By Roger Jackson
Previously: Secret 19-Point VoD Marketing Plan, Part II
Before I dive into the final part of the Marketing Plan, a quick Kinonation update. We’re now delivering 3 or 4 films a day to video-on-demand exhibitors. That’s a thousand films a year. Not bad, and we’re just getting started. For me the best part is when people respond to films we distribute. One of the dozens of Kinonation films that went live on VoD in August was “Good People Go to Hell…” It’s an honest, objective and entertaining doc about hard-right Christianity. My favorite online review: “Great movie. Great education about a world I didn’t know much about. Though I don’t share their views, I love listening to people that have passion for what they believe in.” Kinonation isn’t the director, obviously, but there’s enormous satisfaction from helping filmmakers get their films seen, worldwide. That’s what we do. That’s what we love.
OK, back to the Secret 19-Point Marketing Plan. Here’s 13-19.
13. Mailing List: For indie films, building and exploiting a mailing list can be the single most important marketing action. Why? Because these are the people you’ve already connected with — maybe via Kickstarter, or at a festival screening. They CARE about your film. So you’ll get a high return on investment (in time & effort) from communicating with them. You should start building your mailing list early — at the inception stage of your film project. Collect emails relentlessly — at parties, events, festivals. Ask for business cards, and then be disciplined about adding that name & email to your list. You don’t need fancy software — a simple list in Excel or Word is fine.
14. Google and SEM: I truly believe the holy grail for VoD marketing is effective SEM — Search Engine Marketing. It’s what Wall Street brokers would call arbitrage. The internet just makes it scalable. Here’s an example: your film is on Vudu, price is $5 for a rental. You get 50% of that five bucks — $2.50. So you can afford to spend $2.49 on advertising for each rental, since you’d still make a penny. Obviously that’s cutting it a bit fine, so let’s say you’re OK spending $2 to get $2.50 back. You could do that all day, right? That’s SEO arbitrage, and that’s the Google business model. Every company under the sun does it. You can do it for your film. It’s not easy, that’s why SEM experts make a ton of money. And for sure it’s tougher with low price items like movies, compared with high price sales of vacations or washing machines. But it’s definitely viable IF you invest time & effort learning about Google (and Facebook and Bing) ads, keywords, analytics & tools. It’s a steep learning curve, with lots of frustration. You can test it easily and cheaply, and it’s fun and fascinating to do limited testing of keywords for a few bucks and find out what works. BUT: It require serious commitment to figure it out and make it a profitable arbitrage.
15. Coupons & Promotions: There’s little doubt that discount coupons help to sell product & services. Your film is no different. Don’t be afraid to offer your mailing list and social media audience the added incentive of a discount. Not always easy to implement, depends on the VoD outlet and your distributor. Try to use it everywhere you sell, cross-promoting and cross-discounting between sales of cinema tix and DVDs and VoD and so on.
16. Foreign Sales: Your film is a work of art, but it’s also an asset. Like any asset, you want to exploit it in foreign markets. Build this into your planning. What countries will this appeal to? Brazil? Cool. Invest in Portuguese subtitles and poster art and film description. Distributors like Kinonation probably won’t suggest you localize your film for Brazil. We’re too busy with too many titles. YOU must be proactive about the territories that you believe will consume your product. e.g. you’re thinking Germany? Fine, and we’ll help you, but be prepared to pay for that $5k dub session…Germans don’t like sub-titles.
17. Re-Pitch the Outlets: VoD outlets from iTunes to Hulu to Comcast cable are all looking for programming themes and hooks. If your documentary about Ted Kennedy was released on iTunes 6 years ago, your distributor should be re-pitching it right NOW for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death this November. Will your distrib be creative enough to figure this out? Some will, most won’t, but you make it easier for them if you create the pitch package. Remember, they’re thinking about how to market hundreds of films — you focus on just one.
18. A1 Title: It’s true, unfortunately. Films with titles beginning with A (or even a number) get better real estate on some of the big VoD outlets, especially cable. Is that dumb? Absolutely, but it’s the reality. So that documentary about Teddy Kennedy should — at least for VoD — be titled “Assassin Spared” or something beginning with A. It’s stupid, but sometimes you do whatever it takes. Right?
19. Planning & Execution: None of this will be effective without planning the work, and then working the plan. The most successful VoD distributors are, ultimately, those that plan and execute with the most discipline. Gravitas Ventures comes to mind. Not a big team, they’re lean, but with deep expertise & experience, big vision, impressive revenue…they’re smart and creative and disciplined and relentless in following their own (probably secret) marketing plan — creating a detailed roadmap for each film they acquire, and following through on the plan. You — or your distributor — MUST do this if you want to genuinely and profitably implement my 19 points.
Post Script: All of this marketing stuff will be much easier — and more successful — if you get the deliverables right. By “deliverables” I mean the highly specific assets (film, trailer, images, metadata, closed captions, subtitles, etc) that distributors need to sell your film. It’s a non-trivial amount of work for you, but it’s the filter that eliminates the not serious and elevates the serious filmmaker. Finally, I’m speaking today at 2pm at the Westdoc documentary conference in Los Angeles — drop by and say hello, it’s at the Landmark movie theater in Westwood. Theoretically you’re supposed to pay, but text me and I’ll get you in. 310-463-5807.
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Next Up: Post # 37: Cutting Checks, et cetera
Roger Jackson is a producer and the co-founder of film distribution start-up KinoNation. He was Vice President, Content for digital film pioneer iFilm.com and has produced short films in Los Angeles, documentaries in Darfur, Palestine and Bangladesh, a reality series for VH1 and one rather bad movie for FuelTV. You can reach him at roger@kinonation.com.
