How To Market A Film With Social Media – With Amelia Belle

And that is spending 20 or 22 hours a day on Facebook, Twitter and all other social media tools that we have and getting absolutely nowhere and all you do is waste time.

The 3rd way is that you don’t use it at all because, you don’t understand what social media is.

Well if you’re in the 2nd or the 3rd category then this webinar today is absolutely designed for you.

And if you’re in the 1st category and you’re using social media well, you might wanna jump in and join us and share your techniques and secrets with us as well.

So, if you’re using the 2nd or 3rd category welcome to today’s webinar.

I have an amazing guest with me, Amelia Belle has come to me highly recommended, but before I introduce her to you, I just wanna say a massive thank you to everybody who sent me emails over the last couple of weeks as we prepare for this conversation today.

This is actually an epic moment for me.

This is my 1st time ever to use a Google Hangout with the plugins that we’re using, so we’ve had a few technical problems, I know some of you been driven insane by getting multiple emails and I apologize for that, and thank you for understanding and bearing with me.

And I know also for some of you, that the timer was jumping backwards and forward as well, this is a brand new software and are working with the programmers to put it all right, so thank you for understanding and apologies for all the annoying little emails that were coming in and were trying to sort it out as soon as possible.

I am Tim Bennett, I am from Argon Animation and I am very happy to introduce you today to Amelia Belle.

Amelia, has come recommended very highly, and I’m gonna let her introduce herself because, she knows more about what she’s been doing than anything, and we are also being joined by the one and only Matthew Donaldson from The First Out, he’s around in the scenes behind Amelia as well so he might jump in too, ‘”Hi Matthew if you can hear me.”

Matthew was also one of my guest recently in the interviews.

So, without further ado ladies and gentlemen please welcome, Ms. Amelia Belle. Amelia welcome to our chat today, How To Market A Film With Social Media.

Amelia: Thank you Tim, its a pleasure to be here I’m excited. I’m actually been working in Social Media Marketing for the past 4 years on a non-profit type level.

Which is very difficult because, marketing itself leads to believe it’s you know, its money.

Money is being put back and forth between clients and costumers and it’s hard to determine if social media is working if your non-profit.

So I’ve been doing a lot of research over the past years on developing evaluation methods, on how to determine if social media campaigns are working or not, and thats more of the on and on profit level so, as I was doing the non- profit work, all the research I had to do led to the marketing and the actual for profit type work that I’ve been getting in to and now I am heavily into the film marketing aspect of it.

I went to UC Santa Barbara, and got a double major in Psychology in theatre and a minor in education because I had no idea what I wanted to do in my life, and all of the sudden marketing came in to my life and that’s where I am at, that’s where I’m moving on from here.

So today’s webinar or Hangout is gonna be a basic introduction to some of the really important techniques on marketing.

Generally marketing social media and a lot of different aspects, but I’m gonna bring in examples from some fantastic viral marketing film campaigns that is one particularly that I’m sure most of you have already heard of, and will get to that in the end because, that’s actually really fun, it’s gonna be really cool.

So, I’m just gonna go ahead and share my screen.

Tim: Ok, and while you’re getting ready to do that, I would just like to share to them as well that for those people who are joining, who have joined the webinar and registered for the webinar, Amelia is also going to share a pdf with all of you for free.

And we will send that to you by; when do you think Amelia will that be finished and ready to go?

Amelia: I be able to send that of to you today!

Tim: Ok great, so by the end of the day you should be getting email from myself with the free pdf all about social media and how to use it in your films and for those on a replay, if your listening to the replay, and you want a copy of that just send me an email at argonanimation@gmail.com and I will get that send to you as well, so you don’t miss out. So over to Amelia.

Amelia: Fantastic, as my screen shared ok, can you see the powerpoint presentation?

Tim: Yup, I can see that great and there is a chat box as well, there should be a chat box on the console for the audience if you have a question feel free to type that in or you can send me an email.

If you see me looking around like this all the time because, I got 3 or 4 screens around me and I’m checking them for different things.

So ok, over to you Amelia.

Amelia: Fantastic, and yeah again Tim thank you so much for having me I’m excited to be working with you right now.

So, we’re gonna go ahead and get started. I work with Matthew Donaldson, who again was on Tim’s shown not to long ago and we are starting a company called Bellehammer, which is dedicated to the art and story that people making it, so we do many different things, different services that we provide to film makers across anywhere that you need help with.

We do crowd funding consultation, producing, marketing, trainings, coaching, public speaking and lots more.

So if you need any of that or you need help of anything, please feel free to email me down at the bottom is my email address amelia@bellehammer.com and then I’m also available on Facebook, I also act as well so my that Ms. Amelia Belle pages, is my actor page its a little bit of a shameless plug out there for my acting part of my life which is fun. Shakespeare is my favourite, I’ve been doing Shakespeare majority of my life. So moving on to our 1st question.

Tim: Alright, and the 1st question is: “What’s the best way to keep a brand consistent when using social media?”

Amelia: So, thanks!

So there’s a, I have… obviously of many different ways to keep your brand consistent, but one of the most important aspects of a consistent brand is having a recognizable logo and image.

I know that it may seem a little strange for a movie, but if you look them on a image right hand side there, this is actually from distribution company in Los Angeles called BLT and Associates.

