25 Marketing Hacks is a weekly blog series the explores unconventional ways of getting the word out about your work. Traditionally photographers and cinematographers use their portfolios or showreels either in a face-to-face meeting or online to attract new clients. Today I’ll show you how to get your work in front of 100+ local people from your target audience in 30 seconds.
Pitch your work!
Creative Mornings is a breakfast lecture series that is held once a month in over 100 cities worldwide and if there’s no one in your city or close to you there are other opportunities where people that are your potential clients meet on a regular basis: that can be as simple as a chamber of commerce meeting, a networking breakfast, an award ceremony for creatives, … the possibilities are endless as long as this marketing opportunity gets your work in front of your target market.
Jump on the opportunity
Sometimes it takes you months to get that opportunity, sometimes it happens quickly. In my case, I had attended two CreativeMornings/Miami breakfasts, when I get a phone call asking me if I could video next month’s speaker, since the volunteer that usually films the event was not available. After shooting the first one, I met with the organizer, who told me about a new thing they wanted to try called “the 30-second pitch“. He asked me if I wanted to be the first to give a 30-second pitch at CreativeMornings/Miami. What do you think I said?
Getting the chance to present a piece of my work to a group of 200 fired up, creative people in my city sounds like it has terrific marketing value for my brand.
I edited together a trailer for On Wings of Hope and offered to bring a fast fold screen and a projector (usually CreativeMornings has one TV for their graphics and I wanted to make this a visual experience for the crowd.)
Here’s the trailer for the second CreativeMornings/Miami talk I filmed. It included the 30-second pitch, but more importantly, it includes how Malik, the chief organizer of CreativeMornings here in Miami, introduces my trailer.
This Marketing Hack is valuable, because …
What’s the value of having the main guy of a meeting like this, be fired up about your work? Do you think his endorsement elevates my work in the minds of the participants? What does his excitement for the 30-second pitch do to the marketing value for me? The fact that I was standing in the back of the room behind a camera on that specific day, reinforces, what he’s saying in the mind of the people that saw the trailer.
The result:
The result was two people coming up to me after the meeting, who wanted to book me for video projects.
Jean, check out the video at the end of the post. My pitch begins around 0:50 in the video.
Hello,
What did you say in your 30 second pitch? You say read more about it, but it doesn’t click to anything.
Thanks,
Jean