brand marketing blog

Guest post by Maria Carlton
www.mariacarlton.com

You can learn a lot from the movies. I don’t just mean that some are full of educational material about history or world events, I’m talking about how they are marketed.

Let’s say a new Peter Jackson movie is being released next month. First you’ll have heard about it being signed up, then there’ll be a buzz in the media about who’s been picked to play the lead roles, then we hear about a few wee scandals - cast members divorcing, hooking up, falling over in the street - another buzz on the entertainment news that filming has wrapped up and now it’s being edited, and before long we’ll start to see previews of it – several months ahead of release.

Finally, as the long awaited movie nears its red carpet moments there will be interviews of the cast, news about the cast members divorcing, hooking up, falling over in the street (again), and then the big day arrives, the reviews are written up in the papers and tweeted all over the internet, and we all trot along to see for ourselves what the reviewers were on about.

That’s quite a lead up isn’t it! Well, marketing can – and should – be like that.

Never should it be just a matter of throwing a few adverts together, there has to be a strategy. A plan for which media you’ll use; what people are saying about it, how to turn the media on to the product, and client reviews. You need to know in advance exactly what the reviews will hint at to pique the market’s interest, and what the early adopters will do once they’ve had a good look at it.

This planning also has to include an online strategy. Because your target market is most likely to be a combination of audial, visual, and kinaesthetic people who need to hear, see and experience what you are promoting. For the best interactive experience, that means becoming involved in the marketing via internet and/or text messaging. When people have to do something to get excited about a new release and they flock to their phones and laptops to take part in a competition or review process, this leads to a feeling of ownership in the campaign that radio, tv and print media can’t compete with.

So, you may be launching a new seminar or training programme. You’d start with identifying your best target market of course, and finding that this is 25-45 year old office workers, start talking about the uniqueness of the programme in a couple of trade or business journals, interview the presenter(s), and get their tribes talking about it. Have that interview broadcast via viral marketing to get as many people as possible aware of the programme’s pending release. Then you’d create a Facebook page with regularly updated information about the pending release, links to other relative programmes and ‘build a case’ for the new one via blogs and podcasts.

Once you’ve got a bit of a hum starting up this way, you build on it and tweet out a ‘countdown’ to release day, and combine that with an online competition. By the time release day comes, you have people wanting to know more about the programme, the people involved, comparisons to the competitive programmes on the market, and starting to write their own reviews – good ones – that are tweeted out further and further. Combine this with posters in relevant places and reviews in magazines, and you can potentially keep the buzz going for quite some time.

You can do this with any product, any service, any time. You just have to plan to be omnipresent where your target market are wandering about. It’s a matter of hitting every wall, talking in every corner and spreading the word in as many places as you can and sustaining that activity for as long as you can. The best part is that some of your online marketing can be done at a very low or even no cost rate – and it’s well worth considering what you’ll save by using Facebook and Twitter and investing in a good online marketing strategist to really give your campaign a turbo boost.

The way marketing is done is changing and improving – and working with people who know how the mix works well together is increasingly important for achieving maximum results within any budget. I don’t believe that Peter Jackson would overlook the importance of getting the mix right for one of his movies – do you?