the sales process funnel

It was a question posed in the comments of a Mashable article on tablet commerce and how much ecommerce is happening via tablets and via social sites like Facebook. A Forrester Research poll was highlighted in the article showing “less than 40% [of retailers] have been able to’quantify the return on this investment [social networks], and even fewer have found that social networks grow their business. To the degree that retailers find any benefit at all from social strategies, it is most frequently driven by tactics like ratings and reviews on a website rather than activities on social networks… Social networks, in fact, ranked dead last on a list of 10 customer acquisition tactics.” It leads me to question, is Facebook a good place to be selling?

As a retailer, and if you are trying to sell DVD’s/downloads you are a retailer, I don’t think it is a good place to focus on selling or to make sales from the site. Selling is of course your ultimate business goal, but Facebook and other social platforms are places where people go to socialize, spend time with their friends, share pieces of their lives. Do you think that is a good time to solicit your products, interrupt the experience by shoving merch in someone’s face saying “buy this?” Would you do that in real life, go to a backyard barbeque with a trunk full of DVDs and walk around the yard asking people to buy one? Some of you might, but then you would never be asked back. Likely, you would go to the barbeque and socialize, subtly finding out who are the likely buyers of your product, you might even give them a card (if they ask, and they will if interested) to continue this conversation and get additional information in another location. You have to look at this as a process where social networking is at the initial contact and ongoing fact finding phase. There are many tools in the sales arsenal, all with a different purpose. Use the right tool for the job.

Social networking sites are for acquiring and cultivating relationships. Generally in the sales cycle, this is the top of the funnel. You should start a sales process by inviting people into your funnel. How do you do that? You research and find the most likely people interested in what you will be selling. Initially this could be a wide, diverse group. This is  best done long before you are actually ready to sell something (preproduction/production). You will be moving these people through the funnel on the way to buying something, but it will be a slow process and not all of them will end up buying. That’s why the funnel starts out big at the top and narrows down. Lots of people will initially be interested and gather in the top part. As the process wears on and you start to hone in on the ones most interested in what you are selling, the amount of people reduces. Facebook and the like are for your initial gathering, the tool to use at the start of your process.

The next phase will lead them to your website where the conversation continues, but not everyone will make that transition. Some may continue to only hang out on your FB page, some may fall away completely. You still have to have a presence there. Some may do both and these are likely your best customers, the people most enthusiastic about your work. They will bring others to the page and speak so highly of their involvement with you, they will help transition the community to the website. Take special care of these people.

As you continue to build and foster your audience on social networking platforms like Facebook, try to resist the urge to hurry them along through the sales process. Someone who feels rushed (or used) to buy something will not stay long on your page. Film is a luxury product, the sales process will be longer and it will start with a relationship. A tab pointing the way to your website or store will serve to guide them to the next phase but should NOT be the landing page of your Facebook presence. People come to your page to find others, meet you, see what the project is all about, starting the relationship process. Don’t close off that communication by virtually saying “unless you are here to buy, we don’t want you here.” As the survey shows, audience/customers rarely buy on Facebook, but they do check you out there which is the first step in the sales process.

Obviously, crowdfunding has become a very hot topic in the indie film world as a way to raise money for projects. I have seen more campaigns fail than succeed so I am always on the lookout for secrets to success. Who else can share that information but the ones who have done it? Director Dan Mirvish (Omaha-The Movie, Open House and co founder of the Slamdance Film Festival) generously agreed to share some secrets with me about his campaign. Dan has some great tips on what makes a campaign successful and he was able to raise over $14K for his film Between Us.

The film is based on the hit Off-Broadway play of the same name that premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2004 with a screenplay adapted by original playwright Joe Hortua and Dan. He spent some time talking to other filmmakers who had run campaigns both on Kickstarter and on Indiegogo and he chose to use Kickstarter because he was impressed by the amount of publicity they were getting, most notably from Time Magazine where they were named one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2010 and he thought more people outside of the independent film community might be familiar with Kickstarter which  might help with getting financial backing from investors too.

