Find Your Film's Audience: How to Get Started

As indie film distributors have disappeared, self-distribution for filmmakers is gaining traction giving filmmakers hope that they will be able to make films and create career sustainability. Perhaps it should be called self marketing, not self distribution as distribution is really not the issue. Making the film is what you as filmmakers are trained and inspired to do, but most of you are not marketers. Having an understanding of how marketing works can mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to DIY distribution. One of the mantras in the DIY movement is to find, connect and engage with your audience. The “find your audience to market your film” part is great advice and for most marketers this is routine for their business. But for filmmakers it reminds me of the old Steve Martin joke of how to make a million dollars which goes "first, you get a million dollars..." So, how do I find my audience?

It’s a daunting task when you look at the big picture of marketing a film; it’s like looking at that first blank page when you sit down to write your screenplay. My goal here is just to provide you one of many ways to get started. Before you can find your audience you must know who they are.

Part 1 - Who is my audience?

Of course the tendency is to jump in and start finding blogs, checking out their blog rolls, setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts. But before you do this, take a step back and think about your strategy. Think of this stage as your pre-production. There are many great blogs that talk about film marketing strategy but my purpose here is to drill down a bit into audience discovery using some practical, and free, tools. The place to start is market research.

Think niche interests not niche audience

I know I am stating the obvious but no one is a niche, we all have varied interests. Be aware that it is natural for us to compartmentalize peoples interests to be narrowly focused. I know that the term means an audience with niche interests but sometimes common terms can be misleading. After you identify the niche interest for your film you can work on the overlapping of people’s interests to broaden your audience and look for other connections to your film.

First, look at your movie and break it down like you would a brand or product. Every company needs to know who will buy their product and they develop a profile for that person. You need to develop a profile for your audience. Not demographics but psychographics. Go beyond the age and gender that studio marketers use in their archaic four quadrants approach and into their personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.

Start by looking for concepts in your film that are selling points such as:

• What are the themes in your film?
• Do you have something unique (location, actor, true story)?
• Is your film clearly defined into a genre?
• Does your soundtrack offer you possible audience connections?

Think about the reasons you made the film. What interested you in telling this story?

Part 2 - SEO and Keywords

Keyword research is a tactic marketers use to help increase search engine optimization (SEO) for bloggers and websites to improve their visibility in search engines. It also generates a ton of useful data that filmmakers can use to find their audience and most importantly to learn more about who they are.

The first step is to build a list of keywords and short phrases that describe your film to help you discover who your audience is, where they are, and what they like. Once you go down this rabbit hole you may discover that the audience is different then you originally thought.

As an example, I will use a film that is a thriller about mistaken identity. The theme in the film deals with personal identity, how we define ourselves, and if are we living the life we want to live. It has an obvious David Lynch influence with a touch of Hitchcock, unknown actors, and not much else to set it apart as far as ancillary attributes. So now I need to find an audience.

My starting keyword list:

• Mistaken identity
• David Lynch
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Thrillers

I start with Google Trends this is a basic tool to help you perform market research on who the audience is for your film, and plug in my first keyword phrase, “Mistaken Identity.” This returns the top 100 searches for that phrase. From there I select the relevant ones and drill down some more. By clicking on the little color chart on the right of each term it takes me to another chart showing the number of daily searches for that term and the number of webpages that term is on. This gives a sense of the size of the audience for this term. For my search, most of the terms don’t seem to give me what I’m looking for until I click on “mistaken identity films.” Under “Research” I click on the Google link on the bottom and this takes me to Google page results for “mistaken identity films.” The top few results are useless but then I see a blogger who has a post about “Mistaken Identity Films.” I read his blog and find he is asking for people to send him films to write about. I have my first lead. However, the long tail of the web strikes and I discover the post is 4 years old. But the comments on the site list dozens of films about mistaken identity, providing more info I can drill down into later.

To cut to the chase, I discovered that Mistaken Identity, Hitchcock, and Lynch were not generating what I needed. But through these searches I found that “consciousness” “existentialism” and “perception and reality” were relevant words that kept popping up.

Using these keywords in a google search led me to websites, blogs and videos with content and conversations relevant to my film. Now I have the beginning of my audience profile.

Part 3 - Where is my Audience

The first step is to set up a your discovery and listening posts

Armed with your keyword list you want to find out where your audience is and what they are doing to gain further insights into who they are. There are a number of free tools to get you started. Many of these overlap as far as what they deliver but each offer something unique and all together will help you gather comprehensive qualitative and quantitative data.

Set up Google Alerts to track mentions. This will help you find the conversations going on around your films themes/story/actors/locations/lifestyle whatever you found that fits your audience profile.

Social Mention is a great tool to find new bloggers and discover who is talking about your subject. Enter in your keywords or phrase, and eventually your film, and you get a ton of data relating to sentiment on the subject, the reach, the strength (which shows interest) and the passion of the conversations depicting how often the subject is spoken about. The tool is meant for brands to discover more about their social presence but can be an effective tool for audience discovery.

Set up a Twitter search. I use Tweet Deck but there are others to track conversations on Twitter, again based on your keyword research. This is a great tool to find influencers and the content creators who are on top of the technographic ladder.

Facebook offers a gold mine of data. On the bottom of the Facebook page you will see a link to Advertise. By creating an ad (you don’t have to actually buy one) you can discover likes and interests from your audience plus the size, location, other interests, communities they belong to, etc.

Trendrr is great to search for what is trending now. Track qualitative, quantitative, influence, sentiment, location and competitive trends in real-time and over time. If your film has a theme that is popular in the moment, this can be a useful tool.

Peoplebowsr has a lot to offer, but most of the features are only available in the paid version. However, they offer a free entry level tool which allows you to discover conversations on Twitter and drill down deeper into what kind of content is being shared by your audience.

Quantcast has a tagline that sums it up “It’s your audience. We just help you find it.” With this site you can enter in domain names for websites you’ve identified and obtain good quantifiable data (size, age, income, education etc) on your audience.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs and posts. This can be useful once you know what you are searching for.

Google AdWords offers a lot of information beyond keywords. You need to set up an account. I find it takes awhile to navigate exactly what you are looking for but you can really drill down here to find out what people search for.

Keyword research is a useful tool to get you started in finding your audience, gain insights into who they are, and then help you widen the scope of your search to find a larger audience. Now that you discovered your audience and built a profile, the next step is to construct messaging relevant to each segment to interest them in you film.

One key tool I haven’t mentioned is YouTube because it requires more space and this post is already too long. So next up I will talk about how to use YouTube to find your audience and how to get more video views for your trailer.

I am just scratching the service here on audience discovery, so I would like to hear what tools and methods you find to be useful?