By Cassie Phillips, Freelance Writer, Culture Coverage
No matter how big or small the project, after producing any film it’s essential to give it the best chance for success as possible via a well thought-out online marketing campaign. The internet has provided a fantastic tool for anyone to promote work. It allows you to reach a potentially wider fan base than any other platform.
The accessibility of online marketing, however, doesn’t mean it’s a foolproof system. People often fail to properly consider all the seemingly extraneous elements of their online campaign. They can actually do more harm than good when marketing carelessly.
Benefits of Online Marketing
If you aren’t marketing on the internet in today’s world, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. It allows you to promote your work to potential fans all over the world and makes distribution easier than ever. It’s a great way to save money as you don’t have to pay as much for physical media production costs. It doesn’t even necessarily require a whole marketing team to make it a successful endeavor.
Utilizing many extremely popular video hosting platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo, it’s simple to send out trailers and snippets for little to no charge. On top of that, you can easily interact with your fan base and create a lasting relationship. However, despite the many benefits, there are some serious considerations you need to take before attempting to increase your visibility online.
Onlin****e Reputation
Whether you’re the director, producer or a dedicated marketing agent, if you’re responsible for your project's online campaign, you have a reputation to uphold. If you don’t present a professional and trustworthy brand online, customers are never going to buy into your franchise.
One of the main areas people often fail to consider is online safety. If your security isn’t up to standards and you fall victim to an obvious hack or infiltration, users are going to avoid all of your marketing platforms like the plague. They will fear for their own online security. Due to this, knowing the options you have and the different risks each one faces is essential to your marketing campaign’s success.
Channels To Market
There are a few key areas that are essential to consider when marketing a film or production online. Having a main website is essential, as it acts as a central hub to which all other platforms can divert traffic. It’s also a great way to host an e-commerce shop in order to make sales. Keeping your website clean and uncompromised is an important pursuit that we will explore in more detail shortly.
Alongside this, social media is becoming a driving force in determining the popularity and success of a project, so staying active on all accounts is important. This doesn’t simply mean posting the link to your film. Instead, try and interact with your fan base to rally enthusiasm for your project. Open up discussions and conversations about related topics and stay active.
Other options to consider include video hosting platforms, which was touched upon earlier, or an active blog, which can help keep interest levels up even when you are between project releases. Film-dedicated crowdfunding services, such as Seed & Spark, are also an interesting channel to investigate as they also provide some fantastic marketing benefits.
**Security **Risks
Unfortunately, each of these platforms come with their own host of risks and, although it should never stop you from using them, is it important to be aware of the different types of infiltrations that you could fall victim to.
For your website, the easiest way to destroy your reputation is to have malicious code injected onto your page. This often manifests as pop-ups or dodgy adverts, and whilst it poses no real risk to you or your company, it can destroy trust in your business in an instant.
Social media poses its own unique set of security threats. Messaging suspicious links to all of your followers or mass-posting spam adverts is a common repercussion of a social media infiltration. These are extremely detrimental to your online reputation. Potential viewers will probably unfollow instantly, and you don’t need that sort of downturn when you’re close to releasing a film.
Contingency Plan
Whilst there is no guaranteed way to completely secure yourself online, there are some simple steps you can take to try and minimize the problem. More often than not, security breaches are a result of sloppy privacy practices. To start with, at a base level, it’s wise to be running a comprehensive security suite.
It’s also important to be stringent about the way you use the internet. Clicking haphazardly on potentially dodgy links is always a risk. So is downloading from untrusted websites and opening suspicious emails. Most malware injections are caused by clicking on infected spam in the first place, so be mindful of what you access.
Another point of potential risk is when using public WiFi. These networks are notoriously insecure, as they leave your data flying around completely unprotected. This makes it easy to fall victim to hackers or contract infections. However, these public access points are so fantastically useful in order to update regularly, that you should never sacrifice this convenience. Instead you can make use of a Virtual Private Network, which encrypts all your information and gives you a fantastic extra level of security.
Security and marketing come hand in hand: both are essential for the success of your production. The cybersecurity landscape is constantly changing, so we’d love to hear any advice or updates that you might have on how to stay safe. Be sure to leave a comment below.
About the Writer
Cassie is an entertainment blogger and expert in online marketing. She loves finding new and unknown films on the internet, and hopes she can share tips to help others make their projects more visible online.
