Intro
We’ve recently partnered with Feed. They’re an awesome new tool that anyone can use to boost their digital marketing efforts for pretty much any creative project.
It’s a no brainer that digital marketing (think Facebook, Instagram, blogs) is an essential component to your promotional arsenal, but what many are starting to learn is that to do it right, you often need to be spending as much time on the marketing side as you do on the creative side. This is due to the nature of digital marketing being rapidly consumed, which means you need to be reaching out to more people more often. However, knowing who to reach out to, how to do it and when is an art in itself. Something that requires an entire department of people in most companies. So what chance do you have?
Well, a pretty good one if Feed has anything to do about it. They intelligently automate much of your digital marketing efforts, to minimise time spent worrying about marketing “content creation” and give you more time to spend on “creative creation”. In this blog, we’re going to go into a bit more depth on what Feed is, why it should be your newest marketing weapon, and how you can start using it right now (including a secret early access code at the end!).
What is Feed?
Feed is an automated digital advertising service that both discovers new audiences and intelligently engages with your current audience, building those relationships with selective exposure to your most engaging content. In essence, it helps you build a fanbase, which is what you need to make a living off your creative work.
The reason we’re so excited to share them with you is that they are made for you: their tools are designed for people who are focused on creating, who aren’t necessarily professional marketers, people who have smaller budgets and even smaller amounts of free time to spend on marketing.
With Feed, you simply sign-up, connect your Facebook and Instagram profiles, set a budget, and then just let it run in the background. As it’s connected to your social profiles it uses content that you’ve already created. This means it can work for any creative project: from promoting your latest film release on Instagram to creating buzz around an upcoming music tour. So let’s dive a bit deeper into what that might look like...
Why use Feed?
Money, money, money
There’s a big white elephant in the room and it has a large green pound sign stamped into it. Social media is the world’s free marketing tool and with that level of overcrowding you often have to spend money to cut through the noise. However, unlike a lot of paid marketing, you don’t need a huge wad of cash to get things going on Feed.
They actually suggest spending little and often. So we’re not talking £1000 to get your ad on some website banner for a month. You can start with as little as £3 a day. Think of it as buying an extra coffee a day, and that’s not even a flat white with oat milk.
Of course, you can ramp up the spend if you want, but Feed was designed for long-term growth over a period of months, not just days or weeks. Having a longer term approach gives you time to experiment and hone into what content your audience really wants to see from you. In real world terms, this means when you’ve got your next film release or there’s a project you want people to see, you’ll know exactly what type of content to create in order to direct people towards it: to get them to click this link and watch a video, or go to a Kickstarter or Patreon page and pledge.
All about the data
One of the key strengths for you is how Feed can take pretty complex data and break it down into easily digestible information for you at each stage of your marketing efforts. For example, you could have a short trailer of your latest film on your profile, and also another video of you talking about making the film. Feed will then take these two videos and essentially compete them against each other: seeing which video performs better.
You would then easily be able to see this comparison, with simple data on things like reach, engagement and click-throughs (with an explanation on what those terms mean), showing the comparison at each step along the way. This would, in turn, clearly demonstrate to you what to make more of in the future.
While Feed focusses your marketing efforts on Facebook and Instagram, you can also connect your Twitter, Youtube, Spotify and Soundcloud profiles (if you have them) to be able to see the growth stats for those platforms too, giving you a wider picture for your overall strategy.
Funnel Focus
In case you haven’t guessed already, Feed is all about marketing. And in marketing, your “customer funnel” is your guide on the how, when and the why your “customers” or fans engage with you.
As the name suggests, a “customer funnel” should selectively pick people from the big wide world and funnel those who would be interested in you in your work on a journey towards completing an action, such as buying a ticket or signing-up to mailing list.
This can get very complicated, especially if you’re starting from scratch. However, Feed automatically sets this up for you. It then strategically shows engaging content to the relevant audience members to maximise the chances of them taking an action (e.g. clicking on a link to your website).
Feed can also guide you through some simple steps to set-up “lookalike” audiences, which are people who don’t know you yet but are similar to people already engaging with your social media accounts. This means you can reach new audiences that are really likely to be interested in what you’re doing. Of course, once you’ve created your lookalike audience, you don’t actually need to worry about anything else as Feed takes care of the rest.
Struggling for content ideas? Here's a few examples of filmmakers using Instagram to its full potential...
1. Behind The Scenes Gram - @behindthescenesgram: some really cool ideas for you to make into your own.
2. Peter Mckinnon - @petermckinnonIndie: a great example of a indie filmmaker sharing his journey.
3. Objekt Films - @objektfilms: a small production company making big waves in the industry.
4. Indie Filmmakers - @indiefilmmakers: loads more incredible film content to take inspiration from.
Things you need to consider before using Feed.
Feed runs off the content you create, so first up, you need to have at least an active Facebook Page. If you have Instagram as well, your Facebook Page should be connected to your Instagram creator or business account. You don’t necessarily need to be posting 3 times a day, or even 3 times a week, but having enough variety for Feed to test and experiment with is going to make it work much more effectively for you. You can also choose to promote older posts, which helps alleviate the pressure to post too frequently.
Once you have those foundations in place, you will want to have some idea of why you want to use Feed! Thinking about what your objectives are will help inform how you use it and what data you pay attention to. They could be as simple as, “get 300 visitors to my website a month”, or “get 1000 Instagram followers by June”. Having clear goals like this helps inform you if you’re on the right track. If you’re not, you can then assess the data to see how best to change things.
Finally, putting money towards marketing is still an, albeit small, investment, so you want to make sure you are clear as to why you are investing. The beauty of Feed is that once you’re clear on the why, it takes care of the ‘how’.
Try Feed Now
Feed is currently closed to new users as they're still in their Beta stage. However, as part of our community (and for getting to the bottom of this blog!), you can get early access by clicking here to sign-up now.
