Knowing this, I now have a new segment for you:  Building an Audience for Your Documentary Film – A Journey of the Marketing Behind Los Sotoleros.

In this bi-weekly (or maybe monthly, depending on when we’re in production) email series, I will walk you through what I’m doing to promote, market and build an audience for my upcoming film, Los Sotoleros.

I’ll detail all the steps I’m taking, what I’ve found that works, what hasn’t, and more.

One of the best ways to learn is to watch someone do it in real-time, so here’s your opportunity.

This series will only be for email subscribers (other than a few select public posts), so if you want to stay current on what I’m doing, join the email list here.  If you know anyone who is interested, please forward this article to them!

This is also the only time this content will be free. Following my journey, I’ll likely package up what I’ve learned into either an e-book or course, so be sure to follow me live now!

And if there’s anything you want to see from this series, please let me know!

Before I started marketing my film and building the audience, I needed to develop a plan and strategy.

This document outlines our goals, action items, and strategies for reaching them.

It’s divided into four parts: the executive summary, Target Audience, Brand and Positioning, and Strategy.

Normally (and in the template below) you’d also include a timeline and budget section. But as this is internal use only (and for your viewing pleasure too) and it’s a simplified version, I left that section out.  I have my content calendar and deadlines hosted in another platform (Clickup) so I can always refer to it there.  I would also make the document look much nicer too if it was for a client!

The strategy I have created so far only outlines the portion of the film through preproduction and production. Once we finish production, I will review our marketing performance and make changes as needed to our marketing through postproduction and release.

Usually, you would write this part last. However, as this current document is an update of my previous strategy document, which I created last year, I could simply update the parts that I know.

The Executive Summary provides a high-level overview of the film, the goals, and how you will achieve them. Someone should be able to look at this summary (an investor, perhaps?) and understand what you hope to achieve and how you will achieve it without going into the nitty-gritty.

I set my goals modestly to start, considering our resources are very small at this point. However, I still find having a target to achieve very helpful.  I could set process-based goals, such as a certain amount of posts/week, however I prefer outcome-based goals for this.  I think there’s a really good opportunity to far exceed these goals if we execute our strategy well, but only time will tell.

We’re starting with a Social Media Audience of 160 on Facebook and 59 on Instagram, so I don’t think it will be too much of a jump to get to over 350 people in 1.5 months with the strategy and tactics we have in mind.

Now, we’ll definitely need a larger audience than what I have listed here to have a successful crowdfunding campaign.  However, I anticipate raising a good portion of the funds through my close friends and family, which is not accounted for here as many of them are not on social media.

In this section, I outline who I think the audience for this film is that I’m hoping to attract with my marketing efforts.  This is a simplified, consumer-based audience and includes no institutional (educational, nonprofit, government) organizations.

As you can see in the screenshot below, for each of my audience segments, I outlined some relevant information:

1. Age
2. Location
3. Socio-economic Status
4. Education
5. Gender
6. Interests and Activities

I could take this one step further and create an audience persona for each segment, but I’ll leave it at this for now.

In this section, I outline what makes my film unique, the style of messaging I plan on using, the visual identity of the marketing material (colours, fonts, etc.), and our film’s logo.

This helps keep everyone who will work on the project at some point (producers, marketing coordinators, interns, etc.) on the same page regarding the style of the film. Ideally, your marketing tone, voice, and messaging should be reflected in the film itself.

Now we get into the nitty-gritty.  The strategy section outlines how we will achieve our goals.

We will use a traditional three-stage funnel for our campaign, with our audience moving through the Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion Stages. The funnel is also broken down into three time periods—before, During, and After the Crowdfunding Campaign—as our strategy and tactics will change as we move through the campaign.

PAID MEDIA STRATEGY

I plan on using paid social media at a very, very small level to help grow our audience faster and easier than organic alone.

As this article is high-level, I won’t dive into the specifics of my paid strategy right now. If you’re interested in learning more about my paid media plan, let me know, and I can write an article about it!

ORGANIC MEDIA STRATEGY

I’m separating our organic social media strategy from our owned media strategy as I don’t really believe that you “own” your social media following—it’s under the control of our evil tech overlords and their algorithms . But because that’s where the audience is right now, we have to use it.

I’ve outlined an organic posting strategy across our social media platforms on Facebook and Instagram, including the number of posts per week, post mix, call-to-actions, and what we’ll be sharing in our stories. Further down, I’ve broken down the specific types of posts we can use. I used ChatGPT to develop this list, which helped me come up with many more ideas than I could do by myself!

I’ll then take these ideas, get specific on them, and break them down into a content calendar to schedule them in my Facebook Business Account.

We’ll also share our content in Facebook groups related to our film and engage with posts in those groups. The point is not just to promote our film but to engage and listen to our potential audience.

EARNED MEDIA STRATEGY

Earned media is media that is created, posted or shared by a third party, including newspapers, blogs, podcasts, publications and the like.  This won’t always be positive (as in the case of some film reviews), but you hope that it is. And then again, there’s the saying that any publicity is good publicity!

We plan on creating an Electronic Press Kit to send to publications in the spirits, cocktails, Mexican culture, and travel industry. The kit will outline potential talking points for an article or post and let the publication know I’m available for an interview about the film.

We also have a list of local influencers here in Chihuahua to reach out to for a potential collaboration. We plan to offer them 5%-10% (affiliate marketing) of whatever revenue they bring in during our crowdfunding campaign as an incentive. Some will take us up on it, some won’t, but we’ll see how it goes.

OWNED MEDIA STRATEGY

Our owned media will be the email list that I run. To start,  I plan on publishing it bi-weekly and seeing how it goes.

In the newsletter, I plan on publishing more detailed posts, breakdowns, and other special bonuses than what we post on social media. I will also write a filmmaker’s journal that outlines my creative process for the film, posts about our filming days, and thoughts and other ideas that pop into my head during production.

As I’m not planning on including too many interviews in the film itself, relying more on verité scenes, I will use the interviews I conduct for marketing. I’ll use extended interviews with producers as an incentive/bonus material for people to sign up for the email list.

I’ll also use potential scenes I’ve already cut to incentivize people to join the email list.

Why start an email list?

Most importantly, because you own it and are not restricted by algorithms, it also guarantees you’ll reach the people who have signed up.

This is just the start of our marketing plan, and it will continue to evolve as we progress through making our film.  I anticipate our marketing will slow down during postproduction as we focus on raising the funds to complete the film, apply to labs and markets, and work on editing, and then pick back up again as we go into our film release/distribution phase.

This is a lot of work and requires extensive organization to keep everything on track.  It’s nearly impossible for just one person to do alongside making a film, so make sure you build a team to help you execute your plan.

If you want a template to complete your marketing plan, download one here!