The East Lansing Film Festival AdWords Strategy

ELFF logoTo the East Lansing Film Festival,

As the largest film festival in the state of Michigan, it is important to reach your target audience so that you can not only fill seats, but also to raise funding for your non-profit organization. In order to raise both awareness and attendance of the festival, I am suggesting a cost effective advertising solution utilizing Google AdWords

Goals:

The goals of this campaign are: 1.) To promote the East Lansing Film Festival and Film Series through raising brand awareness, 2.) To find donors/supporters/advertisers, 3.) To provide information/education about films, and 4.) Increase ticket sales, and to attract filmmakers - especially in the Great Lakes region. Utilizing AdWords you will be able to gather information about the people who visit your site, and can target landing pages according to their interests.

Key Benefits:

There are many benefits to advertising online, especially for non-profit organizations such as yours. Your advertising dollars can be tightly controlled, monitored, and altered to best fit your needs. AdWords provides highly detailed metrics for evaluating the success of your ad campaigns. If used properly, AdWords should help to increase audience awareness, boost ticket sales, and increase the traffic to your website. AdWords is based upon a Cost Per Click (CPC) model, so your organization would only be charged when someone clicks on the ELFF advertisement. Additionally, you can test market different two different ads, and Google will automatically use the more effective one. 

Further, you can direct each target audience to a particular landing page. For example, if a filmmaker is the target, you could guide him or her to the "Call for Entries" landing page. If you are looking for donors, you would direct them to the "Support Us" landing page, and festival attendees would be directed to the "Box Office" landing page. Although people from all over the country and the state attend the ELFF, you can also target hometown audiences by local search. This feature would be especially helpful for attracting MSU students. 

Targeting Options:

The East Lansing Film Festival has a wide demographic audience, and has the advantage of drawing middle and upper class attendees. This fact can be leveraged not only for ticket sales, but also to attract donors and advertisers to help support your programs. Additionally, the student body at Michigan State University is a key audience not only for the film festival itself, but also for the ongoing film series. Google AdWords can create targeted ads for each of your targeted audiences. My suggestions for targets include: donors, filmmakers, students, festival attendees, and film series attendees.

Keywords:

Another great feature of AdWords is the keyword tool. This tool allows the marketer to search for popular keyword terms, and use them to help create ads. Keywords I would suggest for the East Lansing Film Festival include:

'East Lansing Film Festival',' ELFF', 'EL Film Festival', 'Michigan Film Festivals', 'Student Film Festival', 'Independent Films Michigan', 'Foreign Films Michigan', 'East Lansing film series', 'East Lansing Film Society', '48/5', 'ELFF sponsorship', and 'documentary films Michigan'. Based upon the targeted keywords ELFF can reach a specific audience with targeted ads. Here is an example of a keyword search:

ELFF Keyword Search

This image demonstrates the competition for certain keywords, and global/local monthly search numbers. "Film Festival/(s)", for example, has a lot of monthly searches, but may not be specific enough for the ELFF audience and faces stiff competition. "Student film festivals", "independent film festivals"  and "documentary film festivals" are a good bet for finding your organization - in addition to your name and the ELFF abbreviation. AdWord also allows for keyword suppression as well as commonly misspelled words. It may be wise to use "independant" as an alternative spelling in the keyword list.

Since the ELFF is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization, I realize that funds allocated for advertising may be limited. You may be eligible for in-kind advertising through Google Grants for non-profits. Either way, Google AdWords is a cost-effective way to reach targeted audiences based upon what the organization would like to pay per click. This is a sample of the traffic estimator, based upon a CPC of $0.10 and a daily maximum of $10.00:

Keyword Traffic Estimator

Sample Ad Copy:

It is my suggestion to target ads towards students, filmmakers, and film fans. Here is some sample ad copy based on each group:

E.L. Film Festival -or- Film Festival in E.L.

Largest in Michigan- Nov. 9-17, '11 Special Student Ticket Pricing!

Special Student Ticket Prices! Independent, Foreign, Documentary

www.elff.com/festival www.elff.com/festival

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E.L. Film Fest Entries -or- E. Lansing Film Festival

$7000 Cash Award for Filmmakers Call for Independent Film Entries

Lake Michigan Film Competition $7000 Cash Prize Competition

elff.com/festival/call-for-entries  elff.com/festival/call-for-entries

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Calling All Film Buffs: -or- Love Independent Films?

East Lansing Film Festival Nov 9-17 Largest Film Fest in MI, Nov. 9-17

Independent, Foreign, Documentary Box Office Tickets Now Available

elff.com/festival/box-office elff.com/festival/box-office

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Measuring Campaign Effectiveness:

AdWords makes it easy for you to measure and track results. Not only are several features free, but with sign-up comes a wealth of helpful options for every step along the way. Since ELFF is a non-profit, you may qualify for free or discounted rates, and even grants from Google. AdWords will give you tools to track trends, feature your ad based upon local search, and can be set up quickly. Reports can be generated to show what you get for the money, and even better, you only pay when people click on the advertisement! Their marketing management system will allow you to track the number of visits to your site, the cost per visitor, where your ads are displayed, as well as the cost per campaign. Google AdWords gives you the flexibility to change your ads at any time, making it easy for you to run the most effective campaign possible and measure your results with ease.

I truly believe that an AdWords campaign would be beneficial for you organization, and it would be my pleasure to help you implement this plan. 

Sincerely,

Tara Stewart Kuhnen