LO1: Apply professional marketing techniques to a showreel website to gain feedback from industry professionals.
To summarize and draw upon both the primary and secondary research done, I thought it would be beneficial to write up a marketing strategy as it would help us have a clear of how we will promote ourselves.
Drawing upon initial research into both SEO and Google Ads, I recommend that we place no initial budget on algorithmic based marketing such as bidding on keyword searches. This is due to the fact that we have very little funding to begin with. Also, drawing upon earlier research, it is evident that a lot of successful production companies do not use tools such as Google Ads so this tells me that we can be successful without paid for promotion.
The next form of marketing we have to consider is contact details. This is an important consideration for both legal reasons and reassurance of potential customers. In terms of legal requirements it is important that we include the following; business name, a geographical address and a contact email address. This it too fall in accordance with various regulations such as E-Commerce Regulations 2002. It is important that we consider where about the contact information is situated however as this will allow for the website to be user friendly. To do this, we will include contact information such as an email address on the front page right at the bottom. This is due to the fact that when conducting primary research into how other production house depict their contact information, I discovered that a lot of the companies within this field place there contact information within the front page. In regards to a contact number, we will include that under “Immediate Inquiries” within the actual “Contact Us” page. This is again due to the fact that most other production house websites feature it within this page as opposed to on the home with only 6 out of the 20 featuring it prominently on the home page.
The final element we have to consider in terms of marketing will be our presence within social media. Social media is an important aspect of free marketing that we will need to utilize to ensure maximum user engagement, as looked at earlier in this blog by esteemed marketing blogger Dan Shewan; social media is a great way of advertising to a specific audience. With this in mind, I have decided that it’ll be beneficial to have somewhat a social media presence. By looking into other production houses social media presence, I have also determined it’ll be beneficial to include widgets for these pages within the front page of our website as 13 of the 20 websites I looked at did so and these companies websites were predominantly modern. In terms of social media presence, the vast majority of websites posted quite regularly with all posts being about upcoming work, availability, releases and mixing based tips. Due to this, we will market ourselves with similar sort of social media content.
In conclusion, our strategy will be social marketing based with no form of SEO or paid for ads due to the fact that we will be starting with very little budget. In terms of social media presence, we will be using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with a lot of content being cross platform. We will be posting semi-regularly with posts revolving around what we are doing and open slots. This is due to the fact that a lot of other esteemed production houses run there social media platforms in a similar manner. In terms of contact details, we will place an email address within the home page for general inquiries and a phone number within the contact us page for immediate inquiries. This is done to push a lot of potential projects to our email address but also while taking into consideration immediate inquiries.