And these are the different movies that they distribute: that their company distributes and they’re so confident in their ability to market films, they don’t even put the names of these films on the front page, this is their home page image and they don’t even put the name’s of them because, they know that you will know them.

And I guarantee that you know a lot of these, like the bottom of the right corner, I’m sure you recognize is Avatar and then the upper left corner is World War Z, which of course just came out, and over the left hand side is Pixar images.

So it’s critical to have that one logo for either your company or your movie that people know right away it’s yours and then, to keep it consistent across the different social media channels.

So along with that, its important that you have a home base online, so and preferably it’s a website that you can get with a vanity URL, so we…For the film that I’m marketing with Matthew Donaldson, we’re doing The First Out and of course one of the first things that we needed to do is to get thefirstout.com before anybody else swiped that up.

So there’s a handy little website that you can go to called namecheck and its right there and I’m actually gonna see if I can do this, and have it work. So can you guys, can you see that ok Tim?

Tim: Yes, I can see that fantastic!

Amelia: Awesome! So let’s just say that you have a new movie that you have coming out.

It’s called, I don’t know….Holland Halloween and you wanna have HollandHolloween.com , I don’t know something like that! I am just making it up.

So you put in whatever username you wanna use across the different platforms and then it goes through each of these social media platforms and lets you know if thats available or not.

So instead of going to each one and trying to see if its free or not, this tool gives you a really quick and easy way to see if its available across the different channels. So if you wanna make a movie…

Tim: That’s really awesome!

Amelia: Yeah, I love this tool. It’s one of my favourite.

Tim: I do it the other way, I do it the way you were just saying don’t do it. I go and check each one individually.

Amelia: Which is fine, it’s a little bit more time consuming. And you wanna be sure to pick a handle for your movie that its both recognizable and it’s also available across the different channels.

So namecheck.com, there’s a few other tools that you can use for that but, that’s the one I used the most.

So keeping that image and also name consistent across the different social media channels, ahhh…

Tim: Amelia, can I just jump in this point?

Amelia: Please, yeah!

Tim: Also with the small tip, is that: some people use services like Godaddy to do searching for websites that are available.

Amelia: Yeah!

Tim: And Godaddy has a very bad habit of buying the domain from underneath you, if you don’t register it straight away.

Amelia: Yes!

Tim: So if you use one of those services and you don’t buy it, don’t be surprised if you go back and it’s gone.

Amelia: Yup, absolutely!

Tim: So this is an ideal service to use because, they are not actually buying domains or selling domains, they’re actually sharing information. And also another tip is if you delay buying the name that you want, people jump on them and then hope that you will go buy, and you will want them and go buy it from them, they elevate the price from $10.

I know when I was after Argon.com, they were trying to charge me $250,000 and I didn’t get it. Hahaha!!!!!

Amelia: That’s crazy!

Tim: Yup!

Amelia: Yeah, doesn’t seem fair. I think you know, there’s a lot of that, that goes on with websites these days. So being creative with your name and also being a little lax and not getting the exact name that you wants is something that may happen so.

Another tip that I have is to create the strategy before hand, so that I have a few slides I’ll talking a little bit about, how to do a social media strategy for online marketing and its just some basic steps as to… you know, where instead of just plunging in and not really knowing where it go, I recommend creating a strategy around this model that I’ll be showing you a little bit. So it’s important to have that basic structure before getting started.

Tim: And can I make another note, I’m just getting a couple of emails from a few people who said that the countdown clock ended and they joined part way in to the discussion here today.

Apologies for that, as I say this is a fairly new software that were using and were working with the developers to improve it so thanks for the feedback and the first few minutes were just introduction so, I don’t think you’ve missed too much and of course there will be a replay and will send you the link to that as well.

Thanks for bearing with us, on you go Amelia.

Amelia: Yup, so you’re on the 2nd question now.

Tim:Yeah, the second question is: “How do you cater marketing campaigns online?”

Amelia: So when we have a great, a great product, a great film, a great idea, it’s important that we utilise social media and have campaign ideas set out on there.

So it’s not just us, spewing random information onto a page like Facebook and then, not having much interaction, not sure what’s going on.

You can do many different campaigns whether it’s a contest or a story getting people to write their own stories, but it also, it’s important to make sure that those campaigns are catered to your audience.

So the first point when it comes to marketing, catering marketing campaigns is specifically know what audience you were trying to target and I do mean target audience.

We’re talking very specific niche groups of people that we want to reach with our film and we can create campaigns based on, who those audiences are and what their interest are.

So for examples, we’re doing for The First Out it’s a LGBT baseball movie, and right there we have two very niche audiences that we can target.

The first one of course the baseball fans, so we can create campaigns that are specifically catered towards the baseball community and then of course the LGBT community.

So we have two different audiences that required, two different types of marketing campaigns and it really is important to do research when it comes to your audiences because, we don’t wanna throw out a campaign online and have it not get anywhere because we didn’t do… we don’t know what are target audience is about.

So there are free tools on Facebook that allow you to ask questions and conduct surveys with your fan base and my recommendation is just to ask them, what are they interested in?

As an LGBT community, what are their interests? As a gay, as a you know a fan, a baseball community what do they want to get out of it.

So focus groups and surveys are great way find out what are audiences are doing and also we need to consider age, someone who is, like I say here 66 is not gonna react to a campaign thats design for 23 year old online.

