Google AdWords Campaign for East Lansing Film Festival

Client: East Lansing Film Festival, Susan W. Woods, Director, woods@elff.com, 517-333-3333

Project: Google AdWords campaign for the East Lansing Film Festival

Prepared By: Bethany Balks, bethanybalks@gmail.com, 517-555-5555

Overview: Upon being asked to recommend a strategy for promoting the East Lansing Film Festival, our recommendation is to launch a Google AdWords online advertising campaign. Online advertising is typically much cheaper than traditional advertising, as you can reach a large amount of people with a potentially far reach without an expensive print-focused campaign. AdWords is a type of search engine marketing that allows potential customers to discover your ads and websites when they search for your chosen key words or phrases. This means that your potential customer should already be interested in independent films or film festivals if they are searching for those key phrases, and thus, they are more likely to visit your website or participate in the festival. The best part is you only pay for the ads when someone clicks on your ad. This is known as a Cost Per Click (CPC) model. Also keep in mind that you can do regional targeting so you’re not paying for clicks from too far outside of your targeted area.

As we see it, you have two target audiences: filmmakers and festival attendees. We recommend that you run two types of ad campaigns taking each demographic to different parts of your website, or a different landing page.

Filmmaker Demographics: MSU and LCC students in the theater, telecommunication, English or film majors who want to enter a film.

Festival Attendee Demographics: Adults in the Greater Lansing area and potentially the Midwest interested in local films, independent films, film festivals or local events.

Filmmaker Keywords:  Student film contest, film festival entries, Lansing film contest, Lansing filmmaking, film contest submission, film competition

Festival Attendee Keywords: Independent films, East Lansing films, film festival movies, Lansing film festival, film festival 2011, film festival tickets, East Lansing festival, documentary festival

Filmmaker Sample Ad:

Michigan Film Contest
Cash prizes in over 7 categories!
Entry deadline July 1.
elff.com/festival/call-for-entries

Festival Attendee Sample Ad:

Free E.L. Film Festival
9 days and more than 100 films
in 6 Lansing venues, for free!
www.elff.com

Measuring Campaign Effectiveness: The best way to measure the campaign’s effectiveness would be to track the number of website hits before and after the Google AdWords campaign. The best way to do this would be through Google Analytics. This will tell you not only the number of clicks, but also which websites referred the visitors to your site. If you use landing pages, you can see which pages were most efficient. To see the effectiveness of an ad, you can see your click-through rate results. It is recommended that you two ads for a week and see which one is most effective, then eliminate the least effective.