rebranded my url and profile picture at the same time so just want to avoid confusion for anyone. i was the-hammer-and-tongs, i am now unofficialihop. carry on
free use is kind of a funny kink bc it relies on the idea that everybody wants to touch you and have sex with you but what if they don't. what if you tell everybody at the party you're free use but they all ignore you and mind their own business
Outdoor in sun perfec t place for president to do speech! Outdoor very warm very soft put old man on green lawn under sun. Put old man in warm sun. no problem ever in warm sun because good view and audience can see long speech. Nice podium outdoor sunny perfect place for old president can trust warm sun to give nice view to President good luck to President. friend sun.
on my hands and knees begging indie creators of all sorts but especially those who want to make money to learn the basics of how to advertise their creations, or at the very least recognize the value of proper advertising tactics.
no i know capitalism is a hellscape but listen, unless it is bare bones hobby that u barely want to share then it's a product, and u want it to appeal to people,
ok by popular demand, by which ofc i mean one person asked and activated my i love to talk about my interests trap, algie's bare bones marketing 101 (i am not an expert but i do have little a knowledge), and also common pitfalls for the indie creator.
disclaimer: every website about how to market as an indie creator is gonna tell u about using your personal social media to build a personal brand, giving ppl bits of your life to look at, making yourself relatable and appealing so ppl buy your stuff. this is not that. it's an effective marketing strategy for some ppl and up to a point, but i personally hate doing it; it feels to me like making yourself and a parasocial relationship with you into the product, and it is not a method i enjoy. also frankly i like when a product can stand on its own! i know we live in capitalism panopticon hellscape, and making good things is no guarantee of success, but neither is marketing yourself instead of your product. there is no guarantee of success, so like. do what ur comfortable with.
(this also goes for the stuff i say; there is no guarantee of success, just things that have usually worked a little better or a little worse, and so u can do literally whatever. but some knowledge can help.)
anyway.
marketing campaign strategy 101:
step 1: define your target audience.
no i know, but listen. yes big corporations love to use age and gender demographics, but that's not necessarily what i mean; i mean look at your work and think about the kind of person who you think would like it, or who you want to like it.
how u define this is up to you, but think about it for a bit. is it for queer sci fi fans? robot enthusiasts? disillusioned retail workers? furries? obvs a lot of indie creators make things for themselves, so it can help to consider what thoughts and feelings and parts of yourself you were drawing on when u made it, and extrapolate from there. now DON'T just slap that on ur marketing, but get that in your brain.
step 2: find what's marketable.
ask yourself, what parts of your creation will your target audience like? ofc you cannot know for sure, but what do you think they'll like? if youve had a chance to get like beta readers or playtesters or whatever, ask them what they liked. find your big themes and stuff for sure, but also small things. phrase that sticks in the brain. eyecatching picture. tearjerking scene. make a list or a folder or some other way of collecting these things.
step 3: show them off!
now, you can do big informative post of everything at once, but tbh that tends to be an info overload. do absolutely have a big info post somewhere that will tell ppl all about your thing, but that's not your marketing, that's like, the thing u link in ur marketing as 'learn more about this here'.
the more effective strategy is a bunch of different (but, ideally, thematically/tonally similar or linked) bite-sized things. take a look at your list of interesting highlights and make small posts about them, maybe one per post, maybe two or three if they're small and link up well. but bite sized! something ppl will be able to get the gist of, or at least notice the large print on, when scrolling social media. short text posts. youtube shorts sized video. short audio clips. one or two good pictures at a time. a cool reward on ur kickstarter. little things, not too much info all at once. if you want to showcase something larger—an overarching theme, perhaps, or the diversity of your cast, or something—try to display a snapshot or example of it.
u can also do some marketing-specific editing if u feel like it, to make things shorter and/or more dramatic. give a stronger conclusion to ur teaser than the more lingering scene in canon. do a fun bonus bit where the characters talk to the camera, but let them highlight their personalities when doing so. a short behind the scenes of the process. etc etc.
