There’s something magical about the movies. Fresh, buttery popcorn, a fizzy soda, and don’t forget those extra comfy seats that let you sink into the experience. With blockbuster season right around the corner, now’s the perfect time to start driving awareness and building excitement, as well as driving ticket sales to an upcoming film by leveraging the power of advocacy marketing. To help set the stage, we’ve put together the below guide chock-full of tips, tricks, and best practices. Let’s get started.
Why SocialToaster Is A Perfect Fit For Hollywood
Not to brag, but we’ve had the opportunity to work on some amazing films (#humblebrag anyone?). We’re talking Spiderman, Goosebumps, and a few others that we aren’t allowed to name. The producers and marketing teams of these movies used a SocialToaster advocacy marketing program to build buzz, ignite excitement, and boost ticket sales for their film.
We’re comfortable working with both major studios and indie film houses alike, and know exactly how to hit the ground running to create an advocacy marketing program that will blow your fans out of the water and into theater seats. If you’re ready to have a groundbreaking premiere event but aren’t sure how to get started, then may we suggest you keep reading.
Frequency Drives Ticket Sales
With streaming apps like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime producing straight-to-small-screen flicks, some analysts believe that hallowed movie theatre scene may be on the way out. This simply isn’t the case.
In 2016, more than 71% of the U.S and Canada population went to the cinema at least once. But, it’s the moviegoers who like to frequent more than once a month that are driving the movie industry. 48% of all tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada are from people who love to indulge in the theater experience.
Even as streaming technology continues to become a part of our life, 2017 saw record high ticket sales up 5% from 2016. In dollars, that equated to about $40.6 billion.
Bottom line, in order to maximize success, your marketing efforts should focus on reaching those individuals that self-identify as frequent movie goers. They already know that they want to go see a movie in the near future. You just need to convince them (through engaging and exciting content) that they should choose to see YOUR movie.
When it comes to amplifying your movie trailers, behind-the-scenes shots, and talent interviews, nothing quite beats a strong advocacy marketing effort. Here are 4 key advocacy marketing benefits that will have you selling more tickets than Titanic has Oscars.
Top 4 Benefits of A SocialToaster Advocacy Marketing Program
1) Increase Awareness and Social Reach
For most movie marketing teams, the traditional route for marketing a film is to pay to promote it on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. However, this strategy can get really expensive really fast. The average YouTube advertiser has a cost-per-view ranging between $.10 to $.30, which means it could cost over $2,000 dollars to get your content viewed by about 10,000 people.
Let’s compare that to advocacy marketing. The average advocate is connected to 500 to 600 people through social media. This means that for every 100 people that join your program, your potential reach can grow by 60,000 people! When you push new shareable content to your advocates, they have the opportunity to share it to their personal feed where it is then visible to their entire social network.
The best part? There’s no cap to how often you can tap into the sharing power of your advocates. Compare that to your paid advertising efforts that require you to break out the credit card every time you want to drive visibility of a new post.
2) Drive Engagement with Exclusive Content
What makes movies so popular is the passion viewers share for the actors, directors, and storyline. An advocacy marketing program is a bit different than your traditional marketing strategy because it allows (and encourages) you to tap into and support this passion by sharing multiple pieces of content.
Your movie promotion plan is more than just movie trailers. Use your advocates to share exclusive content like behind-the-scenes footage, post-production shots, and even conceptual art and storyboards.
Bonus Tip: With SocialToaster you can also ask your advocates to follow the actors, directors, and other key individuals from the movie.
3) Build Loyalty By Interacting With Your Advocates
Your advocates are more than just content pushers. The SocialToaster comes equipped with multiple tools you can use to interact with your advocates. Here are just a couple of our favorite ways that clients are using our platform to build buzz and create emotional ties to your film.
Fun Quizzes
“Which character are you?”
“What house do you belong to?”
“Are you a Charlotte or a Samantha?”
Give your audience the opportunity to put themselves into your film’s universe through the power of fun, interactive quizzes. As a bonus, you can ask your fans to share their results onto their personal social feed and invite their friends and family to take the quiz as well.
Conduct a Community Poll
With SocialToaster, you can easily create and distribute polls to your advocates. Ask your advocates fun questions about the movie story, actors, and even what they think of the hair and makeup. As you collect responses, be sure to share the results of the poll with your advocates.
Hold Q&A’s with Key Film Personalities
Highly anticipated films like yours often come with lots of questions from fans and potential ticket buyers. Feed the frenzy by giving your advocates an exclusive opportunity to ask their favorite directors or stars their questions. Then collect and share the star’s responses in a fun content piece.
4) Incentivize Participation and Sharing With Film-Centric Prizing
One of the biggest participation drivers in any advocacy marketing program are the program incentives. From tickets to the premiere to cool swag bags and celebrity phone calls, there’s absolutely no shortage of awesome ways to incentivize your advocates to share their hearts out.
On top of driving participation, a strong incentive can also increase recruitment and help market the program to would-be advocates. When they go to sign up for your program, make sure it’s clear what they have the potential to earn by being your advocate.
Here are a couple of our favorite incentive ideas:
- Ticket-discount codes (or even free tickets) on Fandango or other ticketing platforms
- Branded movie swag including shirts, water bottles, koozies, etc.
- Phone or Skype calls with actors from the film
- Autographed movie posters and other memorabilia
- Tickets to the movie’s premier or other marquee showings
Whether your award prizing based on program participation or prefer to leave it to chance through sweepstakes, the SocialToaster program automatically tracks every advocate’s activity so that you can properly award points or contest entries.
It’s Showtime
If you’re ready to rock blockbuster season this year, give SocialToaster a call today! Our award-winning advocacy marketing platform can help you kick your marketing efforts into high gear, all while creating a loyal fanbase. Request your free demo and we’ll help you create and design an advocacy marketing program everyone will love.
