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Why The Avengers: Endgame Marketing Is Genius

Iron man, Thor and Captain Amercia

The time has come.

After years of character building and countless superhero battles, April 26th will bring fans together to marvel at a true spectacle: Avengers Endgame.

Endgame is a true culmination of the 21 films that have preceded it, the final chapter of the saga that’s set to break box office history.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a pure force of nature (even if it is comprised of mostly CGI). Since 2008, Marvel has gathered a colossal and dedicated fanbase that stretches right across the world.

Avengers Infinity War took everyone on an emotional roller coaster, the follow up to that film looks to do exactly the same but on an even bigger scale.

Avengers Endgame Marketing Graphic

The ending of Infinity War left audiences shell shocked. A true cliffhanger has had millions of people speculating, theorising and predicting how the next instalment is going to follow it.

The marketing of Avengers: Infinity War was epic in many ways. Trailers showed huge action set pieces, new characters coming together and brand new settings never seen before.

While this built a huge amount of hype, and saw Infinity War make a whopping $2 billion, there were certain fans who thought the trailers showed too much.

It’s a common issue among moviegoers today.

Studios will aim to sell tickets by showing epic set pieces in marketing materials but in doing so, it spoils the natural surprise fans would have got if they hadn’t been exposed to it.

This is where Marvel has excelled with Avengers: Endgame marketing. Here’s our breakdown of how Marvel has used different platforms and strategies to build even more hype around the film.

Trailers

Less is more

So far, there has been around three trailers released for Endgame. However, pretty much all the trailers have only shown the first 20 minutes of the film.

This is a smart move for many reasons. Not only does it protect fans from spoilers, it also leaves audiences eager to buy tickets to the film out of sheer curiosity.

Focusing on story and character development in the trailers, instead of spoiling the action, only builds even more anticipation.

Going into a film and not knowing how it’s going to pan out, or what scenes are going to be shown, is very rare these days.

Showing very little story and action sequences also encourages audiences to speculate how the film is going to turn out. This leads to masses of people producing speculative content for sites like YouTube, indirectly marketing the film from a user generation point of view.

One YouTuber in particular, Deffinition, gives a breakdown of the first, second and third Endgame trailer, connecting the dots that others may have missed.

Deffinitions channel

You can check his channel out here: https://www.youtube.com/user/definition1988/videos

Nostalgic feels

The trailer’s have done a great job at evoking nostalgic feelings within audiences by scattering them with clips from previous films.

In the second trailer, we get shots from the first Iron Man through to the first Captain America, this takes people down memory lane and highlights where this journey started.

The throwbacks to previous films works perfectly for Endgame since it is the final chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Adding the older films to the trailers really builds background context to the events whilst also showing how far the individual characters have come.

Cross Promotion

As well as promoting the actual film, the Endgame trailer also effectively promotes the movie that has come before it: Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel receives the spotlight in the second trailer through her interaction with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor.

As Captain Marvel is still showing in the cinemas, this is a clever move by Marvel as it gives people a reason to go and watch the movie so they are prepared for her appearance in Endgame.

Marvel’s Social Media

A Multi Channel Approach

With 32.5 million followers on Instagram, Marvel has a well established platform to publish content on.

They have catered their marketing materials specifically to individual channels, for example, using condensed snippets of their trailers on Instagram with a link to the full trailer on YouTube.

Marvel has also stayed consistent with the #AvengersEndgame hashtag being used on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Many iterations of poster designs for the movie can be seen on Marvel’s Instagram, Twitter and Facebook too. The stylish poster designs work perfectly on social media to engage fans and visually showcase the actors/characters in the films.

Avengers End Game poster

*Spoilers from Infinity War ahead*

*Are you sure you want to carry on?*

*We’ve warned you..*

After the infamous “snap” from Thanos, we saw half the marvel universe dusted. That big purple b*stard.

To capitalise on the audiences bereavement, Marvel has produced a series of images for social media juxtaposing the characters who survived with the ones who were sadly snapped out of existence (The trauma is still very real).

A very simple idea but one that builds up anticipation as to whether the dusted characters will return or not and drives huge engagement.