(in a big corporate marketing campaign here we'd be discussing things like print ads, tv spots, radio, etc, but since we're talking indie i am focusing in on mostly social media posts. altho if u are branching out to paying for advertising spots, that would be a more in depth discussion re: is this visible to your target audience? how does the medium used enhance or detract from your message? what can you highlight more in video/print/audio, so what should you focus on for each of those? etc.)
step 3b: call to action
this is important!! make sure every little thing you're posting has one! 'learn more here' or 'find the book here' or 'support our fundraiser here' or whatever. easy in our internet age to link ppl to where to find either your product or the info page about it—somewhere they can get more info, consume ur product, and/or give you money. dont give them like 6 different links in one post, keep it to 1 usually, maybe 2, so they dont have to open a bunch of tabs just to find the main thing. (it is ok to give the same link multiple times in a post, but make the call to action one Very Visible. big font, or different color, or whatever.)
step 4, which tbh is more like 3c but whatever: involve your audience!
in amongst all the teaser posts, include ways for ppl to join in somehow. people love to feel like they're part of something, and this is also a way to like, manufacture word of mouth advertising. oh god this sounds cynical but it WORKS, this is why you get companies going 'post a picture of yourself at our store' or 'use our hashtag' or whatever. ask people to like... idk, post their favorite line from your show, or tell you what song should be on a character's playlist, or take a photo of where they put the pins from your kickstarter reward. it can be silly, and it doesn't hurt to give them a small creative task either; i have seen successful 'create a character using the game's character creation system and share it', as well as 'draw this character in your style', stuff like that. always ask them to tag you or use a trackable hashtag, both so you can see how many and so u can like, reblog or otherwise interact, bcos the creator interacting with posts (at least ones made with the intent for u to see) encourages ppl.
it can help if u have little a prize to offer, but if that's out of budget then literally just making ppl feel special and/or included can do it. why do u think spotify wrapped is all over the place, ppl want to share about themselves and see what other ppl are doing. astrology for nerds always goes over well lbr; 'take this quiz to see which ya dystopia city youd go to' or 'here are the types of people in each ttrpg class, tag yourself' kind of thing. oh GOD i sound cynical but again it fucking works.
also include ur links to ur stuff on these kinds of posts too, bcos what if someone sees it and doesn't know your product? let them click the link to check it out! always always always make it easy for ppl to find your stuff.
step 5: track, analyze, and modify as needed.
this one's hard, and tbh for like a short one-time kickstarter type of thing may not be relevant. but if you want to keep advertising your thing—or multiple different things over time—you wanna learn to do this, at least a little. get a rough idea of how much traction you have before marketing begins if possible—how many hits, how many reblogs and likes and comments and so on, how much audience interaction, which websites get more hits, how many purchases, how well do hashtags do—and then compare as marketing goes on. do you get more when you post some things than others? is there a website where people are more likely to click? are you finding your target audience in the hashtag, or an unexpected one? and if an unexpected one, what do they like and should you increase it?
see what works and do more of it. see what doesn't work and change it. test more. be flexible. dont do drastic flipflopping changes every week or whatever—defs give it time—but if something's just not working even after months and months, don't be afraid to try something new. maybe u need a different tone to your posts. maybe you need a different website. maybe you need a total rebrand!
this kind of analysis and deciding what to change is HARD and as an indie creator you will not be as effective as a professional, but you can still do some.
and that's about the bare basics of a marketing strategy. and now,
common pitfalls and mistakes.
disclaimer again that like. listen sometimes this works for some ppl. maybe your specific thing can and should be marketed in ways that i find all wrong. maybe you get enough sales this way and that's fine. these r my opinions of issues that ive seen make ppl less inclined to go consume a thing or spend money or whatever.
- putting down your own work. don't do this! just don't! like yeah we see it all the time in fanfic summaries and ok tbh ive done it on my own stuff before, it's hard not to, but i have seen on kickstarter promotions the creator going 'this is my first time doing this so it might not be very good, but...' STOP. be proud and confident in your work! even if you're not, act like you are!! otherwise why would anyone else want it?
