leading organization or company in that field that you feature in your product have a vested interest to promote your video to their group. Similarly, if you create a documentary on the story of a person’s immigration, are there cultural groups that would help you tell their community about your video as their members could identify with the story in your video. No matter what your video’s subject, it tells a story and in the majority of cases, if you look hard enough, you will find a group that has a vested interest in helping you get the word out about the story you tell through video.
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