How to further my business.

lordybob

lordybob

Well-known member
I've been working as a freelance camera op and motion graphics artist for a couple of years now under my company. Have Produced one live event for web and loved it! New Zealand based. I have just been accepted as a music video director in a company and can pitch for budges from 5-30k

I have a bit of money now for the company but do not know where to invest it.

Gear
Marketing
....

Not sure how I can pump the business. Does anyone have any good moves?

Regards
I
 
Marketing is so important (I mostly spend my marketing dollars on real estate business, but I think it applies across the board). The trick is not to market, but to brand. Decide if you want to brand yourself, your company or your product (if you have one) and then go forward from there.

For instance, I just picked up a camera a few months ago, but already I've begun the branding process. I had a choice to brand myself (Brian), my company (The Great Independent), or the product (The Overs). Since I'm in the early learning stages of filmmaking, I decided to brand the product as an entity. That way if people eventually start to like the product, great -- if they don't, at least The Great Independent hasn't been negatively affected by it.

When it comes to branding you'll want to focus on two things, an online presence and a geographical presence. So choose one of the big three (YouTube, MySpace, Facebook -- I chose facebook as I think it's the most socially relevant), and move your advertising dollars towards building a fan base.

You can split your dollars between PPC ads and Exposure ads. The PPC ads should be extremely boring and uninviting but should BRAND, BRAND, BRAND. So, for instance, I ran three ads for one week. The PPC ad was just the logo and one of its catch phrases "You are the way the world ends." and I branded it to people who I knew would not ever click on the ad. They would never click on it which means the ad stays up indefinitely (at no cost), and these people are seeing the name of my product again and again and again. This is for long term branding. The Exposure ads, which I don't have to pay for per click, are enticing as all get out, and instead of leading back to the website, they led to the fanpage.

If you don't want to spend the money, you can spend time friending people who are fans of concepts similar to your own and then simply send them a Suggestion to become a fan of your product (or yourself, whatever it is you're branding). That's the way my friend Jess did it for her modeling/photography, and she had like 350 fans in the first couple days.

My webseries started about a month and a half ago and we've got over 260 fans. I think the total spent was something like 20 bucks.

The other stage of branding is about face to face interactions; it's about getting your product (or your company/self) known in a specific metropolis. I live in Chicago, so it's just about putting the posters up, leaving logo business cards with small business owners so that their customers can pick them up when they buy their comics or cds. The important thing about branding is to not SELL anything. You just want people to associate you with a specific idea.

So if you're a chiropractor, you shouldn't be selling your business, you should be branding an idea -- a life without aches and stresses, etc -- and that you are what people should think about when they think about relieving the aches and stresses of life.

Yeah, so this might fall under the TMI tree, but you were talking about allocating advertising dollars and I got all excited. :D

(PS -- Vista Prints is hella cheap and has a good product. If you use them in conjunction with these ideas for your online presence, you might not have to spend very much money at all. In which case the answer to your question would be to spend money on gear, spend time on advertising)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top