It’s very possible that, if we decide to use QR code which stands for “quick responds codes” a 66 years old may not I’m not saying will not, I said may not know what a QR code is, whereas a lot of 23 year olds probably do.

So we need to be sure that, we cater our campaigns to fit the audience that we have done are research about.

Tim: I think that’s really important what you saying there and you know, I just got back from Davao Island yesterday morning and as were flying, Jane and I were going past some billboards on the side of the road with QR codes on it as well and the billboard was maybe 20- 30 meters away, I actually held up my scanner to see if it would work and we couldn’t read it and I was like, “whats the point of putting QR code on the billboard if its not gonna work.”

Amelia: Absolutely!

Tim: Not only do we need to target to our audience but also the advertising that we do should be appropriate to the space and the environment that its within.

Amelia: Absolutely! Test marketing that QR code is absolutely critical so be sure that it works, otherwise that it’s silly.

Tim: So just the recap on the first 2 parts of what we’ve been discussing so far, the first part we were talking about branding and making your branding consistent so that people immediately recognise it.

And I think the really great example of this is like, the Batman logo or the Superman logo or Michael Jackson you know, if you see his feet, you know it’s Michael Jackson.

You don’t need to say, I wonder who this is and to carry that branding through out everything you do from your website, to your advertising, to your marketing campaigns so that people can latch onto it. Is that correct?

Amelia: Absolutely!

Tim: And then secondly when you’re doing your marketing campaigns, to make your campaign consistent with the audience that you’re trying to attract.

Amelia: Yup, that’s perfect!

Tim: Actually Georgia Hilton was actually talking about this.

One of the things that she was doing, I don’t know if I were jumping the gun here with your presentation, but one of the thing she was doing, as she was doing the polls and asking questions, she was even asking them, would you like the guy to be blond or dark haired, would you like to do have glasses or no glasses and she was actually building characters based on what the audience wanted rather than on what she thought they wanted.

Amelia: That’s awesome!

Tim: She was getting feedback.

This is one of the ways that she raised $25,000 in the 2 weeks, was that she have this group of people who are actually connected and responding and answering questions and being involved in the actual movie.

So they actually felt part of the movie.

Amelia: Yeah I’ve really like that. It’s beautiful because then the audience is way more inclined to have a connection with the film and see it and share it because, they actually had a part to play in it’s creation.

Tim: Absolutely! And you know, even if you go your name in a credit as that, you know you want your friends to see that.

I remember the 1st time I saw my name up to the big screen, I was like, “hey I finally made it.”

I tell you, I invited all my friends to that cinema that day and we packed it out.

Amelia: Absolutely!

Tim: So ok, moving along.

Amelia: Yes!

Tim: You want the 3rd question, is that right or?

Amelia: Yup!

Tim: Ok. “So how do you find and connect with influencers online?”

Amelia: So what I.. when it comes to influencers those are people who, have ‘pull’ in the topic that you’r discussing.

So going back to “The First Out” again, we want to connect with and have on our team and on board with us, the biggest players in the LGBT community, we’re talking like Ellen Degeneres.

So nothing that we able to get her attention but we certainly gonna try. And the cool thing is that online capabilities that connecting with her are, there’s multiple, there’s Twitter, there’s Facebook, there’s websites, there’s emails, there’s forums.

There are ways to try and connect with her online more so than offline, but there are also key players who have huge networks online, who would be considered influencers, who can take your message and then spread it to their network of people and again, this is for one specific type of target audience.

So, I know we’re all busy, we all work 27 hours a day and 8 days 9 days a week already but, it really is important to try and find these key players in all the different aspects of our target audiences.

So some of the ways to do that are to simply search on Google and Bing about your topic and see who’s talking about them.

There’s also, another recommendation is once you find them is actually go and start connecting with them on their networks, because then they would be more inclined to come on to your networks and connect with you.

Again, that’s gonna take time but, having those connections and partners online is gonna help you when you actually start implementing your campaign and pushing together fan base.

You can also do real time searches, socialmention.com is a really cool website that allows you to conduct searches that analyses your brand ultimately.

So if we go to socialmention.com and type in something, it will go and search through all the different types of social media and it all come back with, whether there’s being positive things said, negative things that are and what the sentiment is, apparently Warner Brothers is coming back with neutral sentiment, but its also pulling out where Warner Brothers is being talked about in all these different websites and you can actually go over here to the left and see who is actually talking about Warner Brothers, and connect with actual users online on a one- on-one basis, and look at that Ellen Shows talking about Warner Brothers, there you go, there you go, I think that’s the sign.

Tim: I love these tools as well. That’s an awesome tool there.

Amelia: Yeah and it’s also let you If you continue down that hash tag that people are using when discussing Warner Brothers, so the first one is Star Struck, Quinsy Jones and theres another one.

So you can actually dig a little deeper and find out what these hash tags are that people talking about and why those are so specific to your brand and then it allows you to really connect with your users on a one-on-one level and you can even, at the top of here, you can even narrow it down, so if you don’t really care about images then you can search for other things.

Tim: That’s fantastic! And you know, when I first started doing the interviews that I’m doing now.

