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Word-of-Mouth and Social Media Marketing Success Story
by Tom Wozniak, Marketing Director
It's
always interesting to watch a marketer think outside the box,
utilize non-traditional methods and hit a marketing grand slam.
It can be a great motivator for marketers as they see someone else
take a chance and achieve some serious success. While it isn't in
the affiliate marketing space, a recent marketing campaign for a new
Hollywood movie is the latest example of someone turning the
tried-and-true marketing establishment on its ear.
If you
happened to catch the entertainment and movie news from the weekend,
you may have noticed that a movie called Paranormal Activity was #1
at the box office. The movie stands out from normal Hollywood
fare for a number of reasons. Number one - it was made by a
virtually unknown director for approximately $11,000. A large
studio bought the movie, with possible plans to re-shoot the story
with some big name actors and a big budget. Those plans were
changed and the film was released with a few minor tweaks. The
studio provided a truly minimal promotion budget, forcing the
movie's marketing team to come up with some innovative ways to get
the movie in front of a small, but potentially vocal target audience
and then encourage them to recommend the movie to their friends.
The
movie was initially given limited screenings in a few college towns
and promoted somewhat like The Blair Witch Project, in that it could
be seen as a "true" story, rather than a Hollywood blockbuster.
Audiences reacted exactly as hoped and told their friends about the
film. The marketing team then utilized social media to let the
audience mobilize and begin demanding that the movie be released in
their towns. The rest is movie marketing history in the
making, as the film has earned over $62 million since its initial
limited release.
Obviously, the clever marketing wouldn't have done much good, if the
movie hadn't resonated with audiences. But, it still stands
out as an unbelievably successful use of so-called "non-traditional"
media to connect with an audience in ways that most movies never
aspire to.
As
affiliate marketers, we aren't generally involved in movie marketing
(although I can certainly see performance-based marketing playing a
role in online ticket sales) but, that doesn't mean there aren't
some great lessons to be learned from this campaign. The
beauty of this type of word-of-mouth and social media marketing is that if it is
done well, the audiences does most of the heavy lifting. The
marketer's main goal is to do their best to support and facilitate
the group, as it caries out the majority of the actual promotion.
Think
about ways that you can leverage social media or other innovative
methods to drive traffic to your websites and offers.
Not every outside the box idea will end up being a success, but you
just might hit on one that will help you rise above the competition.
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