Dusted Super HeroAlive Superhero

Actor’s and Director’s Social Media

A Communal Effort

Not only have marvel done a fantastic job at filling our feeds with superhero goodness, the actors and directors from Endgame have also done a great job at promoting the film.

The Russo Brothers, who have directed Infinity War and Endgame, have populated their social media feeds with relevant marketing materials from the film, as well as behind the scenes images.

It shows how much the directors care about their creation and how proud they are to see their ideas come to fruition. As a fan, its encouraging to see directors so passionate about their work and gives people more reason to care about this movie.

Russo Brothers Instagram

This leads us to our next point: The casts social media.

Endgame is filled with some huge stars. From Chris Hemsworth and Robert Downy Jr to Bradley Cooper and Scarlett Johansson. The 5 main stars of the Avengers have a collective audience of around 35 million on Twitter and 50 Million on Instagram.

This gives Marvel the ability to leverage their actor’s social media platforms to again build anticipation for the film and drive ticket sales.

A great example of the actors getting involved was tweeting the recurring line from the trailers: “Whatever it takes”. The constant repetition of this line sticks in peoples heads and really drives home the message that this is a film where the stakes are incredibly high.

End Game actor tweet 2

End Game actor tweet 4

End Game actor tweet

End Game actor tweet 3

 

Avengers: End Game Marketing Budget

Marvel isn’t exactly shy of money. So, you can expect that their marketing budgets for each film are usually pretty high. For some background context, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 had a marketing budget of $80 million while Spider-Man: Homecoming came in at an impressive $140 million. Avengers: Infinity War increased on Homecomings budget by $10 million, with Marvel spending $150 million on End Games predecessor. With all that considered, how much do you think they spent on marketing their biggest film to date?

Over a whopping $200 million. Yes, you read that correctly. The Avengers End Game Marketing Budget is actually higher than the average Hollywood movie budget. Marvel partnered with some huge brands to promote the film such as Audi, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Google, General Mills and Ziploc. So with a staggering budget and the right partners, you’d expect a big return, right?

Avengers: End Game Box Office

After months of anticipation, End Game finally released on April the 26th and raked in a huge $1.48 billion worldwide. Within only a week of releasing, End game has risen to the 8th highest grossing movie of all time. For a movie that contains a talking racoon, that is impressive.

Endgame has rocked the world by providing a satisfying conclusion to the epic adventure that Iron Man started us on.

The way Marvel has marketed the film has been refreshing, especially in a world that contains so many spoiler ridden trailers. Marvel has used mystery, curiosity and leveraged their own stars platform’s to generate a buzz.

End Game now sits at third position for the highest grossing Marvel movie, with Infinity War and the first Avengers edging above.

But with looking at how things are currently going, End Game will soon over-take both.

What does GDPR mean to your digital marketing strategy

If, like me you’re now fed up of people using the four letter word; GDPR! You’re probably asking yourself, how do we actually market our business to suspects past the 25th May 2018? 

We’re getting all these emails about updated privacy policies and asking us to re-subscribe to an email marketing list. People are going on about it like its doomsday for businesses.

The new rules will prevent certain aspects of business that have been practiced since business first started marketing, but, there are some major positives to take from this legislation.

And yes, we’re bound to say this as it puts us in a great standing as we’re the experts in inbound marketing. But, what can you actually do to keep on the right side of the rules and keep your marketing moving?

What are the positives of GDPR?

As a marketer I feel this is a positive move, in general, towards a better and easier life. I mean we get so many unsolicited emails, phone calls, direct mail etc. that it sometimes becomes a bit overwhelming.

I subscribe to people I find interesting or companies that I have a vested interest in or thinking about purchasing from or even sometimes just for the fun of it.

GDPR and your digital marketing strategy

I want to be able to read about what these people and businesses offer form time to time and happily ask them to do so.

I do however find that a lot of time is spent deleting emails rather than reading them. I’m concentrating on email here because it is something we do a lot of for our clients.

Being very busy I regularly just purge the lot as the time I want to read I spend time deleting unsolicited SPAM.

I am very hopeful I get lots of time back from those SPAM vampires when the GDPR comes into effect.

Will it work? I doubt it, but I’m very hopeful!

Anyways, what marketing can you do and what should you be doing better?

