How to Build a Film Marketing Plan Around Your Audience

Marketing can look like a job for after the edit, once there is a film to show. Leave it that late and four chances have passed.

• The Application

  Some funders want to see how a film will reach people before they invest. Manitoba Film & Music, which invests in features by producers in the Canadian province, requires a detailed marketing and distribution plan with every application to its production fund, alongside the final screenplay, the budget and the schedule (Manitoba Film & Music checklist (opens in a new tab)). It assesses that plan partly on its "clarity in identifying target markets and pathways to audience engagement" (Manitoba Film & Music guidelines (opens in a new tab)).

• The Set

  Some material can only be made while the cameras roll: stills of scenes as they are played, footage of the cast at work. Once the set is struck, the chance is gone. Funders may ask for stills: one delivery list from the Danish Film Institute, for features it supports, requires a main still and six to eight more, with the photographer credited in each file name, and the institute's third installment is paid only once the delivery that includes them is approved (Danish Film Institute (opens in a new tab)).

• The Budget

  That material needs a line in the production budget, because marketing money that comes later may not cover it. The New Zealand Film Commission's Marketing Materials Grant, for films it has supported that have New Zealand distribution or a festival's invitation or formal interest, pays toward a trailer, a poster and a title treatment, but not toward promotional photography, behind-the-scenes content or costs already incurred (New Zealand Film Commission (opens in a new tab)).

• The Time

  People, clubs and venues need time to hear about a film, make room for it and pass the word on. A plan started in development has the whole production for that.

A film marketing plan template gives you headings. The plan is what you write under them, and it works when every part comes from the same audience. It holds eight things:

• The audience, from your business plan: the core audience you reach first, the wider audience that may follow, and the people in between, such as programmers and sales agents.

• The relationship: what you ask of each group as the film takes shape, from following the production to bringing friends to a screening, and why saying yes is worth it.

• The places where your audience hears about films like yours, and where it will be able to see this one.

• The timeline, worked back from the first public screenings: what the set must capture, what must be ready for the festivals, and what the people in between need before they decide.

• The material: stills, set footage, the trailer, the poster, a press kit, the music and anything your audience can pass on, each with an owner and a date, all making the same promise about the film.

• The partners: groups, associations, venues and media that already reach your audience, each with a reason to pass the news on.

• The team: who does what from the shoot to the release, and what you hand over when a distributor comes on board.

• The signs that will show whether the plan works, chosen before you start, and what you will change if they do not appear.

The Content Model Canvas (the Canvas) sets out a film's business plan in nine blocks on a single page. Three of them already hold the outline of a marketing plan:

• Audience / Client names the people who will watch the film and the people who carry it to them.

• Customer Relationships says how you will find them and stay in touch, before the film reaches them and after.

• Channels says how word of the film, and then the film itself, will get to them.

Together they give the plan its spine: who to talk to, what to ask of them, where to send them. Everything else serves those answers. Which routes the film takes to its viewers is for your distribution plan to decide. The marketing plan makes sure that, wherever the film plays, the people it is for know about it and turn up.

That makes the audience the starting point, and a vague one weakens everything after it: you cannot pick partners or places for "everyone." If your Audience / Client block is not settled yet, start with how to define the target audience for your film, then come back to the marketing.

It works the other way too. If your audience costs more to reach than the film can afford, the fix lies upstream, in the business plan: a narrower audience, another way to reach it, or a smaller budget.

Night Shift Chorus, an independent comedy-drama, follows a city hospital's night staff as they form a choir to save their ward from closure. Its producer, still working on the finance plan, knows who it is for: amateur choir singers and the friends and relatives who fill their concerts first, then hospital workers and fans of feel-good stories about ordinary lives, once reviews and the choirs' enthusiasm reach them.

That audience has already shaped her choices: money for music rather than a famous lead, festivals where audiences vote and buy tickets, event screenings opened by a local choir, a singalong version that choirs can book, and choirs recording the closing song during the shoot to give the film its first social posts. Her marketing plan turns those choices into tasks:

• The relationship asks a choir for more than a follow. A choir that signs up gets the composer's arrangement of the closing song, sends back its own recording and is thanked by name in the end credits. Those willing to host a screening become the list the release is built on.

• The partners start with an association of amateur choirs, which passes the call to its members in return for an early screening.

• The material has its own budget line: a stills photographer for every singing scene and a camera at the cast's rehearsals with their vocal coach. A short reel of choirs singing the closing song goes to sales agents and festival programmers, and the press kit opens with the choirs, not the cast.

• The timeline starts before the cameras roll, so that recordings arrive during the shoot. At each festival, the team signs up the town's choirs as future hosts. Nothing is spent on the wider audience until the film has played to the choirs.

• The team is small: the producer leads, and a freelance coordinator looks after the choirs from the first call to the last screening. A distributor that signs starts from her list, her partners and her material.

• The signs she watches for are choirs signing up unprompted, conductors passing the call on, and festival audiences asking where to see the film again. If the choirs stay quiet, she will know long before the release, in time to change the call or rethink the audience.

Every item depends on timing. Written after the shoot, the plan would have no stills of the singing, no footage of the rehearsals and no choirs who have followed the film since the first day.

A marketing plan can only be as clear as the business plan behind it. When the audience, the relationship and the channels are settled, the marketing comes down to tasks, dates and names.

You do not need a separate film marketing plan template to begin. The free one-page film business plan template puts the three blocks the plan draws on next to the six others, so you can check that reaching your audience fits what the film costs and earns. When you want help filling in all nine for your own film, the Canvas and its online tutorial take you through them one block at a time, saving your canvas as you go.