In recent years, the film industry has been undergoing major changes. Because of this, if they want to survive, they must innovate and apply highly effective methodologies, such as growth hacking.

Growth hacking acts in a scientific way as it poses a hypothesis (growth drivers), conducts experiments to check if it is correct and finally analyzes the results. If the results are as expected and therefore help to achieve the objectives, a way to grow will have been discovered. This allows us to discover the most effective tactics quickly and cheaply.

The first thing to do is to find out which metrics point to our growth, i.e. which are the key metrics of the business. Some examples would be, number of movies sold per month, movies produced per year or average number of subscriptions.

Once we know which metrics we should focus on, we will set SMART objectives, i.e. specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. Achieve 10% more subscribers per month to your service, increase the number of films produced in a year by 20%, or sell 5% more films in a quarter. Objectives are the desirable increase, or decrease, of your key metrics.

After proposing an objective, we will hypothesize how to achieve it and conduct experiments to prove or disprove its validity. Possible growth drivers for the film industry could be user experience optimization, remarketing, indexed advertising or catalog optimization. Which one suits us best? Which one should we focus on? This is what we are going to test through the growth hacking methodology.

To get our film seen we need to advertise creatively and get it talked about on all the social networks, how will we get people talking about our ads and learning about our film? How will we attract views and comments? 

We could try to get another company to include our films in their catalog, what kind of companies will we do this with, how will our film be included in their system?

It is essential to be very active in social networks. People like companies to be close to their audience and address them on social networks to interact and get more visibility, but this has to be published with care and strategy.

• What kind of content will we publish?
• How will we achieve this interaction with customers?
• What audience will we target with our marketing campaign?

It will be necessary to devise experiments to find answers to these questions. After these experiments, we document the lessons learned. In this way we will gather information about successful and unsuccessful strategies and thus be able to develop more appropriate strategies each time.

Want to learn more about how to apply growth hacking to your film business? Sign up for Hypertry and request a one-on-one session.