Instant Dreams is a European documentary exploring the love for polaroid film through people from different walks of life after Polaroid had filed for bankruptcy and shuddered its doors. Once all the material was in and the research was compiled a clear community of instant photography enthusiasts came into view. Also, Polaroid’s brand name recognition allowed us access to photographers and artists.
Community and brand recognition became the core of Instant Dreams’s marketing strategy. In the end we were able to bring in two different influencer’s campaign. The first campaign brought in art photographers from around the world that often used instant photography in their work. The second campaign involved contemporary photographers being shipped a camera in order to shoot on it and posting the photos. All the photos were cross promoted between the artist and the documentaries social media pages. These interactions were supplemented with paid promotions of each of the photographer’s work and a website that housed all of the photos. Both sites were custom coded and built under a week which allowed us control over our digital marketing pixels and the flexibility to add developing pieces to the main movie page.
Synergetic Films acquired international and documentary titles from well-respected film festivals from around the world. As certain distribution channels became less profitable, a business to consumer approach on behalf of the company became crucial in order to remain competitive.
The “Film Passport” series campaign enticed festival goers with a screening of a quality international or documentary title for the price of their email. Aside from creating brand awareness, we were also able to segment audiences based on the types of films we were offering at the time.
The advertisements and website aimed to reflect Film Festivals in order to position the films as something fun, unique and artsy.
First we created a mood-board with festival graphic styles.
Birds Without Feathers won the George Stark’s Spirit of Slamdance Award in 2018. The film’s focus on mental health coupled with its hyper-stylized sets and cinematography landed it a distribution deal.
In order to get a limited theatrical release up and running a media kit and website were put together as the primary assets for B2B and B2C activities, respectively.
The production outfit for Birds Without Feathers had raised money through Kickstarter and along the way had produced a lot of marketing content. The distributor, intent on a limited theatrical release, looked for ways to boost its appeal. Among the changes was new artwork and typography.
This had to be reflected on the website. At the time, the Birds Without Feathers team did have a website. It was built on WIX. After collecting all previous creative and composing the press kit, I moved on to creating a site that could bridge the gap between what Synergetic micro-sites look like and the previous Birds Without Feathers website.
I cut a video background from the film that was reminiscent to the key art from the previous iteration on the homepage. I also added the same green to the website as the bottom-bar and side bar. I replaced the typography with the distributor’s choice and added assets from the key art into the website.
Birds Without Feathers Home Page Pre-theatrical Release
This site had Google and Facebook tracking skills and an email capture. It highlights the arthouse audience with a positive review and has a trailer as a call to action.
How do you ensure that your company lives as an option in the mind of your customer when they need your services?
In my experience, it takes a solid marketing plan and consistency woven into a well designed website and marketing initiatives.
Americans see between 4,000-10,000 ads per day depending on where they live. Ads are so pervasive, they are often referred to as noise, but I like to think of them as “white noise.” After a certain point, people don’t even notice the ads. There are thousands of companies throwing their money away on ads that don’t get noticed. So how do you stay one step ahead? Every month, a new marketing trend emerges to answer that tired question. It’s okay to test these trendy new solutions, but keep your focus on what works. Here are three things you should keep doing to cut through the noise this year.
Keep Building Your Email List
Integrates Text and Bots on your website
Update your Blog Posts
Keep Building Your Email List
Email is one of the least expensive ways to advertise. Often it will only cost you the time to think of a good headline and a solid offer to see a return. And your email list is 100% yours. It doesn’t belong to Facebook or Google. So, my suggestion work on your email list.
are you integrating your email list into your web design and marketing activities?
Build pages that talk to a particular type of customer and create sign up sheets on those pages. This way you have a specific person in mind when you’re writing those emails. I often hear that give-a-ways and gimmicky ads are a way to boost email sign ups. I’ve seen a lot of people go about this the wrong way. This tactic might generate emails, but will it generate the right emails?
There should be at least one sign up form on every page of your site when you design your website.
Integrate Text and Bots on your Website
In my experience younger generations don’t like phone calls. SMS and online messaging are less formal than email. Integrating chat on your website creates a less formal sales approach. People are more comfortable to interact with you in this way.
The statistics on chatbot are incredible. Some key takeaways are:
that over one-third of people have bot something through a chatbot.
The top quarter of companies are using a chatbot.
They often save a ton money in customer service-30%.
Year-in, Year-out, Chatbot popularity has increased over the last 5 years.
