Assessing the marketplace

LO1: Apply professional marketing techniques to a showreel website to gain feedback from industry professionals.

 

One of the key routes to ensure a successful marketing strategy is to assess the marketplace and check how successful websites promote themselves. To do this, both me and Ed have taken a sample size of websites(20) varying from post production portfolios to foley studios and checking out for key themes from these websites. To do this, I have decided to construct a few checkpoints/questions. By doing this, we will see what the majority are doing in terms of marketing, this will help us when it comes to promoting our website.

1. Does this website include social media links?

2. If so, are these links to the social media pages on the homepage?

3. Does the website include a contact email on the homepage?

4. Does this website include a phone number on the homepage?

5. Do these website use paid for ads on google?

6. How active are these companies on Twitter/Facebook?

– Est. Multiple posts a day

– Around 1 post a day

– A post every week or so

– A post every month or so

– No social media presence

7. Do the companies make reference to current events on social media?

Early research into website marketing

LO1; Apply professional marketing techniques to a showreel website to gain feedback from industry professionals.

 

As someone who has little experience in marketing, this would be a task i’d have to put a lot of research into both on a primary and secondary level. The two main methods of marketing i’ll be looking at within this post will focus around paid for marketing and free marketing.

 

The main method we would have to look into in terms of free advertising would SMM(Social media marketing). Although focused around social media, SMM is a broad spectrum, it mainly focuses on creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding goals. In our case the branding goal would be to get as many eyes on our website to increase our chances of getting paid work. Esteemed advertising expert Dan Shewan runs a blog focused around marketing websites on wordstream and here are some of the key takeaways from the blog:

 

– If you’re running a promotion and you want to post about it on social media websites then you should link directly to the promotion, not to your websites homepage.

– Targeting the right people with your social media marketing is important. Going after the right people at the right time is incredibly effective. For our social media’s we will need to follow people within industry, it’s way more efficient to focus on people within the industry who will actually require jobs doing. It’s more important to have a small crowd of industry followers as posed to many non-industry followers.

– Within marketing, visuals are often more important that the text itself when it comes to getting potential clients to consider you. Offering an aesthetic visual experience will often be the gateway for people to read through the rest of the website, never have a page of text on your homepage.

– Use in app functions within social media to gauge how well certain posts do. For example, Twitter makes use of analytics for Tweets including an impression rate. This will be useful to find out which Tweets result in the most engagement,

– Take into account cross platform contract details. For example Facebook has a “call now” button that is useable on pages. This limits the chances of loosing customers/established engineers before they arrive to the landing pages.

 

We could also potentially take some paid for advertising routes as well. One of the possibilities is implementing automatic bidding on GoogleAds. This would be handled by a external company who would adjust bids on keywords within google searches depending on the success rate of the search terms. Using something like this would allow us to constantly be on top of what key terms people are using to look for services such as ours and by readjusting the bids, we will be higher on the Google search. Another route we could take is paid for sponsorship on either social media or paying for GoogleAd placement, ensuring we get more eyes and potential clicks onto our websites.

 

Whilst the paid for advertising methods are potentially useful, we as a company need to ensure we stick within a limited budget and save as much money as possible, this is however a route we could potentially look at once we are more established. For now we will need to make sure of free promotion through having a good social media marketing strategy.

 

Aims and learning objectives

Project objective: The overall objective of this project is to create and begin to run a business that offers services and expertise to the media industry. This will include sound recording and audio post production.
 
Project aims: 
– To create more content for the website, branching out to various media forms and not sticking exclusively to short films and therefore showing a greater variety. 
– To create a website that displays a portfolio of work with a little bit about us as sound engineers. 
– To use this website as a method of getting more work within industry.
Learning outcomes: 
1. Apply professional marketing techniques to a showreel website to gain feedback from industry professionals.
2. Create audio material for film makers through professional collaboration.
3. Apply professional Pro-Tools editing and mixing techniques in a Audio Post Production situation for a film project.

Introduction

This is an introduction to my second audio project for my third year in audio production, this project follows directly in from my first project this term. Within the first term I was a part of a team that created a short 10 minute film called Sector B, throughout that process I worked as a field recordist but I also was involved heavily in the post production stage. Whilst this film helped me develop my skills and overall, meet my aims and objectives – there were a few factors that I hope to avoid in terms of this project.

 

For this project, me and a fellow course mate aim to create and begin to run a company that provides both stages of audio production within film, field recording and post production. Although in the last project me and Ed Richardson(fellow student) took on the roles we were most comfortable with(me as a field recordist and Ed within post production) we have decided it would be beneficial to swap these roles as a way of broadening our skill set within this marketplace.

 

We have also split the workload for the creation and maintenance of the company website. This will include Ed looking into various factors around the creation of the website, this will include a number of tasks such as video coding and graphic creation. My main workload will be focused on marketing the company so it becomes as prominent in the marketplace as possible. This will include looking into both external media platform such as Twitter and Facebook as a method of promoting the website but also looking into keyword based research and the use of SEO as a method of pushing the company to the market as much as possible.

 

To conclude, my main role within the project will be working as a post production engineer on various projects and also, dealing with marketing the company.