“Good marketing is easy” – Guy Kawasaki
It’s has now been one month since the release of my new movie, Bend and Break. Over these last 30 days I’ve learned a lot about film marketing and sales and how important it is to have a clear marketing plan to create awareness and exposure for your movie.
To-date, exactly 81% of all Bend and Break sales have been generated from word of mouth marketing, the other 19% was generated from publicity. The power of word of mouth marketing has impressed me so much that I decided to do some research and studying in order to better understand and utilize this efficient marketing strategy.
I came across a book called Word Of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking by Andy Sernovitz. In this book, there is a simple yet great definition of what word-of-mouth marketing is:
1) Giving people a reason to talk about your film
2) Making it easier for that conservation to take place
That’s it. Andy’s book explores four basic rules for creating and maintaining word-of-mouth marketing success.
Rule #1 – Be interesting
Nobody talks about boring products(films) or people(filmmakers). I’ve found the best way to interest people about your film is a tell them an (true) entertaining story about how something went terribly wrong during filming the movie and how all hope was nearly lost but because of your wit, creativity or just pure determination you managed to press on and successfully finish your film. Everyone love a hero.
Rule #2 – Make it easy
Word-of-mouth is lazy. You’ve got to help it along if you expect it to go anywhere. You need to do two things: Find a super-simple message and help share it. What I’ve done is tell people, ”This is my first feature film!”. When people hear the word ”first” they always seem to get a little bit curious.
Rule #3 – Make People Happy
Happy fans are your greatest advertisers. Thrill them. Create an amazing film. Do whatever it takes to make the experience remarkable for them. Make sure the work you do gets people energized, excited and eager to tell a friend. For me that means always shipping DVDs to my customers the exact day they purchase me movie from the website, provide free shipping or personally delivering the DVD movie myself to their home. Customer service is key, even for filmmakers.
Rule #4 – Earn trust and respect
If you don’t have respect, you don’t get good word of mouth. Be good to your fans (customers). Talk to them. Fulfill your needs. Make people proud to tell your story to everyone they know. The two best ways I feel you can earn people’s trust and respect is to:
A) Always tell the truth, no matter what.
B) Be yourself.
Think for a moment about a person or film-maker you respect a lot. I’d be willing to bet the reason you respect this person so much is because they always seem so honest about themselves and their lives (even when admitting their failures and mistakes) or they’re always true to themselves. They don’t compromise or go against their values in order to make everyone else happy.
Here is Andy Sernovitz’s conclusion regarding word of mouth marketing:
“Success comes not from what you advertise but from what you deliver”
Read Andy’s blog at http://www.damniwish.com/ for more great information about word of mouth marketing.
As always, your comments are welcome and encouraged. Let me know what you thought about this article by leaving a comment below!
#1 written by Cialis March 10th, 2010 at 11:24
NyihRv Excellent article, I will take note. Many thanks for the story!