The reason I did them was because, when I would produced my second movie here in the Philippines, I saw so many people struggling with film finance and I thought there’s got a be a better way than this and I needed help as well, I had just sold a condominium to finance one of my movies and I didn’t want to do that again.

Amelia: Yeah.

Tim: You know, I have to find… to solve my problem, I have to find help and I can share all that with other people and the way I did it was, I went to Amazon.com and I found people, author’s who would written books about film finance and I’d send them emails saying “would you be willing to come on to an interview with us?” and you know what I was super surprised that how many people that actually said yes without any hesitation.

Amelia: Yeah.

Tim: And the more I’ve been doing this, with people like your self, you know almost nobody said no and the only people that did, said no because their on locating shooting in the movie and can’t do it that week but come back in 2 or 3 weeks time and we will talk again.

Amelia: Yeah.

Tim: I know some people are very scared to approach experts and say, can you help or can you be part of our activity whatever we’re doing, but you know these experts love being ask to help.

I am always been ask to talk at different promotions or different speaking engagements and a lot of them I do for free, especially here in the Philippines, cause were trying to help so many people and I love doing it and I love touching the people and reaching out to the people and I know that everyone else is in a similar position.

So don’t be scared to ask, the worse that they can say is “no sorry I’m busy!”

Amelia: Absolutely! Yeah, it’s a really good point. Another tool that actually didn’t put on here, that you reminded me is that Linkedin.

Linkedin is a great, is a powerful professional tool where people enjoy helping others because of builds on their resume’s. So if you wanna find and connect to people in Linkedin too, it’s a fantastic tool use.

Tim: I totally agree! And actually Linkedin for me has been an incredible source. It’s great for business to business.

So if you’re on that type of that industry Linkedin is fantastic, if your business to consumer Facebook seems to be a much more powerful tool for me.

Amelia: Yes!

Tim: But Linkedin is a very professional level tool and you’re dead right, great way connecting with people.

Amelia: Absolutely!

So there’s also another really awesome tool unfortunately I just went to it today and it’s closing down July 31st, but you can see at the top, that it give’s you some other suggestions.

This allows you to get a pulse of the community as it pretends to a particular topic.

So let’s just say our movie is about vampires and we wanna know what people are talking about when it comes to vampires.

So we can type in vampires and do a search and it pulls up, actual updates on Facebook and Google and Twitter, as to what people are saying about vampires.

So we can, this is another kind of secret detective under cover way to find more information about topics as it pertains to particular people and I actually went and looked at some other these suggestions at the top and this other one topsy.com is really cool.

So if we do the same. This one pulls back, all of these different… again these different users and what their talking about and you can sorted by Google+ or Twitter and really break it down, so I love getting the pulse of what people are saying online as it pertains to a particular topic.

Tim: There’s another tool that I used called Boardreader.

Amelia: Uhhm.

Tim: Boardreader.com, and it does something similar and it goes through bulletin boards and things like that and pulls out information to people and it has search bar, you just type in your topic and it does the same kind of thing.

Amelia: Yeah!

Tim: So if the one you’re using is closing down, boardreader.com is also an option.

Amelia: Fantastic.

Well I like about the one I have pull up right now, socialsearch.com is that you can break it down in to actual locations.

Tim: Oh that’s cool.

Amelia: And really get a sense what they’re talking about in California specifically and the same with countries on Facebook and languages on Google+. Tim: Excellent. And what’s that tool you’re using?

Amelia: So that one, social-search.com that’s right up here at the top.

Tim: Ok, fantastic.

Amelia: So these are again just real time searches, ways to connect to people who are talking about your brand, you can actually see what if… that users, if they have any clout or communities, they are great connections to have.

Tim: Awesome! And why is this so important to have these people with us?

Amelia: So these are people that have networks of their own and being able to share your campaigns, let’s just say it’s a contest and you are trying to promote your movie with the contest, but you need to get the word out about the contest, you can harness the power of these influencers online that you’ve already connected with so and to take that messages and spread out to their networks too.

You are exponentially increasing the amount of exposure that you have, just by connecting with these people, but also, some of these users are simply fans and these are people, and these is why we make the art that we do, it’s for the people.

And if we can connect with them on level that, is one-on-one that shows that we are human that we care, that’s another fantastic way to connect people online.

Tim: And maybe, I’m gonna put you on the spot a little bit here, but what do you say to someone to get them to join you?

I mean presumably, you can’t just phone them up and say, “Hey, can you come and be part of my movie?”

Amelia: Yeah, that’s a good question. Actually, depends on who is it that you’re contacting and I like breaking down my influencers in to a different categories, there’s the dreaming category, so the people who I dream about being connected with, like Angelina Jolie she’s a dream.

I wanna connect with her, but she’s my dream.

So the way that I talk to Angelina Jolie online, is a lot different than what I with talk to on the other categories, so there’s the people, there’s the dreamers, there’s the actuals, who are people who I actually, hopefully connect with and then they are people who are necessarily influencers, but are fans so, each one of those categories of people will have a different voice when reaching out to them.

And ultimately, I mean saying “hey, we’re making a movie it’s gonna be a really important film about a gay rights and the way that gay’s are represented and in professional sports, we wanna get the word out and we will love your help. We can offer you, you know this perk and this perk or we can put your name on the credits,” so we can do that. I mean, that kind of stuff goes a long way with fans who are, who wanna reach out and just learn more.