- focusing on appeal to pity. in the same vein as the last thing. telling people 'woe is me i have no money' can work on like a mutual aid post, but it's not great when you're selling a product. i worked with an organization that did a big charity fundraiser and tried to sell things by going 'we just can't afford our important charitable work... pls help...' which did. not go well. instead, tell people what they'll get by putting money in! sometimes that is just your product obvs, but like, listing off rewards and cool bonuses is better. and if you dont have actual rewards to give, simple phrasing can work wonders. 'we cant afford to do this unless you give us money' sounds pitiable. 'by donating, you'll be helping us achieve this cool thing!' sounds like your audience is part of the creative process, which ppl love to be, and doesn't sound like you're on the verge of having to give up. people also like giving money to things that they feel will succeed.
- not being clear about what the product actually is. i know trope based marketing is in right now but honestly it is not as effective as telling ppl what the damn thing is about. too often ppl will start out with a list of tropes, genres, creator identities, overarching themes like 'capitalism is bad', etc, and neglect to tell the audience any actual plot information. please please please, somewhere near the top of your info post, give a one or two sentence plot summary that tells us about the actual plot. personally i feel a little condescended to when i am told 'this book is gay and hates capitalism so you'll like it'. let me decide what i like. also frankly let me decide the story's themes when i read or watch or whatever, I don't need spoonfeeding. if you did it good your audience will notice; if you did it bad but told them it'd be good, they'll, uh, notice that too.
- keeping too much information secret. again in the vein of previous point, but different bcos this is usually done to 'prevent spoilers' or whatever. im not saying give away all your big plot twists, but honestly i think a lot of creators are afraid they're giving away more plot in teasers than they are. the audience wants to know what they're getting into! give them the basic plot! give them the interesting out of context snippet of future stuff! it's fine! it gets them interested! it makes them want to know more!
- too many comparisons. listen i know we all wanna be the next big successful thing, and namedropping it with like 'my product is like (successful other thing)' seems like an easy way to catch fans. and SOMETIMES this is an appropriate comparison, particularly for like, fan projects that grew into something big, or for adaptations, or for projects where the main thesis is '(other thing) but with Specific Change'. but once you start putting that on your marketing, as a major marketing point, you run the risk of a lot of people looking at your product and going 'hey that actually doesn't have any of what i liked in (successful thing).' your audience will always be comparing, and lbr, the comparison from fans of the first thing is often biased towards the first thing. they may treat yours like a knockoff or wannabe. they may give it a shot and lose interest quickly.
(like... do list your inspirations somewhere in your creation itself obviously, we gotta give credit. but don't make 'just like (thing)' or even 'like (thing) but better' a main marketing point unless you are REALLY SURE people will not be extra disappointed that it's not like what THEY liked about the first thing. it's ok to market your creation on its own merits.)
- not making enough posts. look just...... u wanna make your marketing visible, ok? more posts is better. post all the time. even if u think it's annoying, keep on postin. reblog old posts occasionally, and certainly if ur interacting with ppl who've interacted with your posts, but tbh new posts, with new bits of content, with tags on for ppl to find, circulating? you want to be showing people so many things!
.......there may be other things but this is all i managed to think of while i wrote this at work, so. here's the thing. pls forgive any typos as i wrote this on my phone at work and dont particularly feel like doing a proofreading of my big ol ramble rn lol.
slept on it and remembered to clarify that step 4, the audience interaction one, need not be done as often as regular ad posts. i mean it can but u can also save it for special events or whatever if a lot of that is too much to deal with. it's a very useful tool tho so like, i do encourage using it, yk?
also u can do audience interaction in a variety of ways, even without ever making a social media post about it yourself if u rly want to; eg the adventure zone's 'post in our hashtag and you may win your name in our show' bit. honestly what an excellent marketing tactic that one was.
this is going around again and i'm bored at home since now i'm (musical cue) ~unemployyyyed~
so for funsies im gonna ramble on abt marketing some more
this is not so much like, next steps to take after u've mastered 101 (u have never mastered 101. that's the fucking trick u gotta keep analyzing and adjusting. forever.)
it's more abt like. well ok algie u said this is how to market your indie creative project on social media. but there are other kinds of marketing, right? right?? (yes.) and some of them are too expensive for an indie creator, but some might be affordable to someone who's gotten enough funding to spend a LITTLE on ads. and then again, there's some kinds of advertising even outside of social media that are free.
