How To Market Your Film: Getting Results on YouTube

Part One

This is part one of a two-part series to help Independent Filmmakers use YouTube to help you market your film and build a brand around you as a filmmaker. Part One is how to develop a strategy for YouTube and better understand the platform. Part Two will drill down into the tactics of how to get more views for your video content.

Why are you putting your movie trailer on YouTube?

Your movie trailer is created to market your film. It is not your film.
This post is about using YouTube to market your film and build your reputation as an independent filmmaker.

Yours goals should include:

• Increase awareness and interest for your film
• Develop and sustain positive word of mouth
• Build an audience
• Promote you (as a director/writer/producer)

YouTube as a strategy for most DIY independent filmmakers' distribution and marketing plans usually consists of uploading a trailer and maybe a couple of random videos and then seeing what happens. Usually it doesn't return many benefits beyond the free hosting of your content. You've spent many hours, probably days, editing your movie trailer and now you put it on YouTube for the world to see. After all, millions of views every week happen for movie trailers. You promote your video through Twitter and Facebook updates and maybe an email campaign and you get around 500-1,000 views. Don't feel bad as 80% of all YouTube videos get fewer then 500 views and you probably know the stat that 20 hours of video get uploaded every minute onto YouTube.

Strategy: Social networks, search engines and YouTube

To accomplish your goals you should approach the marketing of your film with a strategic plan. Your advertising, social marketing, PR, events and anything else you dream up, should be integrated to maximize the efforts of each channel and have the whole be greater then the sum of its parts. YouTube is often a misused platform that I feel filmmakers can better utilize to reach their independent films marketing goals.

The first step in creating a strategy for YouTube is to understand it as a community and a social network. When you joined Twitter and put up your first tweet did you get a thousand followers? The same applied to Facebook. Did a thousand of your closest friends join your fan page or friend you after your first status update? You build your audience here through interaction, the same way you build your fans and followers on other networks.

The next step is to understand that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Let me repeat that. This is a trick question I often use in speaking engagements. When I ask what is the second largest search engine, most answer Bing or Yahoo. It's YouTube. The key difference from Google, other than you are searching for videos and not websites, is that your community involvement on YouTube influences the search results.

Key Obstacles in Marketing Independent Film

This is a simplistic view at a complex subject but here are two reasons Film Studios (and most large brands) spend the money they do on advertising and why TV ad spend is still important:

• People prefer to buy from known brands to unknown brands.
• Attention: we are in an attention economy and creating awareness and staying "top of mind" to consumers helps influence purchase behavior.

One major problem in marketing Independent films is a lack of funding to do either one of those things. I believe the biggest hurdle indie's face is the lack of name recognition and validation. The kiss of death is to hear "I never heard of that movie". That translates into not wanting to take a risk on something unknown and wasting time.

Build a Channel

For the DIY filmmaker your strategic approach should be to develop a fan base that will invest their attention in your channel, content and you the filmmaker. Think beyond the movie trailer, beyond this film and towards developing a channel that over the long term can serve as a platform to help launch all your films as well develop your reputation as a filmmaker. You may be writing a blog and that is helpful as well to promote yourself, but you are a filmmaker. This channel offers you a chance to showcase your work that might otherwise not have an outlet. Creating an optimized channel of entertaining and/or informative content is an important tool to help develop sustainability for your film career.

Uploading fresh, regular content is very important to your success. If you write a blog you understand the importance of new content and YouTube is no different. You want to add subscribers and build a following over time. Just like email lists, Twitter followers and Facebook fans, YouTube viewers and subscribers can be your über fans spreading the worth of mouth you need to succeed.

Your channel also works to help promote your website where you most likely will have e-commerce. You can embed the videos on your site as well but keep YouTube as the host rather then hosting them and paying the expense. What YouTube offers over your website, or any site, is the search-ability and discovery of your content. I will cover that more in part two of this series.

Viral is not a Strategy

Going viral is a result of your content and many other unpredictable and uncontrollable factors. To make a viral video is the equivalent of saying, "make a hit movie". It's important to include all the elements that enable your video to be shared (embeds, links, etc) but no one can guarantee it will go viral. It is a goal not a strategy.

In part two I will drill down into the tactics of how to get more views for your movie trailer, other video content, and your channel on YouTube.

Do you have a success story or other ideas to share? Please leave a comment.

Here is Part Two