Promoting a film online is more than posting on social media a few times a month; it means having a strategy and following an action plan to see what is working and what’s not when promoting your film. It’s all about consistency and keep working towards your goal.
Marketing works pretty much like producing your film. If you don’t put together a plan to shoot your film, then your film won’t exist. The same goes for marketing your film. If you don’t talk or promote your film, no one will see it.
Because when you don’t follow a plan, you won’t know what plan to follow next time, and you will repeat the same mistakes.
We tackle this when working together: your marketing plan, your action plan, and the metrics to follow so your film marketing campaign is a success.
Today, I share with you what I have always recommended to my clients to promote their films online, and I have worked this way for years with the films I have marketed.
1. Building an audience from scratch is a lot of work; it’s better to condense everything in your own production company’s social media pages. Don’t start a new Facebook profile or Instagram; why? You already have 2 or 3 profiles you need to maintain and feed and create content for these profiles about your film.
2. When running a paid Ad campaign, you can segment your audience, and the Ad will be shown to the audience of that particular film. Sometimes, filmmakers are worried about all the different content they will show their audience on social media, but the truth is each feed is personalized to their own likes. If they don’t like horror, they won’t see that kind of content unless they interact with it. The same goes for ads; you can be as specific as you want.
3. Have a page on your production company’s website with the film information: poster, datasheet, synopsis, trailer, and CTA (call to action). You don’t need to create another website for another film. In the end, you will have lots of websites, lots of domains, and little time to maintain them, and it’s an extra cost you can start saving now. Put everything on your production company website and social media.
4. Always share a link where people can click to learn more about the film. This is determined when you create your marketing plan. The page you have created on your website makes people visit it; this way, you can take a look at your analytics to see if it’s working and what you are doing with your marketing.
5. Graphic design is super important for your visuals; make sure to have top-notch designs for your posts and Ads. You can also use canva but make sure is quality instead of quantity of the information you share in your images; sometimes, you are so worried about all the things you want to communicate in one single image that, in the end, it’s saturated.
6. Have a clear marketing plan and the action steps you will follow; don’t try to improvise. Improvising will cause you to burn out and hate marketing because you don’t know what to do next; the secret to successful marketing campaigns is repetition and following the steps you discussed at the beginning when you started your campaign.
This is my take as a film producer and film distribution and marketing consultant with 16 years of experience.
Are you ready to work with me?
Contact me!