AND ALSO: there are other kinds of social media management for your creative project besides advertising! this is an important distinction for me algie who is currently job hunting in the uhhhhh entertainment industry which includes the marketing and social media jobs. i want indie folks to understand this distinction. please please please understand this distinction especially when u get to the point of hiring someone to do one or both of these things.
so! here is:
indie marketing 102: the separation of church and state marketing and social media
(and as history has shown, by separation i mean ok yeah they're pretty entwined and often cooperate but actually they do have their own thing to be doing, at least if you're SMART about it)
(listen it sucks when the government does it but this is different. dont get lost in the metaphor.)
disclaimer as before that there is no perfect guaranteed success, one size fits all method to this. there's just Things People (and brands, which are not people) Have Done that work a little better than some other things. and also im not a marketing professional, im just some guy who took some media production classes (including advertising and social media) and got way too into them. and got a degree but that means NOTHING apparently. altho if u would like to help me become a professional hmu i got reasonable rates for indie stuff and even potentially free limited assistance on zero budget passion projects--
anyway.
first up: marketing!
part 1: what the fuck else is there?
this is the easy part that most ppl are at least vaguely aware of: there's advertising EVERYWHERE. to like, an annoying extent. (and listen, i find advertising/marketing fascinating, my first semester of college back in uhhhhh 2009 i took a masscom class and learned a little bit about how advertising Works and it's all been downhill from there, i even view ad creation as an art form. but even i find the proliferation of unregulated and unethical ads annoying and bad. just bcos it's art doesn't mean it's good.)
but this is (sorta) great for you, indie creator! because as you begin to look beyond social media and wonder how to market your creation, my god are there many examples.
a quick list of (some not all) advertising platforms:
television, obvs
radio
newspapers
magazines
news websites
physical flyers, handed out in places
physical flyers/posters, attached to walls in places
public transit ads
billboards
playbills for local plays
in newsletters, including emailed ones (often with small classified/advertising sections)
youtube ads
sponsored episodes with specific youtubers
podcasts
random websites, on the sidebar and shit
social media websites, as sponsored ad posts
social media websites (like instagram and tiktok usually), as sponsored ads with a specific person
at this point you may have noticed that there is indeed some crossover with social media, as promised. but in this case you're going from managing your own social media presence/getting audience members to talk about you for free, all the way over to making your project a product on a DIFFERENT content creator's social media.
(bcos you wouldn't do a sponsored ad with just a rando on instagram, that would be silly. you pick someone who's already a creator with an audience. and then their audience becomes your audience, for like a 30 second ad spot, at least. and maybe more!)
but you'll also notice how many types of advertising are not social media, or even online. the world of advertising is vast! and terrifying!
part 2: but which ad platform do you choose?
there's a lot of factors to consider for this, but mostly we are coming back to the sorta central idea from 101, which is: who's your audience and what are they into? you want to advertise on a platform that already has your target audience.
at this point you're gonna want to take that list you made back in 101 of 'things in my project that my target audience would be into' and see how those things can relate to stuff other people may already be doing.
now go look up organizations and creative projects that potentially already cater to your target audience. you might say 'i am making a horror podcast, so an ad with another horror podcast would be good', or 'i am making a comic about birds with real bird facts, are there any birder groups with a newsletter i could advertise in?', or 'i'm creating a ttrpg, let's find a ttrpg youtuber', or even 'wow the characters in my story have real theater kid energy, are any local theater groups selling ads for their playbills?'
local stuff in your area is great (in a big city you got a potential big audience; in a small town you get to be the hometown kid making a cool thing, and folks love to brag about that.), as is advertising online or even with a far-distant location (i once sold an ad in a local play's playbill for a podcast made by someone very far away. there's still an audience isn't there.)
doing more than one thing also widens the scope of your audience. put your horror podcast ad in another horror podcast, then go put up a flyer at your local haunted house for halloween. not everyone in your target audience lives the same lives or consumes the same media, so spread out! more eyes is good eyes!
you're also gonna want to consider, what medium is my project in, and how well does that translate to the medium i am advertising in? an audio-only podcast, for example, will clearly be shown well on an audio-only platform (like radio or other podcasts), or even as like a sponsor for a youtuber who's just gonna talk about it and not show pictures. it may struggle a bit more as a billboard, which has no audio and only shows pictures. whereas a comic with no sound is easy to advertise in visual ads, but difficult in an audio-only medium.
