Studios such as WB and Lionsgate have leverage with the Cable MSOs and work to  get films marketed and New Video has marketing leverage with iTunes. New Video  works via social media outreach by disseminating a release with images & clips  to sites such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and posts a release on PR distribution sites (ClickPress, i-Newswire, eCommWire, The Open Press) along with feed-based announcements on Google blog search, Technorati, Yahoo! News, Topix etc., tagged with keywords for easier discovery. They also claim to do online grassroots outreach, email marketing and trailer and clip tagging.

Gravitas notes that its PR firms and staff release information about new titles to key websites and bloggers and they utilize what they call “VOD Guide Optimization” where they utilize  relationships with operators to raise the profile of certain Gravitas titles.

Distribber makes it clear that the marketing is up to the filmmaker (and they are also referring our TFC Marketing Services), but all the revenue goes to the filmmakers with no backend percentages taken.

CRM cites the marketing it does and we’re not sure what it entails beyond the usual Facebook and Twitter announcements, but we’re looking into it.

Whichever aggregator you choose to work with, make sure you have either a very firm marketing plan in place and committed to and/or know that you need to deploy one yourself.

In my last post, I talked about the difference between your web traffic and your targeted web traffic. Today, I want to talk about the fact that basic marketing principles are getting lost in all of the talk about grassroots marketing and social media marketing.

There have been many articles, seminars and blog posts covering the “how to” of marketing. “How to leverage the power of social media marketing,” “how to use Twitter to market your film,” “how to design websites that attract your customer.” The part being forgotten, or maybe it is already assumed you know, is the “who,” “what,” and “why” of your marketing strategy. Who are you trying to attract? What are you trying to sell? Why would anyone buy it? In marketing terms, this comes down to correctly positioning an offering and building effective messaging. The best website design, ad campaign, or social media campaign will fail if the “who, what, and why” are wrong. These questions are generally answered in a marketing plan which should be set before you ever make the film. It is a typical mistake of filmmakers to not have a marketing plan in place from the start and, upon realizing that a distributor isn’t necessarily ready and waiting to take on the film, they start on the ”how to’s” without knowing where they are headed. A really bad move.

One quick way that will help you discover your strategy is called a SWOT analysis. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. Use it as a brainstorming tool and a strategy formation tool. The first pair of categories — strengths and weaknesses — refer to your company’s INTERNAL nature, while the second pair of categories refer to EXTERNAL opportunities and threats.

Examples 

Strengths: experienced producer, experienced director, well known actors, strong artistic team, access to capital, presale or distributor already in place, etc.

Weaknesses (be honest!): areas where your team lacks experience, lack of proper planning, no known talent, disorganization in the chain of command, etc.

Opportunities: addressing what film subjects are lacking in the marketplace, trends that are forming that could be further developed, possible cross promotion or affiliate programs, possible alternative streams of revenue such as soundtrack, merchandise, etc. , ability to self distribute using various up and coming platforms.

Threats: number of similar films competing for the same audience, lack of low budget traditional distributors leads to the need and additional work of self distribution, economic conditions make raising needed capital difficult

The most important goal of this exercise is to apply this knowledge to your film idea. Take all necessary actions to reduce the threats to your production and position yourself to take advantage of the opportunities. When you have a clear understanding of your strategy, then you can build your message and all of your tactics around that.