J, is an actor, comedian, podcaster and independent filmmaker of horror movies. She was planning her next project, a horror/comedy series and political satire. J maintains an active social media and online presence. Prior to her campaign, J’s main touchpoints with her audience are:
During our hour-long discussion, J discussed progress on her upcoming film projects and general marketing strategy for promoting her films and related merchandise. She has some experience in digital marketing. Currently, she would like to:
The keywords or phrases we selected broadly fall into three major topics, the “indie film” industry, the “horror” genre, and topics related to “fundraising”.
In total, our search input contained ≅400 keyword terms. The keywords were assigned varying relevancies, with a median relevance score of 0.2 and mean score of 0.35 (the maximum score was 1). This indicates that the majority of the keywords were relatively “low” in relevance, although they still contributed a long tail of keywords to the search.
The initial search candidates belonged to several major groups:
From manual interaction with the recommended profiles, J received generally good responses. In our retrospective, J made several suggestions for the final list in the refined report.
While not directly relevant, she preferred to keep actors, music, artists, authors, and other creatives as they are related to movie production, frequently use crowdfunding, and interesting in general. She would like to know more directors and producers, especially those with experience raising funds.
Although indie games and video gamers seem unrelated, on closer inspection, many gamers were frequently horror fans as well. Many games also contain the element of horror, so we should not explicitly remove or suppress gamers in the next report. She provided new suggestions for search keywords, to pick up fans of a specific horror streaming service, a horror magazine and a horror production house.
After inspecting and approaching a few crowdfunding tools/platforms, many tools on the list appear too commercialized. Their standard services do not seem to provide enough value, so she was no longer interested in this group (to be removed). This helped confirm her chosen fundraising platform, and she will be more confident meeting with her platform representatives at the upcoming Philadelphia Independent Film Festival.
After incorporating all suggestions above, the number of refined search terms expanded to over 480. Many keyword relevance scores were updated, however, the general distribution of the relevance scores remain largely unchanged. Some topics (third party fundraising services) were removed or even suppressed.
The new search terms allowed us to discovered more horror fans, and more independent directors and filmmakers, especially in the horror genre. The final report no longer contains commercial crowdfunding platforms.
About half of the profiles in the list had been replaced.
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