however! this does not necessarily mean that you can't advertise in a medium your product is not in. you'll just have to create something in the other medium that showcases important things about your project.
it's a bit more difficult to do, and when ur just starting out i wouldn't advise forcing yourself to do it, but if you happen to already have an idea then fucking go for it. like, do you have some cool and detailed cover art for your podcast that most people only see in tiny icon form? slap that on a flyer with some choice quotes from the show. got that theoretical bird-watching comic from before? get real bird sounds to go with someone voicing a character talking about them for like 30 seconds.
this is sort of an opportunity to stretch your creative abilities in directions your medium wasn't able to encompass. you want to be careful, bcos you do want to still show the strengths of your original project and not turn it into a whole different project, but it can be fun!
part 2b: but which ad platform can you AFFORD?
listen. we're all poor out here, but especially indie creatives. nobody here is buying superbowl advertising. if you have a little money to spare, especially if you're making some money on your project already and a bigger audience means more money? it may be worth it to, say, spend a couple hundred dollars doing sponsored ads. but that's about the limit for most ppl.
but what can you do for cheap--or even for free?
first, look to other indie creators. many podcasts do ad swaps (you run their ad for free, they run yours for free), and i'd imagine other types of projects have something similar. there's also collabs/crossovers--a special episode or chapter or whatever that features characters from two different things gets both of you attention from each others' audiences.
even indie projects that don't have free ad swaps will usually have much MUCH cheaper ads than a bigger project. an ad in the playbill of a super popular broadway show is always gonna be more expensive than with a tiny local community theater. plus you can support small businesses and that's always nice to say.
speaking of small businesses, when you're looking for organizations (not just other indie projects) to advertise with, look at small ones! the monthly newsletter for a little hobby website is gonna be cheaper than the big network news.
look also at community spaces. the library. your local community center. if you're in school right now, especially college, there's almost always a bulletin board, or a school newspaper, or a school radio show. if the ads for these aren't free they'll at least be relatively inexpensive, and again you are helping to fund something small and cool! yay!
there's options out there, and starting small is generally the way to go.
but also, look at your budget, look at your options, and choose what you think is gonna be both affordable and effective; it might be worth it to put a little extra money towards one thing that's more specific to your audience, vs using the same money to do two or three things where ppl will be largely disinterested. consider the balance and make a plan before you start buying ads, and you will be able to stretch a small budget further than if you just buy whatever's available right away.
(also for anyone who is selling a thing for money, don't underestimate the power of giving away some of it for free! first episode free and then the rest under a paywall, or putting a paid game in a limited-time charity bundle, or offering free/discounted stuff to people who attend an event, or place the first few orders, or are randomly selected from a pool. i touched on this in 101 with audience engagement, but in general people love free shit even if it's not actually worth a ton, bcos it's free! and if they liked what they got for free they may buy more later, or encourage friends to buy the thing they like as well.)
part 3: longer advertisements? in this economy?
now. due to the nature of ads that u buy/trade for/somehow acquire on other people's platforms. you are much more limited than when posting on your own social media.
so! way back in 101 i said don't make your ads a big post with all the info about your project; instead, do posts with very small, bite-sized bits, so you can spread those little digestible teasers out. the smaller, more frequent posts allow more people to see and process them than the one big post.
but if you buy/trade for an ad on a different platform, you can't do unlimited small ads. you get one ad, unless you've managed to buy a series of ads, and even those are limited.
so do you cram as much info as possible into the one (or few) ads you've got?
no!! you still do not want to overwhelm! people will only process a little info from an ad they encounter. nobody is stopping to read an essay on a poster.
you can still usually put more in the ad than you would in a bitesized social media post tho. take your list of bitesized things and find several that go together or expand on one until it's bigger, and perhaps has elements of others in it. (eg instead of doing a tiny clip of one scene, you might do the full scene, or you might do multiple clips of multiple scenes all cut together.)
it is generally gonna be a good idea to have a central idea for the ad, tho, and focus on that as the most noticeable bit/build other bits around it. exactly how u would do this is i think a case by case basis.