Update Your Blog Posts
If you’ve been around a while you might have some blog posts that used to bring in some traffic. Over time that traffic might have dwindled with the entrance of competition. Updating your posts with small edits or additions will help you stay at the top of search results. SEO aside, the nature of your business changes year to year. Your customer will feel comforted to see that you’re on top of that. It positions your company as an expert. It’s also a low-cost way of creating new content. You can post this “new” material in your newsletter and on your social media channels.
Conclusion
Life has a tendency to pull us in many directions at the same time. In business marketing this can be bad for your business. So this year I encourage you to focus on what works: build your email list, integrate chat bots and update your blog posts .
It’s all fun and games until someone wastes budget.
If you’re thinking of setting up an ad. Get some help *cough, cough, me*. Building out ads for platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Google are encouraged by Instagram, Facebook and Google and they can be profitable if you know what you’re doing. They can also be a waste of time and money.
If you think you don’t have the money to hire someone, you should reach out and find out if you can come to a special arrangement with the ad specialist (read, “call me”). If you do however decide to go it alone without reaching out first, allow me to help anyway.
The Questions
There are 3 main things you want to answer before starting an ad campaign.
What are you selling?
Who are you selling to?
How are you going to get them to buy?
What Are You Selling?
This is the most obvious, but at times can be overlooked. I’ve seen plenty of people set up an ad “promoting the business.” Brand awareness is important, but it’s also vanity. Your ads should be tied to sales and therefore tied to a product. Once you decide what you’re selling, move on to who.
Who are you selling it to?
If you’re the business owner. This answer should come natural to you. Who has bought this product? Create a list of traits that they share. If this is a new product. Find similar products online and try to define their audience. How do you “define” an audience? Here is a starting point for you:
Where do they live?
Male/ Female
Similar Products or Services
Income Information
Activities
Keywords
Married/ Single
Do they have Children?
How will you sell it to your audience?
The most common way of finding an angle is to create a list of features. Find the feature that will benefit your ideal customer the most. That’s your main angle. If you come from sales or advertising this might be second nature to you. Great! If you don’t, this will take practice.
This should help you with your headline and visuals. It will also dictate the look and text of your Landing Page. A landing page is a web page that is devoted specifically to the product you’re selling.
I would argue this is the most crucial piece of the puzzle. You want to design a web page that matches the look, feel and promise of your advertising. Let’s say you’re a chiropractor and you create a headline like this:
How to get rid of lower back pain in 3 minutes.
And let’s say you use a visual of a person stretching. Heads up, I would find a visual that looks like the person your are targeting. Lower back issues tend to occur in older people and larger people. I would have a visual reflect that.
At that point you want a web page that delivers a small solution to lower back pain. Perhaps, a 3 minute stretch routine. Your main goal however to sell a consult or collect a lead. So I would put that up front and center.
There are plenty of ways to collect emails, but offering an extra bonus is tried and true.
Conclusion
Before you start an ad campaign, ask yourself some questions.
What am I offering?
Who am I offering it to?
How should I sell it to them?
For a bundle of templates I use when writing copy and a pack of blank ad sizes for Google AdWords sign up here:
Content is king when it comes to social media and SEO. Creating relevant and engaging content for your business allows you to bring traffic to your site. When coupled with a strong digital strategy you’ll be able to engage with these people outside of your website. If you’ve chosen your audience correctly, content can be the beginning of your sales process because it shows an interest in your industry.
Developing engaging content however is not as simple. Here are 5 tips to come up with content for your business.
Think Tank
Competitors
Keyword Tools
The Think Tank
If you have employees, the first thing I would do is order a pizza and sit everyone down together. Explain to them that this is a topic brainstorm for your blog and social media. My goal would be to put together 14 new topics. That’s about three months worth of content if you released a post every week. When leading a meeting like this one, just sit back and ask questions. It will be important for the team to think about your customers, your products, industry information and needs. Sit with a pad and start taking notes. Go over the notes and start putting together content ideas.
Competitors
Now that you have some ideas in your hands. Go look at what your competitors are doing. You can do this by looking up your competitor’s website in a google and adding “site:” prior to the URL.
This should give you a list of pages. Go through the headlines and read the articles. If you like a format or topic, take it and make it your own.
Keyword Tools
You should have an adequate list of topics by now. I would suggest taking your list of topics and identifying the keywords. put them in an excel document. For each keyword, type it into https://answerthepublic.com. This should yield you a substantial list of keywords and questions. Go through the lists and see which topics interest you.
Also you can use certain tools to measure keyword volume.
