Indee Blog

Marketing your festival to filmmakers can be an expensive and relentless affair. There are turnkey options with an expensive buy-in, like Withoutabox’s mailing list, or Google’s adwords. But there’s a slew of other options that you might not be using. Read on to learn about all your options.

Call for Entries Mailing Lists

Mailing lists are the most popular form of Call For Entries. They are very effective and the response is almost immediate. However, it isn’t always cheap.

Withoutabox – The behemoth when it comes to call for entries. They have an extensive mailing list and festivals see an immediate jump in submissions as soon as they are mentioned in one of  Withoutaboxs’ mailers. However, it doesn’t come cheap. It is approximately $700 to be mentioned in their mailer along with several other festivals and it ranges up to over $2000 for an exclusive mailer.

Indee - (disclaimer: we are Indee) Indee’s mailing list is smaller than Withoutabox, however it is doesn’t cost anything. Every festival that uses Indee’s system has one exclusive Call for Entires email included for free. An example of this is included here. Several festivals sign up for Indee and Withoutabox simultaneously. Additionally, Indee runs Google Ad campaigns for festivals, see below for info on this.

Self-promote – Never underestimate the strength of your own mailing list. If obtained the right way, this is a list of filmmakers who already recognize your festival, who’s films you are already familiar with and they might have had a great experience in the past. While it may not be as large as the other two mailing list options, it is likely to be much better targeted.

Cost-per-click adverts

Facebook, Twitter & Google ads: Costing you between $0.50 – $1 per click, these aren’t cheap. However, it gets you to the right source: Filmmakers searching online for film-festival call for entries or identifying themselves as filmmakers. Targeting your keywords and demographics is paramount here. Focus should be on conversions rather generating traffic. It is less expensive and far more effective.

Festival aggregators

There are a slew of festival aggregators out there. Many have lousy interfaces, so its hard for a filmmaker to find what they’re looking for, but most are free, so it doesn’t hurt to list on these. ($) indicates that you pay to list on these sites.

• http://topfilmfestivals.com ($)
• http://openfilm.com
• http://filmfestivals.com / http://fest21.com
• http://www.festivalfocus.org/
• http://www.filmcommunity.com/
• http://www.filmfold.com/
• http://www.filmfestivalsource.com/
• http://www.shortfilmcentral.com/events/
• http://www.insidefilm.com
• http://festivals.documentaryfilms.net

Festival or film centric blogs & magazines

It might help getting ,an article mentioning your call for submissions on these. Don’t expend too much energy or resources on these though. Most properties with significant traffic will not dedicate a post for a single festivals Call for Entries and many of the smaller ones don’t get enough traffic to make a dent in your submissions. But it’s always worth just shooting a note to see if they will mention your festival.

• http://www.contestwatchers.com/
• http://www.filmmaking.net/
• http://moviemaker.com ($)
• http://filmmakermagazine.com/ ($)

PR Firm

Of course, there is always the really expensive option of hiring a PR firm to get all of the above done for you.

Have I missed any? Please post them in the comments.