luckily, when you acquire ads on other platforms, they usually have some guidelines for you to follow, so you can use that to guide your own creativity. a word count, or a set space to fill, or a time limit. some sponsored ads for podcasts and youtube and so on may also be like, hey give us a list of talking points you want to hit and then let us talk about it 'naturally' (u see it all the time in things). use those guides and limits and let them shape your ideas!
ok and now. social media management.
this one isn't really divided into parts bcos it's not so much instructions on social media management (my LEAST favorite of my media classes tbh) as just like, well what does a social media manager do besides marketing? when you are managing your social media, or if you're successful enough to hire a social media manager, what kinds of tasks do you/your smm need to be able to handle beyond the social media marketing 101 i gave before?
and the answer is SO MUCH. like yes of course there's also the marketing. but not all of your project's social media should be marketing (unless we're being super picky and claiming that ever talking about your creation counts as marketing, which yes SORT of but also no).
there's the basic informative posts (notifying ppl of a new episode drop, or giving updates on a situation delaying releases). there's behind the scenes stuff, which can be used for marketing but also helps your audience feel more in touch with the creation/creators. (which admittedly is a kind of marketing sometimes, and can lean into the parasocial side of things, but also sometimes u just wanna share with ur audience. it can also be done to provide perspective on the creation process and encourage more patience.)
there's also just interaction with the audience/community! answering questions, giving answers to audience queries that are fun and informative without seeming rude. it's seeing how audience members engage with the project and related socials, putting out polls and other posts asking for feedback, both to get real feedback and to keep your project on people's minds. for a lot of marketing campaigns the goal is to draw in new audience members; some are also to remind ppl about your thing, but active social media can be more effective than ads in going hey! we're still here! remember us?
social media, nowadays, is also where you keep up your project's reputation and handle any sort of publicity issue. PR and marketing are often intertwined, but in case something breaks bad in your reputation (scandals and callouts? in my online community??), you don't want to treat a public relations crisis the same way you'd treat an ad. at that point, you're not trying to draw people in and capture their interest; you're trying to make them view you positively, and perhaps even doing some fact-checking damage control. which should not be all fun teasers and 'find out more here!' like. at all.
even when not in crisis, you generally want to present your product/company/image well, and fun ads are not always the way to go. sometimes it's that behind the scenes stuff, sometimes it's talking about charity collaborations, sometimes it's just making sure your sociopolitical stances are well-established (or..... avoided, if you're going that direction.)
there's just so much that a social media manager does but a marketing manager doesn't, and vice versa. there's clear overlap, of course, but also such a huge amount of OTHER stuff that doing both requires a much larger set of skills than doing just one. on projects with a lot of money that can hire a team, they'd generally have a social media team and a marketing team--and have them interact, consult, and collaborate with each other, but not be exactly the same. bcos my god there's so much to do.
(ofc if it's just you, or just you and a few friends, there's the wearing of multiple hats situation, which is understandable and unavoidable. but if you want someone to do marketing you don't tell them you're looking for a social media manager, and if you want someone to do social media you don't tell them you're looking for marketing. and if you want someone to do both? you tell them you need some of both.)
(as with many things, specialized focus is gonna be more effective in one specific field than a broader approach. but sometimes you gotta go with broader, just be aware you'll be sacrificing the specialization.)
love island should introduce a "scheming eunuch" islander who is like a smart and completely asexual islander exempt from being kicked off or being made to participate in any challenges and they're just there to provide advice and be a sort of sounding board for the other islanders when they need a disinterested party to talk things through with. but the scheming eunuch has secret goals unbeknownst to anyone e.g. a cash prize for talking a certain couple into breaking up etc.
So, I was working in a lab, right? My job in the lab was preparing a pure, concentrated enough sample of virus. This is tricky since, y'know, viruses require hosts to replicate, but you then need to get the host cells (and the pieces of the host cells that died!) out of the sample while still keeping the viruses. Once I'd finished and the samples had been sent to the database for analysis as well as a second one sent to be frozen for future reference, there was still some left over that needed to be disposed of.
I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.
Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.
(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)
(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)
areudirty
blakekathryn
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