Indie Film Marketing Part 2: Paid Advertising

In today’s installment of movie marketing tips, we are going to cover digital ads for movie marketing. Today’s strategy will require you to invest a bit of money, but luckily studies show the results are worth it. We’ll go over Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads and YouTube Ads, as these are the most popular and effective in movie marketing.

Google Adwords
Google Ads are the most famous of digital advertising with the popularity of Google as a trusted search engine. If you are successfully able to leverage Google Ads, you can potentially attract anyone who is searching for movie times online or topics relating to your film to your film’s website or trailer in a matter of days. Another benefit is that the ads will show up at the top of search results for your film, so if there is any bad press that you’d like to hide, you can do so by investing in ads.

Authors Reggie Panaligan and Andrea Chen from Google Media & Entertainment said in a very interesting report called “Quantifying Movie Magic” with Google Search: “On average, moviegoers consult 13 sources before they make a decision about what movie to see. This active research and engagement is reflected in search query volume as well. Although the number of titles released declined 9% in 2012 vs. 2011, movie searches on Google are up 56% in this same period.”

In order to create an effective campaign, use the Keyword Planner to choose keywords related to your film. It is best to use targeted keywords with multiple terms so that you have the best chance at a high ranking. For example, if you are making a martial arts documentary, you can type this into the Keyword Planner to find more ideas for keywords along with how many people search for the term monthly. Choose wisely and invest in keywords that are relevant to your film, have low competition, and are not too expensive so as not to deplete your budget too quickly.

Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are growing in popularity, as Facebook is arguably the largest social network. Optimized Facebook ads that appear in users’ News Feeds are the most effective. The best performing Facebook ads are content that is inherently sharable. Facebook ads are also great for attracting fans on Facebook pages that stay.

With Facebook ads, you can define goals, such as direct traffic to a website, a video, collect emails or grow likes on a Facebook fan page. You can also target users by age, gender, location, and by what other pages they like, which allows you to leverage similar popular films. With Facebook ads, it is important to set a budget and adjust accordingly so that you don’t spend too much.

Twitter Ads
Twitter Ads are another avenue of paid advertising that you can use to promote your independent film. According to Twitter’s blog, Twitter was 3.5 times more likely to increase movie ticket sales when compared to audio, print, online display, paid search and TV. You may not be looking to sell tickets, but Twitter is very effective at word-mouth-awareness.

Here are some tips: Come up with a relevant and unique hashtag for your film, as well as a Twitter profile with compelling imagery and catchy copy. You can also use their new First View product, which combines Promoted Videos and Tweets to promote your film’s trailer. It allows advertisers to put trailers in the top ad unit on Twitter for 24 hours.

YouTube Ads
Over 1 billion people are users on YouTube, and 50% of them are watching more video each year. Thus if you are looking for an audience for your film, YouTube is no doubt the place to find them.

According to Marketshare, for the sample studied, YouTube comprised 4% of total US ad spend for the category—but generated 16% of marketing-driven revenue.YouTube has video ads, text ads and in-display ads, so there are many to choose from. YouTube ads are based on keywords, much like Google Ads. For a great in depth article on YouTube ads, click here.

Paid advertising is a great way to sell movies on iTunes for independent filmmakers. If you are interested in getting your film on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and other platforms, visit our site Quiver Digital to start the process.