The campaign lasted only 30 days. It seemed just long enough to raise the money he needed, the goal was $10K, without completely nagging all of his supporters. One thing he does regret is not having a pitch video at the start of the campaign. Dan and I spoke often during the run of the campaign and I urged him to get a video up when I saw there wasn’t one in the early days.“Thirty days is not a lot of time if you only think to post a video in the second week. We really only had two weeks where we had a strong video up.  I don’t know if it ultimately it would have made a huge difference early on, but it did make a difference in the latter part,“ Dan said.

He gave some thought into what the video should show. “It was a real challenge in making the video because it wasn’t  a film we had any footage of , there wasn’t a short film it was based on, and I don’t act very well on camera or come across sincerely because most of my other projects have been very wacky and this is a departure from that. It is really important that the video is compatible with the tone of the film. For me, I had to make a video where you hear my voice, but you don’t see me talking. There were still pictures of me, much more sincere (laughs). So it had to be creative and show my talents at filmmaking. If you are selling yourself as a filmmaker and the first thing people see is this Kickstarter video, that video had better be good. I looked at a lot of videos before I made mine and I thought ‘oh my god if I have to look at one more pasty faced filmmaker asking for money, I’m going to throw up!’  Some are done well, but a lot are not and I was thinking ‘wait, this is a filmmaker and he can’t even shoot a good promo video?’  A good piece of advice, that I did not do and struggled with, is try to come up with the video BEFORE you start the campaign.”

The whole of this interview will be available starting Jan 1 in Microfilmmaker Magazine. Here are a few highlights:

-a tip for using Facebook; “set [the campaign] up as an event, invite friends to the ‘event,’ and then it is possible to send updates to everyone invited, even if they don’t initially respond.”

-a tip for choosing perks; “I offered an imdb credit at the $25 level.  For those in the industry, having an imdb credit, even a thank you, is valuable.” Plus, it costs nothing but time to fulfill.

-a tip on how to look at the campaign; ” The campaign wasn’t just about raising the money on Kickstarter, it was about the momentum. It wasn’t  just the individual amounts we raised, but leveraging that into much bigger investments.”

-a tip about the timing for the Kickstarter launch; “I knew that I wanted the campaign to be finished about the time that other filmmakers would start hearing about being accepted to the major festivals [Sundance, Slamdance and Berlin] and many of them would be using Kickstarter to raise funds to travel to the festivals. I wanted to be out before that rush hit.”

-a tip on continuing to raise money after the campaign is finished; ““About 2 minutes before the end of the deadline, I edited the text proposal on my Kickstarter page and told people that if they missed the deadline, there are still ways you can contribute financially. After the campaign ends, you can’t edit the page anymore even though the page stays up.”

Check out the whole of the article next Saturday.

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.

Popular rental platforms include iTunes, YouTube, and Virgin Media. Caution: Rental in due time. New Video, for example, notes seeing a clear cannibalization of DTO when Rental is turned on too soon. The number of people who will buy, just have to have it, are stronger if a rental release is delayed. If released at the same time, those that would have bought will rent if they can.

To keep up with all of our latest updates and news relevant to the world of digital distribution, check our Facebook business page.

Download-To-Own (DTO) is a transactional platform. iTunes, Playstation, Xbox, Amazon VOD are all DTO sites.  iTunes and Xbox account for the majority of the non-cable revenue in the digital space, for now.

Several Hollywood studios have announced that they are doing deals with a new download-to-own store from DivX  and the site FreshFilm.com such that their movies will be playable on millions of DivX enabled devices.

To keep up with all of our latest updates and news relevant to the world of digital distribution, check our Facebook business page.

Sorry to have left this space unattended for so long. It was a whirlwind couple of weeks in Park City and now I am traveling cross country by car. But I did want to do a little check in so readers would know what was happening.

Slamdance was a blast, as expected, and I am still trying to frame it cohesively in my mind to give you a good perspective on what to expect from the experience should you have it next year. One thing I would like to address, because it came up for me and for many first time Slamdance visitors, is the issue of meeting people and networking.