Tim: One of the ways I did it was, because when I was approaching these people in Amazon, I felt that if I just call them up and said, “can you help me and train me”, that they are probably charge me you know, 1000, 2000, $3000 an hour for their advice.

Amelia: Right!

Tim: So what I did in the end was I wrote them an email and said, can I help you promote your book through an interview.

Amelia: Uhhm!

Tim: And they all jump on that and said yes of course you can promote my book.

So we interviewed them about their film finance book and they shared their tips within the book, to promote their own product.

Amelia: That’s brilliant.

Tim: There’s lot of different ways of doing it, and I totally agree with you.

You know there’s a lot of people out there, who are very happy to help their advocacy or what it is their trying to promote themselves, weather it be gay rights or you know, weather it be any subject that you can think of, there’s someone there trying to promoted and all of these different people have their own, like for me, I love promoting anything about being an entrepreneur, because being entrepreneur was change my life when I left school at 16 unemployable, because school and I didn’t get on very well.

Amelia: Ahaha.

Tim: And I left with almost no qualifications and became an entrepreneur and as a result I’ve traveled the whole world and I’ve done amazing things and for me is like a solution I want to promote, this is how I change my life so you might want to do that as well or give it a try. And when people approach me and say can you help us?, I say of course I can help you, no problem because that’s my advocacy.

Amelia: Yeah!

Tim: I actually think, that being a filmmaker and being an entrepreneur are

almost the same thing, it’s like very similar processes that we go through.

Amelia: Absolutely!

Tim: So each one of us has own little thing that we love, and if you approach us in the right way, you’ll get support very easily and if it is business to business you know, just be a little creative about the way you approach people, I’m sure you’ll get some people in to join you.

Amelia: Absolutely, thank you and just lastly on this way, these under cover methods are great way to keep an eye to competitors as well, just to kinda see what their up to and how their connecting with people and you know, just you gotta be sure that what your doing is staying with the times.

Tim: Fantastic and there’s some great little tips there and I know I’m gonna use some of those websites that you’re pointing out, I’ve not seen those before and this is one of the things, that I think that is great about this kind of project that were doing right now, where we talk to people.

They do take us to places, like you’ve just shown at least 3 websites that I’ve never heard of and I’ve been online intensively for the last 8 years I think, 5, 6, so many years, so that’s cool.

So let’s say we’ve got a product, we got a movie that we wanna start marketing, what’s the best way to prepare before launching?

Amelia: In this, there is a lot that we need to do before lunching on social media campaign. The 1st and foremost is to have of course the fantastic pitch kit and business plan.

Before…it’s not essential, but once we put out this campaigns online, people are expecting to see a product, so, if their investors or they are, if they’re people who want to get involved, we need to be sure that we have a pitch kit and a business plan ready to send of to them. As well as a teaser that really showcases our abilities.

So other teaser or trailer before, so we can start pushing content on to a social media pages and through our campaigns.

Otherwise what are we, I mean we need to have content to push out.

Another thing that we can do is to have a legitimate plan, so this is where the strategy comes in to play and I have a few steps, this is definitely not the end all, be all and a social media plan model, but this is something that I’ve used in the past that seems to work pretty well.

So the first and foremost is to determine and specifically assess that specific target audiences, it’s critical that we profile them, I know that kinda sounds bad but it really honing in to who those target audiences are but also being able to assess what exactly our movie is topic is about and how that is relevant or how that is affecting our communities and todays world.

So that’s the first step, the second one is to create our team.

We have to have really important people, we have to have really creative people on our teams when it comes to social media, because this is technology that changing everyday, and in order to stay current with developing campaigns, we have to be able to do, to think out side the box and come up with some great campaigns.

So that team, creative team is very important, whether it’s the director or producer and you know the marketing and public relations and all like that types of group.

Having the right team is very important.

And then we come up with the actual strategy of social media, so we have these ideas for campaigns, we need to have, in order to know if the campaign is working, we have to have the goal and objectives before we actually start the campaign.

So once we come up with our campaign goals and that could simply be something like, we want traffic to our website to increase by 52% and that’s our goal.

Our goal is simply an awareness campaign about our website period. And if that’s the campaign goal, then we can structure an appropriate campaign around us.

So again we specified that target audience exactly really as niche as we can make it, we identify what tools that niche audience is using because there are some tools out there in this world that you, I don’t even know that exist.

I mean there are so many online communities and websites and tools that I don’t even know that exist.

So really doing the research around the target audience and finding out what their doing online, and then based on the tools that the target audience is using, and what are that target audience is in to, now we can create specific activities online to help push this campaign through.

So once we have that, we have those activities and all over goals lay out, now we can actually go and say, “ok who’s gonna do it and when are we gonna get it done.”

Something to keep in mind, is that if we push our social media campaign too early, by the time the movies actually made and ready to be put out there, it might be a year or two even if it takes, sometimes it takes long time.

So by that time, some of our audiences made just be over it, so we need to have be able to have that timeline laid out and the strategy laid out well in advance.

So then, we actually do the action the activities, we try the evaluation and debriefing, so when it comes to evaluating, the evaluating over all campaign is the overall plan and then we evaluate the action plans, so that’s the activities that we decided to implement.

And then, we can go and say, “we used Facebook how well did that do as a tool itself within our campaign.”

