Build Your Film’s Audience Using Search Engines

Making a film is a big enough challenge in itself, but if you are like most low-budget independent filmmakers, you’ll quickly discover that finding an audience for your film can be even more challenging.

Outside of widely known marketing methods like submitting to festivals, inviting people to special screenings, and attempting to make friends on social networks, most filmmakers fail in allowing their audience find them on their own. In most cases, your audience is already out there and are already looking for your film. Where are they? How are they looking? The same way everyone finds things these days: search engines.

The Search Audience is Huge
It’s no secret that search engine marketing is huge for most businesses. Search engine marketers get paid very handsomely and for good reason—there is a tremendous amount search activity on an unfathomable number of topics. Even the top 10,000 search terms only represent, at best, 18.5% of the all search traffic (see my long tail study)

This is where your film comes in. You have an opportunity to tap into a very large audience across the globe that is much more interested in your film then the average film screener. People that are passionate about your film’s topic are out there and want to find you. And it is a level playing field—Hollywood studios have trouble ranking #1 for their own film titles!

If you are working on a documentary, chances are people are already searching on your exact topic. They may not be looking specifically for a film, but if your film shows up on the first page of the search results for that topic, you are certainly going to draw an audience in.

Even if your film is a fictional narrative, there’s still an audience looking for your film, you just need to figure out the angle. Maybe it is your filming location (“films shot in Memphis”), a specific type of character (“pregnant zombie”), a specific audience (“female skateboarders”), or a fear (“how to survive a kidnapping”).

Even if you don’t use search engines for audience building, you still want a search presence because if your film does hit it big, people will search your film’s title, and you’ll want them to land on a website you have full control over.

Search Marketing for Your Film
There are two types of search engine marketing. One is paid search (the ads you see typically in the right column) and the other is organic. Paid search is usually not an option for a low-budget filmmaker, but if used in the right way it can be effective. Here’s one example:

You’re doing a documentary on the homeless and are looking for evangelists for your film. You buy Google ads for a variety of keywords, including: homeless documentary, homeless movie, homeless film, homeless stories, and even homeless charities. Your search ad has a call to action that your film is looking for volunteers to spread the word on the film. For $50, you get 500 people to visit your site and maybe 50 actually sign up to help you out. Those 50 people may have connections that expose your film to another 50 each, and so on.

Paid search is also great for filmmakers selling DVDs because you can easily set up a campaign and test to see how much revenue you can generate per dollar spent.

Natural Search
Organic, or natural search, is an even bigger opportunity than paid search for your film because 70% of people click on organic or non-paid results. For organic search success, having the right kind of site with the right kind of content is key. Here are some important tips:

• Get a custom domain name for your movie—it’s the best $9 you’ll spend.
• Blogs tend to do well as blogging platforms are easily recognized by search engines. Plus they're easy to use, meaning you are more likely to create lots of content. 
• Flash-only sites don’t tend to do well because they are virtually unreadable and untrustable by search engines. If you must use flash, go the hybrid approach (both flash and html).
• Upload your trailer to YouTube and link to it from your main site. If things go well, your video could show up on the first page of Google’s search results for your target keyword (example for Juno)
• Spend some time learning the basics of SEO (search engine optimization). The two most important aspects to learn are choosing title tags and obtaining links.

Think Outside the Google Search Box
Google isn’t the only game in town. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask and a number of video search engines may be small compared to Google, but still drive a lot of traffic. Also work on getting listings on internal search engines within sites like YouTube, Myspace, and FaceBook.

Search engines are generally underestimated by the film community. Don’t make the same mistake—use them to your advantage.

Dustin Woodard is a veteran search marketer who recently completed his first film, a 30-minute short titled Unseen Abilities. You can follow him on his SEO blog, on Twitter (@webconnoisseur) or on IndieGoGo (Dustin).

Comments

[Manda]

Never thought of this before, but it makes sense considering the number of movie-related searches I do online & how often I'm dissapointed with the results.

[johnbarnald]

The people search engines provide information about people.Many of them provide information for free while other charge for the information provided. We need to choose the appropriate people search to find the information of the people.