It is a well kept secret that I am not the best mingler when it comes to cold introductions at parties and networking events. I hate walking into an event not knowing a soul and trying to go around introducing myself to groups of people all standing together in conversation and obviously already acquainted. While there was a filmmaker meet and greet at the festival, it consisted of rows and rows of chairs holding over 100 people and we stood up one by one and introduced ourselves and our projects.  Not the easiest setting for talking amongst the group when someone you might want to know is seated way across the room from you. Then we were adjourned and people went back to talking to their own group! The large festival setting is very overwhelming to most people.

I will say that this occasion allowed me to meet many of my tweeps from Twitter. When I met them in person, we already had loads to talk about from previous conversations. In fact, we arranged to meet ahead of time and it made all the difference in getting to know people to hang out with quickly. People may disparage Twitter, say it is dumb and all that, but I have met many a filmmaker and connection from my tweets. You can follow me @shericand, BTW. 

A filmmaker I met, Chuck Gomez from NY, complained about not meeting fellow filmmakers easily and we concluded that it would be a good idea to hook up with filmmakers involved in the festival ahead of time by emailing them or finding them on Twitter or Facebook and communicating well in advance of the event. Introduce yourself and your project, even if it is in competition with theirs, and tell them you would like to meet up for coffee or whatever. Get the details of films and filmmakers selected from the festival media coverage and go their film’s website, Facebook or Twitter page (because I KNOW they will have them, right?) and find out the contact details. Not all will respond, but many will because they are all going to have the same situation and should want to connect to their fellow attendees.

When I set up accounts for films and filmmakers on Facebook, I generally like to set up Fan pages rather than Group pages. Some ask what the difference is and here is a little explanation.

Fan pages are better used to create long lasting relationships and offer a more interactive community. They are meant for businesses, public figures and brands. Your film is a brand. Group pages are used to rally people around a certain cause or common interest, like guerilla filmmaking or users of the RED camera.

Group pages are not circulated into the members’ “feeds” on their user profile, therefore to see any updates, the group members must go directly to the page to see posts there. With a Fan page, updates are circulated into the home “feed” of the users. Fan pages are randomly suggested on the home page in the upper right hand corner. Facebook will often show Fan pages that friends are  fans of and will position them so one can easily join them. This spreads the word about your page through your existing fan base and their friends are more likely to become a fan of your film if they know someone who is. 

Fan pages also provide the ability to track who is visiting your page, their demographics, how often and the interactivity level of fans on the page through their metrics function. Group pages do not have a metrics capability. However, there must be more than 10 fans for the metrics capabilities to begin. Fan pages are indexed by search engines and are visible to people unregistered with Facebook. This helps with your overall film presence online. Groups are not indexed in the search engines.

When you want to bring attention to your Facebook presence, you have more options with a Page than with a Group. Group updates are  dependent on either  members taking an active interest in the group by visiting regularly and/or members’ personal News Feed settings being configured to show sufficient updates from the  group. Neither variable is under the control of the group owner.  A Page supports notification in update streams. These updates stand alone in a side-bar to the right hand side of the page under Highlights and are much less likely to get lost in the stream of other kinds of notifications on a profile newsfeed.

Pages allow for sending mass updates to all fans with an opt out function. Users can also specify which of their Fan Pages can notify them. This promotes good will to your fans that you are not spamming them with useless notifications and if they think you are, they can opt out. Updates also appear in a special subsection of your fans’ inbox, helping segregate it out from the rest of the messages they may be receiving on Facebook.

On Fan pages you can add applications such as quizzes and games or content from other sites such as your blog feed, Twitter feed, Digg, etc.  With Groups you cannot feed in outside content. Both Group and Fan pages allow for wall posts, video and photo uploads.

Facebook Pages — but not groups — can utilize the built-in demographic information to create micro-targeted ads. Through the use of your Fan metrics, you can determine who is likely to respond to your message and you only pay to target those people. You can set daily budgets that cannot be surpassed, but Facebook advertising is another conversation.

A Fan page is more of a running conversation with your audience. It provides interactivity between you and your fans and the fans with each other. This is what social media is all about. I would also suggest leaving the privacy settings on the page open so that all fans may post links, photos, videos etc. If a fan takes advantage in a spammy or objectionable way, administrators of the page can delete posts and report the behavior.