Audience
The Audience section is made up of two key areas: how to build your audience, and how to keep it. ‘Build’ covers the essential ideas you’ll need to grasp to be able to start designing your strategy. ‘Keep’ covers managing the relationship with your audience and sustaining their engagement. As opposed to the ‘Tools’ section, which offers more practical information, this section consists mostly of concepts, ideas and approaches.
The information is all interrelated – it’s a circular field. Many aspects that have been put in one section might easily have fit in another. My main goal here though is to help you divine and define your audience, understand the thought processes you’ll need to reach them and create a strategy that’s going to have the greatest chance of success.
IT’S MEANT TO HELP YOU BY GIVING YOU A COMPREHENSIVE OVERVIEW
Despite this being a web-based how-to and the potential that offers for cherry-picking what you’d most like to know, I do encourage you, especially if you’re just starting out, to read through the bulk of it so that you have a comprehensive overview. I’ve gone into quite a lot of detail – a lot you might later on realise is irrelevant to you personally - but the advantage of reading it in depth is that once you have a good grasp of the terrain the information becomes scalable to fit the size and specifics of what you want to do.
BUILDING AN AUDIENCE WILL SOUND LIKE A LOT OF WORK
Building and maintaining an audience will probably seem like a lot of work but,
a) it’s likely as much work as making sure someone else does an effective job of getting your film out there and
b) the alternative is often your film falling into obscurity.
Given the amount of time, energy and effort it’s probably taken to make your film in the first place, it’s probably best to adjust your expectations of what it means to make a film so as to include the process of getting it out into the world. Nothing I’ve said here couldn’t be applied as a hybrid model of working with a traditional distributor and once you have a comprehensive awareness of the field, all the information should help you in understanding what you’d want to get out of that relationship. The good news is that audiences carry, so once you’ve done this the first time it should be a little easier the next…
THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT AUDIENCES CARRY
The main goal of an audience-building strategy is usually, ‘how can my growth become exponential and self-generating?’ – where, as Joe Swanberg said, “The audience just exists and you can then make films full-time and get the movies directly to your audience.”. All the ideas contained in this section attempt to tackle that in some way. If it’s going well, at a certain stage your opportunities will grow beyond the web (eg: being picked up on cable or other mainstream outlets) and you might well extend beyond your niche - the particular community you’ve built your core audience from – into a more general audience-base with different requirements. It’s a process that goes beyond the web and back again, an ever increasing loop. As you go through the process of building your audience you’ll be gaining deeper understanding and mastery of that loop and, hopefully lashings of the satisfaction that comes with it.
