Powster Movie Platform Best Practices

Seeding Strategy

There are 4 major phases to theatrical marketing for you to leverage.

1) Pre-awareness
Get your audience visiting the showtimes destination early and get them setting up Calendar reminders or signing up to your email newsletter. This can go live months before tickets are on sale to tease upcoming content and create excitement.

2) Showtimes available
Build hype around the launch of showtimes. Get your audience excited for the day they can buy tickets. Use FOMO (fear of missing out) to eventise the day.

3) Release day
Most tickets are sold on the release day, so count down to this date and heavily seed the showtimes platform on that day. Take advantage of impulse buys where users want to be the first to see the movie.

4) After release
Continue seeding the platform ensuring residual sales. As the movie leaves cinemas start thinking about promoting the Blu-ray / On-Demand. Powster products are available to feature your chosen vendors.

Analytics

To check your platform's analytics, simply log in on insights.powster.com

Please ask for your log in details if you don’t have them! The production team at Powster are able to help you get the most out of the Insights platform so do get in touch if you would like a tutorial!

We’re also happy to provide deeper learnings such as “Which exhibitor had the most interactions?” or “Which On Demand vendor was the most popular?”

Campaign Tags

Measure the performance of your individual activities. Put ?campaign=[ANYTHING HERE] (letters and numbers only, no spaces) at the end of your URL and all traffic going through that link will show separately on your analytics page. You can literally just make up a word, there’s no set up, it’s instant!

For example if you set up a ‘book now’ call to action on a YouTube trailer, put /?campaign=youtube after your direct site link and your Insights page will tell you exactly what users coming through that link did.

There is also a handy campaign tag generator for you to use in your toolkit. You can access your toolkit by simply appending your site URL with /toolkit/.

Set Up Locations

There's 3 important principles in movie marketing, Always show the title treatment, always show the release date, and NOW always show the ticketing call to action. Use this principle across the board.

If it's interactive, include a button, if not include the vanity URL. Here's the recommended setup of any of your platforms:

1) Add a link in the Facebook About section
This is great as it gives the platform an officiality!

2) Include the link in your Facebook posts copy
Massive reach potential each time you post the link.
We see amazing conversion to get tickets from this kind of activity.

3) Add a link in your Twitter and Instagram bios
Another destination users will use to find official source of information about the movie you’re promoting.

4) Include the link in your Tweets
Another brilliant destination to push high levels of traffic to the app.

5) Add a call to action on any other owned websites
If the showtimes platform is not already your official site, we’d recommend making it so to streamline the user journey for all of your movie’s content. This also ensures you only need to use one URL throughout your movie marketing lifecycle.

Add a ‘Get Tickets’ button to your other owned websites to improve SEO through backlinking!

6) Add a call to action on your Apps and Games
Add a get tickets link if you build out any creative destinations or experiences to help push your movie.

This allows you to capitalise on the users you've converted once they’ve played the game or taken part in the experience.

7) Use the vanity URL on your outdoor advertising

  • Maximise the reach of your platform by adding it to traditional media.
  • Creates a powerful, urgent call to action.

8) Loop in social and media agencies

  • Provide your site link to supporting agencies for them to add to your banner ads, social posts and other display destinations.
  • If applicable, we’ll work with your Head Office team so they understand the platform and its potential as well.
  • Loop Powster in with your deployment teams to help get the most reach out of the platform!

Social

Social is key to getting the most out of your platform. Excluding regular posts, Facebook and Twitter have some cool CTA functions, you can add an official ‘BOOK NOW’ button on your videos and posts.

1) Posts
Posting the URL to Facebook or Twitter automatically attaches an awesome CTA card.

Use a new campaign tag for each post for a total breakdown of your campaigns posts.

2) Best practices

  • If you post an image with the showtimes URL, you may be paying for interactions on the photo.
  • You don’t have to attach an image with the URL to the platform, as our team creates a bespoke share image from your key artwork which is attached to the metadata.
  • Simply paste the site link and your image preview will populate!

3) Customisation
You can customise the image the link uses and add a native platform CTA button.

Do this in Facebook’s Power Editor or the Twitter Ad creative.

Paid Media Seeding

Now you have a true way to measure your advertising spend’s effectiveness, to see what’s working, and what isn’t, directly next to how much it cost you!
The team will happily talk through the platform with your media agency to explain all the ins and outs of how to get the most out of tagging.

1) Campaign Tags
You can use campaign tags to track everything, owned, earned and paid.

Add a new one of these to each of your banner ads to see how well it converts users to get tickets.

2) Conversion Pixels

  • Simply send over a conversion pixel (a snippet of code exported from your ad software) and we’ll place it on the page.
  • These can be added to any section of the app, not just landing.
  • When someone presses ‘get tickets’ it will show as a conversion versus your ad.
  • You can also use a ‘conversion pixel’ to see your paid conversion directly in your media platform.

3) Re-target users

  • Add a retargeting pixel to the platform in the same way you would a conversion pixel.
  • Use this to positively retarget users (If they’ve seen the site then to show it to them again later in your campaign).
  • Use this to negatively retarget users (If they’ve seen the site then don’t show it to them again later in your campaign).

© POWSTER 2020