Email Marketing! But much better, and the way it should really have been done before GDPR.

Yes, email is still one of the best tools to move a prospect from a newcomer to your brand, into a full on evangelist for your business.

When I say better, I mean by using either a checkbox on your forms or by using double opt-in. It’s easy, so why aren’t you doing it? If you are then what you worrying about.

You will, in fact, definitely won’t gain as many people into your marketing database but do you really want people in your database that aren’t really looking for information from you or your business? I would argue it’s wasted energy, and money if you’re using a tool based on number of contacts such as Active Campaign (p.s we’re a reseller!).

How do you get people into your marketing database?

Inbound marketing or content marketing, call it what you want. It works! Look at Hubspot, the worlds best inbound marketing company in my humble opinion. They appear in pretty much anything you search for around their niche.

You can too!

Anyone who spends any time online will know the scenario, you are searching for a solution to your problem and suddenly you find yourself reading an article on “how to attract the right customer” finding it really engaging and a nice slide in box or in content box pops up asking if you would like more information?

Yes, you would as the content you are so engrossed in means that there must be more you don’t have time to read now but want to. So you fill in your email address.

Within a few weeks, or months you’re proposing the solution or service of said company to the boss or your line manager. You’ve become an evangelist for the brand who you didn’t even know about a few weeks or months before.

This is inbound marketing at its best. And it’s much easier than you think to do.

Need help with inbound marketing, give us a shout we don’t mind saying we’re pretty good at it!

So what does Inbound marketing consist of?

Just to set expectations, we’re not looking to produce an exhaustive list here. We’re simply looking to help with a few ideas which might be common place in certain industry sectors.

Here are a few types of inbound marketing we’d suggest starting right away:

Subject leading articles – Most people don’t know as much as you do about your industry, service or product. Write about it, not from a sales point of view but from the view of the user. What will they gain and why is the service or product a good thing for them in general?

Ultimate guides – You might think that telling someone how to do the actual service you offer is counterintuitive. But it really isn’t. There are lots of people who just want to know you can complete the job they would like you to do. Plus, an ultimate guide should give you an enormous amount of exposure. Hopefully leading to subscribers and those all important links from other websites.

Case Studies – Producing engaging case studies are great for lead generation. People will actively look for these on your site and in any marketing literature they have before they make a decision. They can also be great for SEO and can often be found by people searching for your service. Perfect opportunity to bring in new prospects.

Videos – If you aren’t using video as part of your marketing strategy at the minute you should be! The growth of video is massive and just keeps on growing. The world’s second biggest search engine is Youtube, and they now show as tiles within relevant searches on Google! Get on it if you haven’t already!

Like I said above, I’m not going to go on about too many types of content for your inbound marketing. Just try a few at first! 

Make sure you have a way of converting those site visitors into subscribers or prospects! A great tool for this, if you’re using WordPress is Thrive Leads. If you’ve read this far you will, no doubt, have seen a perfectly designed opt-in section or slide in. It’s perfect and integrates via API into Active Campaign to help build a seamless inbound marketing platform.

Anyways, that’s where we’ll end this one. Hope you enjoyed reading it.

‘Not Secure’ Google Update for HTTPS Certificates (2018)

You need an SSL certificate

This is big for all business owners running a website for their business. Effectively, Google will be telling all users of its Chrome web browser that a site is not using a Secure SSL certificate and therefore is not a secure website to browse or enter information into.

I don’t know about you, but I spend my life online and the thought of entering details into a website which is not secure frightens me. I mean we do it all the time, as it’s not flagged up to us, but from July this year every potential visitor of your site, using Google Chrome will be given a message before they enter your site.

Massive increase in friction to visiting your site.

This will coincide with the release of Chrome 68.

Along with this they have announced its Speed Roll-out in July, confirming back in January that page speed will be a considerable ranking factor in where your website sits in the search engine results page.

We’ve known for a long time that speed is massive to Google but now they’ve actually put it on paper!

So, what can you do to stop visitors being put-off coming to your site?

Get an SSL certificate installed on your website! The process is relatively simple, but there are a vast number of pitfalls you could stumble into so I would suggest you speak to us or your existing website provider and ask them what the cost will be to do this for you.