How To Promote Your Film Screening Online
A lot of marketing today has moved to online/digital formats. While we do talk about traditional marketing and using your physical space, this article will focus on utilizing online strategies. This includes the most commonly used social platforms as well as other digital assets such as email lists, event websites, etc.
The trap to avoid when doing online marketing is relying solely on social media. While social media is great, it often takes a lot of time to correctly execute with an impact.
Social Media: Facebook + Instagram + Twitter
Social media has become one of the most dominant formats of marketing over the past several years. It can be used as a tool to generate great brand awareness or can be a huge waste of money if executed wrong. Below, we are going to guide you through the basic concepts of social media marketing.
Correctly Designing Your Social Posts: The first step to getting people to engage with your social media content is to correctly design the post. The post SHOULD NOT be long paragraphs but shorts snippets that get right to the point. Posts should also be accompanied by a media asset — either an image or video.
When writing text, use as few words as possible. Give the date/time of screening, the name of the movie being played, and the link to the site to RSVP or get tickets. The text should be accompanied by a video (preferably a trailer) or an engaging photo.
Example:
“Join us Feb 6th @ 9PM for an outdoor movie night playing Gods Not Dead. Family Night, RSVP here: [link-to-site]”.
The longer the text, the fewer people are likely to read it and share it, and also the less likely social platforms will show your content in the feed.
Post 2–5 Times A Week: One social media post on Social Media is not going to bring out your audience. This has to be done several times leading up to the event. The closer to the event, the higher the frequency.
Use Relevant Hashtags: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter all support Hashtags. As you create your post, use relevant hashtags to best reach your audience. Test which hashtags lead to the most views, likes and shares of your content.
Time Your Posts: Timing your posts matters. Posting your content at 4 am in the morning is not going to get much engagement. Test around times that your audience is likely to engage with your posts. When you find a sweet spot, continue to post at that time.
Engage In Conversation: When people start engaging with your post — commenting, liking, sharing — engage back with them! Answer any questions they have, thank them for sharing, support their enthusiasm.
Consider Paid Social Promotion: The above tactics you execute for free, they just take time. Paying for promotion is a viable option for generating exposure of your screening. Paying included advanced options such as the ability to target audience geographically and by interest.
Post Content In Niche Communities
Online there are several niche communities that exist that are dedicated towards specific topics that align with your screening audience. For example, if you are showing a Horror movie, there are plenty of Facebook Groups dedicated to horror. Reddit has several very active niche communities.
Use Google to find online forums dedicated to specific audiences across the internet that you will be able to join and post. Ask people in the community to share and invite friends who they know that might be interested in your screening. Word of mouth is the best form of marketing.
A warning note, before posting a community try to be part of the community first. This means commenting on ther people posts, liking their content, talk about other stuff besides your screening. Just posting without being considered a member of the community will come across as spam, and your post not be effective.
Email Marketing
If you have been growing an email list, another great form of marketing is sending email blasts to your audience about the screening. Email blasts are tricky because you want a clear call to action but you do not want to spam your users at the same time. Below are some general tactics when working with email:
Track Your Email Metrics: Before you begin email marketing, it is vital to set up tracking to measure your success. The two numbers to track are your open rates and click-thru rates. Open rates are how many people opened your emails, and click-thru rates are how many people clicked on a link in your email. Many of today’s emailing software offers these features.
These numbers will determine the effects of your emailing campaigns. For example, let’s say you send 100 emails and only 10 people open it. That means you have low click-thru rates and you need to improve the titles of your emails. Another example is if 100 people opened your email but only 2 clicked on the link, you have low click-thru rates. This can mean you have a weak or unclear call to action.
Have A Focused Email: A common mistake that organizations do in email blasts is to have multiple things in the email. The problem is too many items will cause the receiver not read at all, which is a wasted marketing campaign.
Focus your email campaigns to say as little as possible and have a clear call to action. For example, clearly state the purpose of the screening, time/date, and the title of the movie. Then have a big call to action such as ‘RSVP Here’ or ‘Get Tickets’ as stand-alone buttons. This focuses the user’s attention and can improve your click-through rates.
Timing: When you send your emails will affect your open rates. Sending your emails at 3 am will reduce your open rates as people clear out their spam in the morning. Send at 3 pm might have better results. The timing of when to best send your emails is learned from trial and error.
Send 2–3 Emails: When promoting a screening, it is good not to send too many emails as people will unsubscribe from your email list. But send too few and people will forget about the event. A good tactic is to send 1 email a few weeks from the screening and then one more email a few days prior to the screening.
Promoting On Other Websites
Another great way to promote your event online is through someone else’s site! There are many local sites online that look for and promote local events.
Online Newspapers: Look at your local news site. You will notice that many of them have an events section where you can submit your events to be listed. Submit your event and potentially
Google Local Events: Google can be your best friend when finding sites to post on. Just Google “Events in [your area]”. A list of websites will appear listing events. See which ones you can post your event on. Most will be free to post, some will be paid. Many sites will also require 2 weeks to process your request, meaning you should do this process at least 4 weeks out.
Meetup/Eventbrite: Using popular event sites like Meetup and Eventbrite is also a great way to promote the event. Eventbrite is free but has less exposure, meetup charges a monthly fee but will give you greater exposure.
It is important that when you use these sites, you direct the audience to RSVP at the provided BingeWave ticket page. We have this in our terms of service because we provide viewer data for to the filmmakers that enables them to better understand their audiences.
SEO: A great benefit for posting your link to the RSVP page for your screening on BingeWave is it helps improves SEO, aka your screening will rank higher in Google searches. Part of how SEO works is counting the number of links to go back to a website. The more links that go back to your event page, the higher the relevance Google will assign it.
Implementing Successful Digital Strategies
Now that we have gone over a few digital strategies for marketing your screening, there a few important concepts to follow that will help you be more successful:
- Test and learn from every engagement. Until you have optimized your targeting, messaging and conversions, treat it as an experiment
- Learn the digital marketing nomenclature — CPC, CPM, Click-Through, Impressions Bounce Rate. This will be important for evaluating your success.
- Marketing, especially social media, is a marathon and not sprint. Meaning think about your long-term goals and grow slowly towards them.
- Form habits and a schedule around marketing. Meaning set a specific time aside every day where you write social posts. Send emails at the same time every week, etc.
- Be brief and exciting with your audience. Social media has a very short attention span, be impactful and to the point with your audience.