And this is gonna be a very fluid process, going back and changing their activities or going back and realising that maybe that wasn’t the best target audience or maybe those work are right tools to target that specific audience, that’s ok we can go back and try again and see what happens, it’s very fluid process, so then we regroup, and then we tell our story.

So that’s the plan that I recommend utilising, while we’re coming up with this social media campaigns.

Tim: So just to recap on that, because there’s a lot of information there.

One is set yourselves measurable goals, that can be measured using the tools that we have like Google Analytics, or Facebook Analytics and all those kind of things.

Amelia: Yes!

Tim: So that, you can see how you’re doing and then also have, to have a team in place, so that you can move in the correct time frame that you need to move in…. and what was the third point you made..at the end?

Amelia: The campaign, I mean the strategy knowing which tools your target audience is using specifically.

Tim: That’s it correct. Yup! To be in alignment with your target audience when it comes to using social media, like for example, if all of your audience is on Linkedin, then why are you on Facebook.

Amelia: Exactly.

Tim: Yup! So use the correct tools.

And you know again, referring back to the conversation I had with Georgia Hilton, who you know, she was totally amazing and some of the ideas that she came out with.

She had specific goals that she put in place before she did certain things.

For example, they wanted to raise $25,000 on Kickstarter…so whats, her goal was, that she would have 1,000 interactive fans on Facebook before they launch Kickstarter.

Amelia: Perfect!

Tim: And she didn’t just want 1,000 fans, she wanted 1,000 interactive fans and as we said earlier, they felt like they were part of the movie, so when they launch, when they launched their campaign on Kickstarter, they raised the $25,000 in two weeks, I mean the growth was just incredible and it was amazing to see.

So I think that’s solidifies exactly what you were saying.

Amelia: Absolutely! That’s perfect! And I love that she, so that would be a specific activity that helps to get to the overall goal.

So she has this activity where she wanted to have the Facebook engaged, engaged Facebook fans and that’s brilliant.

Tim: Yeah. And then the other things that she was saying as well, and I’ve heard this from a few people, like I was talking to Tom Malloy and Jason Brubaker last week and they were saying that, when you do your videos, don’t make cheap videos, make them the same quality as the movie.

Amelia: Yes.

Tim: Because this is what you’re showing people, to pull them in as the investors and if it’s a piece of rubbish, they’re gonna go, “this is it? This is what we investing in?”

Amelia: Yup!

Tim: So what you’re doing free launch need to be as the same quality, if not high quality than the actual movie itself.

Amelia: Absolutely! It’s so important, so important that people see what your abilities truly are.

Tim: Alright, fantastic.

So, yeah you just showed the quick question there. “What are some the best practices for marketing movies with social media?”

Amelia: So I’ve got some tips, just based on some of my own knowledge in marketing for movies and the first one is to actually utilise this online tools that keep on contact with your amazing creative team that you’ve already develop.

I can’t tell you enough about Google, I love Google, I should be getting paid based on how much I talked about them, but they’re brilliant.

Their business plan is create awesome stuff that people can’t ignore now and find the way to pay for it later, that’s legitimately their business plan.

So I highly recommend Google Drive, it’s a free way to share your documents and to create documents with one another online, and again free, it’s a cloud that you have, but you don’t have to pay for.

Google Calendar let’s you….

Tim: Can I just jump in, you know you’re talking about Google.

You know, so many people see Google as it’s big bad monster that’s gonna shut you down if you do anything wrong, that is absolutely not the case.

Google want you to be successful, because if you’re successful, they’re more successful.

Amelia: Yes!

Tim: So all of the tips that they put out, are actually designed to help you not to shut you down and all you have to do is comply with what they’re doing and they will accelerate your growth.

Amelia: Absolutely! Google Calendar’s fantastic, if you haven’t used it yet, there are ways that you can create specific calendars for each project and then, have those dates be sent as an update, as a reminder, weather it’s via email or text message, you can have that meeting or that due date be a reminders sent as a text message to your team.

So, that’s all done for free with Google Calendar, I can’t tell you enough how much I love their online tools.

This is probably the most important part of the entire presentation and that’s, that using traditional forms of marketing is not dead, it is so, social media is fantastic and it reaches a huge audience but that doesn’t mean we can forget the rest of this marketing techniques and honestly email is still a thing, it’s still real sending out email updates to fans is a great way to market your film.

Putting adds in newspaper and on billboards and on journals and magazine and bus shelters, that is still a huge important part of marketing a movie.

As well as going and meeting people in person.

Having webinars like, I mean this isn’t a in person for say, but it’s having webinar like this being able to talk one-on-one with people, doing q and a’s, going to mixers and networking with other people, it’s very very important.

As you all know, when it comes to the movie business, it’s who you know.

So having that connections is critical, and then you know post cards and posters and tables tents something like that.

Traditional forms of marketing is the most critical for your film, as well as social media.

Tim: So true you know, I actually have friends who do not have Facebook accounts.

Amelia: Yes!

Tim: And that is amazing and my mom has never ever sent an email. So there are these people who are just not connected online. I know it’s amazing but it really does exist.

Amelia: Oh yeah.

Tim: And we need to connect to those people as well.

