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.
