For better or worse, the days are long gone when footage companies could build their marketing and communications strategies around a few key tactics like trade publication advertising and direct mail. And now that most marketing takes place online, the list of available marketing options seems to grow all the time.
Should you Tweet more? Host a webinar? Start your own YouTube channel? And what is content marketing, anyway? It can all be quite daunting, particularly for newcomers, and especially since each new tactic seems to demand specialized knowledge and skills.
So, for the purposes of this article, our third in the Getting Into Footage series, we thought it would be most helpful to frame our suggestions in terms of broader marketing objectives, rather than specific tactics, and think of marketing as a flexible set of ideas, practices, projects and campaigns that footage companies can use to build awareness and visibility for their companies and drive incoming business.
We were fortunate to get input from several Footage.net partners, including CNN Collection, Bridgeman Images, INA and Producers Library. So, with all that said, here is our highly subjective view on the basics of formulating a marketing strategy in 2022.
1. Wherever Possible, Be Different, Relevant & Useful
As Jeff Goodman of Producers Library put it, marketing footage is “no different than selling sneakers, you still need to show how you are separate and special compared to your competitor.” In other words, you need to figure out how to differentiate your product and service. How you build, catalog and digitize your footage collection, your approach to online accessibility and ecommerce, and even your offline customer service capabilities are all product development factors, and, as such, each offers opportunities for differentiation. In an ideal world, a footage company would build its product and service from the ground up to meet the needs of a particular market. In reality, this can be difficult, especially when you’re tasked with marketing a more generic collection, a challenge that most footage companies face at some level. “The main challenge is to sell a clip or a footage collection that is not unique on the market,” said Sandrine. “Marketing tools are therefore a great help to highlight this clip/footage collection in order to make it stand out from other competitors.”
2. Make Your Company and Your Collection Easy to Find
Both your company and your footage collection(s) should be as discoverable as possible. Why? Because connecting with potential customers when they are in active search mode and guiding them to footage in your collection that meets their needs is where the rubber hits the road. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to increase the discoverability of both your company and your footage, often at the same time, from PPC campaigns to SEO to YouTube to establishing a presence on our site, Footage.net.
“YouTube has turned out to be an essential marketing channel for our business as far as brand awareness, site traffic and SEO,” said Nia Taylor of CNN. “Our channel also falls under the Turner Content System which allows us to monetize bypassing some of the requirements that might prohibit an otherwise new channel from doing so.”
Our platform, Footage.net, is another time-tested way to reach footage customers when they are in active search mode. “Footage.net continues to be one of our top drivers of traffic to our website,” said Nia Taylor at CNN Collection.
In addition to leveraging online platforms like YouTube and Footage.net to increase your overall discoverability, the easier it is to find a specific clip in your collection, the better. Does this mean that cataloging is a marketing activity? Yes, it absolutely does.
As our partners at Bridgeman Images put it, “footage, in its form as a moving image, is unique because at any given minute, any given second, even any given frame, you can find something historically useful, never before seen or just plain weird and/or interesting. And that inherently amazing aspect of film/video is what leads to one of the biggest challenges in marketing these collections: what makes footage special is what can be seen as a detriment to its success in that it takes a lot of time and patience to discover. And time and patience can be in limited supply in this day and age. By highlighting the right key segments of a piece of footage and using best practices in cataloguing that spans all the potential different subject matters of the entire clip, we can make sure the right people discover all of the hidden parts within the running time. Footage, with its movement and raw stories, presents a plethora of creative, eye-grabbing methods of marketing and with social media video usage on the rise, now is an amazing time to give archival footage collections the boost they need in this digital world. As a leading global supplier of still imagery, Bridgeman Image’s footage collections have this unique opportunity to stand out either on their own or as complementary next to some pretty amazing art and photography collections.”
3. Develop Key Contacts First
Because the footage market is big, fragmented and spread out around the globe, trying to reach the entire population of potential footage customers with your marketing communications is unrealistic. So, at least at the outset, it makes sense to focus your efforts on smaller, more targeted populations. For many footage companies, connecting with professional footage researchers is a smart first step. This can be done through a variety methods and events, including trade shows like Sunnyside, FootageFest and the FOCAL Awards, as well as existing organizations like AMCUP and CLEAR. For Footage.net partners, participation in our monthly newsletter is an effective way to get in front of a highly relevant audience on a regular basis. As Sandrine S. put it, “Footage.net has been working with INA for a long time and allows us to communicate with targeted audiences via its website and newsletters.”