Amelia: Yeah and it takes a whole new strategy, when working with things like emails, email updates and adds and print advertisements, it does, it’s gonna take a different strategy for that as well, with different target audiences and things like that.

Finding ways to integrate traditional forms with online forms so, you know, taking a cool item like a…like a bottle opener or lighter, and then putting a QR code on it, that takes people back to your website or a video or an application that they download that is about your movie, that’s are really cool way to integrate this traditional forms of marketing with online and to create the basis for both of those.

My next tip is to have one location for your teaser or your trailer, teaser or trailer and because then, it keeps that counts consistent in that one location and I recommend finding a way of posted on your, on your website.. or on Youtube, it probably find a way to get around on other platforms, but if you can trying keep the traffic leaving towards one, it will increase your view counts on that one, that one film.

So being easily accessed is another important tip and so that means if you have a website, it’s pretty important that you have and you have a Facebook, it’s pretty important that you have your Facebook link on your website and your Youtube link on your website or your Google+ or your Vine or your Pinterest.

All of that needs to be easy to access, otherwise your fans aren’t gonna carry more, there’s just, they’re not, they don’t wanna search too much to find you.

Which leads me to the next point is focus on your SEO, which is search engine optimisation. If you’re not on page 2 or 3 of those Google or Bing results, then you’re not gonna get found.

So some ways that are really important on increasing your SEO, is to register with Google and Bing, you can actually register your website with them and you also creating outbound, inbound links, helps raise that SEO too.

So this is where you bring those allies that made, those influencers that you made early on, in the process, this is where it’s really gonna help you, because if you and them work on a blog together let’s say, and your referencing their material and their referencing your material, then those, every time those links are sent around on different sites, your search engine optimisation has increased exponentially.

So having those connections, really helps you on the long term.

Tim: And these are awesome tips Amelia and I wanna go back to one of the things you’ve talk about just now, which was Google.

Amelia: Uhhhum.

Tim: Until recently, I was using GoToWebinar which is where I talk to Matthew as well .

Amelia: Yeah.

Tim: And first of all, GoToWebinar is horrendously expensive,I think it was nearly $500 a month.

Amelia: Wow.

Tim: And I was limited to about only a hundred people at a time, so that there a huge restrictions.

Amelia: Right.

Tim: Google have transformed the way we communicate and connect with each other and they’ve now launched Google Hangouts and Google Hangout is free, this is what were using today Google Hangout and we have this amazing systems where we can see each other and talk in real time and what’s cool about Google Hangout is the tittle of this Hangout today is called “How To Market A Film With Social Media.”

The words “how to market a film” are the keywords I’m using in my site for searching engine optimisation.

So I’m trying to target the keyword “how to market a film”.

Google are presently ranking Hangouts higher than normal Youtube videos, and as, maybe the audience don’t know, is what’s happening at the end of this video is that Google will automatically upload this to Youtube and as I say, they rank it higher than normal videos.

So I should see, and you know you can check it in the next few days, I should see a very high ranking of this video on the keyword “how to market a film”.

Amelia: Brilliant.

Tim: And Google is amazing, they are providing amazing tools and the connectivity and linking together is awesome with them.

Amelia: Absolutely, I love google.

Tim: And of course, I just save myself $500 a month.

Amelia: Yeah. Ahaha. Which is a big deal.

Tim: Big Deal.

Amelia: Ahahahahahaha.

Tim: Ahaha.

Amelia: Oh google, love’em.

Tim: Yup.

Amelia: Yeah, thank you.

That’s absolutely true and it helps every little bit helps on when trying to get that, your website in the first couple pages of Google and Bing.

So my last tip, some best practices is to harness your fan base.

Once you build up your fans and you’ve, and you’ve made your contest, you have people who really care about you and you responding to them is also really important, cause they wanna feel like their part of your movie.

Just like, I can’t remember her name, what’s the name that you’re talking about Tim?

Tim: Georgia Hilton.

Amelia: Just like she did, Georgia with her film.

Bringing her fans into the film, making them feel part of it, is a huge components of the generations that we living now.

The young up and coming, you know millennials as they are called.

They wanna feel like that they are the president of the company, they wanna feel like they have a stake in the product.

So if you bring them on and make them feel that way, they will be some of your biggest advocates that you, that out there and another really interesting laid to harness that power is to create something called a street team.

So when you have these fans who are super active for you, being able to offer them perks for doing things to help boost your campaigns, offering them prizes, offering them experiences, offering them potentially days on sets.

So in return for sharing your campaigns or connecting with you, or you know, handing out post cards or doing those types of marketing activities.

Those people, will feel even more connected with your film.

Tim: Well you know, you just mentioned something I just gonna talk about and I know Matthew is with you and if his lurking in the background, his welcome to join us.

Matthew was saying to me, that they’re actually going to have a baseball day, where they invite some people to the sets and they hang out with them and play baseball with the crew.

Amelia: Yeah.

Matthew: True.

Tim: I just think that’s an awesome thing to do and you imagine handling them all the T-shirts and said “I just played Baseball with The First Out” and they wear that on going home or something like that.

Amelia: Yeah.

Tim: This is them advertising the film and people gonna say “What’s this? What is this that you’re talking about ? What’s on your T-shirt?”

Amelia: Yeah.

Tim: And I think it’s a brilliant idea. I’m certainly gonna implement that in my coming projects.

