THINK

Movie marketing is big business, and the new Godzilla movie is no exception. Businesses are more and more engaging in online marketing campaigns to help rank their web content. These businesses could learn from understanding how these big movie marketing campaigns work. Here we’ll lay out some of the key components to big movie marketing campaigns.

Key Elements to Movie Marketing

Some of the key elements to these marketing campaigns center around developing mystery. For example, to promote the new Godzilla movie the campaign marketers have introduced a mysterious company called M.U.T.O.

Recently the Pacific Rim movie used a similar technique promoting a narrative about a company called P.P.D.C., complete with memes, fake news footage and a website dedicated to the fake company. Here we see several different types of content all pointing back to the movie.

Obviously these movies have giant marketing budgets, but some of the principles they are employing translates well to small businesses. The idea being to create multiple pieces of content all pointing back to a single marketing effort. There are many tools available to generate content quickly.

Content Marketing Sales Funnel

Mark Schaefer recently produced a series of content on how to create content. His slideshare, 6 Ways to Create Great Content in 15 Minutes a Day, is a great example of what marketers can do to create content pieces which help gather people to a marketing goal. Not only does it outline how to generate content, but he also shows you how his marketing works along the way.

Basically Mark’s strategy is to produce several pieces of content that all direct people back to his website. Slideshare is one way this can be done, with over 60 million visitors a month and growing. Not only does Slideshare have a lot of eyeballs browsing the site monthly, its content is highly indexed in search engines like Google.

Movies use a series of trailers and video releases leading up to the actual movie release date to build momentum, and maintain audience awareness. For example, Legendary Pictures has released several trailers for the upcoming Godzilla movie. You can watch the latest trailer below.

Using Google Plus Hangouts for Business

This example can be easily adapted to the small business using Google+ Hangouts. A Hangout is essentially a TV station available to small businesses using Google Plus. These Hangout events are broadcast live, which is great for building social signals, and are actually recorded to a connected YouTube channel upon completion.

An Online marketing campaign can take advantage of Hangouts by hosting a series of them leading up to an optimized landing page with a specific call to action. This creates what is called an Online marketing sales funnel. Along the way you’ll have people interested in what you’re doing, and by the time the campaign is wrapped up you have video content. This video content can then be spun into articles, blog posts, slideshares, blog comments, social shares etc.

Online marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. Keeping the above key elements in mind, throughout a new campaign, will help increase your business’s return on investment (ROI). Not only will your ROI increase, but the effectiveness of your campaigns will grow, while the time needed to properly manage the campaign will decrease.