4. Play the Long Game
Embrace the reality that customer development and engagement is a long-term process, not a light switch. Awareness, trust, name recognition and word of mouth all take time to build, and some highly worthwhile efforts take time to get traction and produce results. At Footage.net, for example, our newsletter has become an indispensable communications asset. But it’s taken years to build our subscriber list, and a lot of work each month to produce useful, relevant editions. It’s been worth the effort, though. Now that our newsletter is established, it’s a cost-effective way to deepen our engagement with a growing list of highly relevant contacts and build our brand over time.
5. Avoid Shortcuts
There is often an enormous sense of pressure to produce results quickly. For example, you may be tempted to engage in deep discounting as a “get the business” tactic. And while this can produce some short-term gains, it’s often self-defeating in the longer term. This is not to say that you should be inflexible, but if you’ve made the effort to create a unique, relevant and useful collection and service, and your pricing is fair, deep discounting probably won’t enhance your brand or help you achieve your long-term goals.
6. Wherever Possible, Make Your Marketing Trackable
Most online marketing is trackable, at least at some level, which gives marketers a lot of insight into what is working and what is not. Google Ads is one of the most trackable marketing tactics, and more and more companies are using A/B testing to compare open rates for email campaigns. Most companies analyze incoming traffic to their websites, as well as user behavior on their sites, to fine tune their UX strategy and online communications. “The marketing we are currently deploying at INA is aimed at strengthening our presence in an increasingly competitive footage market,” says Sandrine. “To do this, INA is trying to become more and more data-driven as we constantly strive to improve our customer experience and put our customers at the center of our strategy.”
7. Be Realistic about Social Media
Love it or hate it, social media is a reality for all marketers and footage companies are no exception. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are great for cultivating specific prospects, keeping track of competitors, building in-roads with journalists and distributing communications. That said, maintaining a compelling social media presence can be enormously time consuming and, at least so far, few footage companies appear to be leveraging social media as central component of their marketing strategies. As Nia Taylor of CNN Collection put it, “it’s important to maintain a presence for your audience and share updates, but we haven’t seen much lead gen from it.” And at INA, “we don't take much advantage of mainstream social networks like Facebook or Instagram, and prefer to focus on LinkedIn as it better fits the professional audiences we want to reach,” said Sandrine Saccerre.
8. Mix it Up
It can be very helpful to think of your collection as a set of assets that can be exploited across different channels, platforms and markets, as opposed to a single, unified asset that is available exclusively through one point of sale. For example, there may be some footage in your collection that would do well on a digital media platform, and another subset that could be more effectively marketed by a highly focused representative with an established reputation in that specific footage category. Engaging a representative based abroad to handle international sales is often the best way to grow your business outside of your home market. The point is, you should at least consider leveraging a variety of channels to fully monetize your collection.
9. Avoid Non-Essentials
If you’re going to exhibit at a lot of trade events and you have extra room in your budget, there’s a pretty good argument for producing some kind of swag. A pen, a notebook, or some other small, branded object can be a smart addition to your tradeshow kit, and, if done well, a quality premium can make people smile and add some shine to your brand. But tactics like premiums rarely produce any real return, and should be thought of as a “nice to have” rather than an essential component of your marketing strategy. As Jeff Goodman points out below, it’s hard to know whether even a really clever, well executed premium produces any results.
“We did an amazing desktop calendar shipped to customers locally and abroad,” he said. “Using frames from our 16mm or 35mm film for every month, it really showed the range and quality of our archive. We only got a few ‘well done, love it’ responses plus a lot of return mail ‘not at this address.’ Cloth handbags, pens, coffee mugs all are great fun and serve a marketing function to some degree. But in this day and age digital is king.”
10. Go with Your Strengths
Good marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. In order for your marketing to work, you need to find an approach that suits you and your strengths and that you can sustain over time. There are plenty of worthwhile options, and you cannot possibly do them all, so it’s better to get deeply engaged in a few long-term marketing projects. Maybe you love Instagram and have found a style of posting that your followers respond to. Or maybe you have an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and you’ve figured out how to share that knowledge on Twitter. Or you’ve found that posting funny demo reels on YouTube drives traffic to your company website. The point is, there are a lot of great options, and if you take the view of all of these activities are components of your marketing efforts, it will all start to gel and begin producing results.