Amelia: I love that. Yeah. Offering those experiences and having your fans be your street teams, your billboard for you I mean, it’s awesome.

Tim: I don’t know if you know, but I’ve been involved in event management, a show production for 22 years and the Philippines is one of those countries where we have a show for everything.

It’s really an amazing country for shows and getting your audience to be part of your product, is what made show production so successful is that, once upon a time, you could see an advert on a TV, that would say. “product A is better than product B”, well that doesn’t work anymore.

People wanna see it, they wanna touch it, they wanna feel it, they wanna play with it, they wanna interact with it and they wanna take information home and be involved in the product.

Amelia: Yeah.

Tim: And we do product launch, after product launch, after product launch, just invite people so they can emotionally attached to the product.

And I think this is great what Matthew is gonna be doing with them.

Amelia: Uhhhhum, I agree.

Tim: So absolutely awesome. So let’s just recap quickly cause were nearly at the end of the hour.

Amelia: Yeah.

Tim: Going back over the 5 different stages, the 1st point was about branding. Just in a one sentence, what’s so important that we should do in branding?

Amelia: It’s important to keep your brand consistent across the different channels in social media and have it be a recognisable brand or image in order, so people can recognise it immediately and also the name has to be consistent across the different channel as well.

Tim: Fantastic and then when it comes to marketing online your tip for that. Which is our 2nd point.

Amelia: Yes.

Tim: How do you cater marketing campaigns online?

Amelia: Yeah so, having a home base where you can, where people can go for more information that’s a critical components of the marketing process. I’m trying to remember what else we talked about.

Tim: Ok and then your 3rd point was about connecting with influencers online.

Amelia: Yup, being able to reach out to allies who are important in the topics of your film, so important people online in the topics of your film.

Those influencers will be your allies through out the process and what be those fans later that can be your street team and will help spread your campaigns and your contest and your messages across their networks and they’ll be huge for your reached.

Tim: Ok and then 4th, the best way to prepare before launching, what your take away for that.

Amelia: Create a plan, have a very detailed strategy around your campaign, your target audience, the tools that you’re gonna be using and how you plan on showing that, on evaluating that, that campaigns is working.

So having that all laid out ahead of time on very detailed timeline and assigning roles to your team mates.

Tim: Awesome. And then finally, what are some of the best practices for marketing movies in social media.

Amelia: Just a few is, well the most important is, use traditional forms of marketing.

Social media is great but it’s not the end all be all.

There are plenty of audiences out there, who do not utilise social media and those are, those people are just as important as the ones who do.

Tim: Well it’s been, we manage to survive our very 1st Google Hangout with Amelia Belle.

Amelia: Yeheeeeey.

Tim: Yehey. It’s been an awesome experience.

I was really nervous this morning because, Amelia and I were actually having connection problems.

We couldn’t get together but it all came together, it all worked.

And I wanna thank who all of the people who’ve attended the live Google Hangout with us, I know there’s a few of you. I apologize for any technical problems that we had but as I say it’s a 1st time we ever used this software and it’s all new to us. I know that the chat-box is not working correctly as it should be and will get that all sorted out for the next one.

And if you do have any questions that you want Amelia and I to help you out with, you can send them directly to Amelia or to me at argonanimation@gmail. and Amelia, what’s your email address?

Amelia: It’s on the screen right now, it’s amelia@bellehammer.com or please feel free to Facebook message me on a facebook.com/msameliabelle again, it’s on the screen right now.

Tim: Good, so there you are you can connect with either of us, either way and Amelia will sending me the pdf gift for you all later and to everybody that’s been registered, I will send that out to you within the day and then for all those people who listening in to the replay, if you like to get copy of that just send it to argonanimation@gmail.com

I wanna thank everyone for being here. Amelia, you’re an awesome star. Matthew, thank you for introducing me to Amelia.

Matthew: Welcome.

Amelia: Ahahaha

Tim: Good, good. Ahahaha and Amelia, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge with us and spending your time.

And I hope you’ve come back again with us soon as well.

Amelia: I would love to, anytime.

Tim: And maybe, maybe you can be our resident social media expert. Amelia: I love it, done.

Tim: For The Film Finance club. Yup.

Amelia: Love it.

Tim: Cool. So thank you very much. I’d appreciate everyone being here, any questions you know where to contact us.

What happens now, is this video will be uploaded to Youtube automatically, should be ready shortly.

I will send everybody a link, so that you can see it there.

It will be available without any restrictions for the next few days, and then after that I make the video private, and I put it in to my members area and it only have access through the members area, and the members area at ArgonTV and it’s only $1 until 31st December 2019, so it’s not gonna kill you, your welcome to join me there.

And we have presently, I think about 9 or 10 different videos, in audio, video and transcription format, which is also what will happen to this, so you’re welcome to join us.

There’s a whole plethora of information about film finance on my site. I love that word “plethora.”

So Amelia, thank you very much.

Amelia: Thank you.

Tim: And will see you all again soon, take care. This is Tim Bennett.

Amelia: Thank you everyone.

Tim: From argonanimation.com, we’ve been talking with the one and only Amelia Belle about “How To Market A Film With Social Media”.

This post “How To Market A Film With Social Media – With Amelia Belle” was produced exclusively for Argon Animation Inc and is copyright to Tim Bennett © 2019