Optimising media marketing strategies in a multi-platform world: an inter-relational approach to pre-release social media communication and online searching

Abstract

In recent decades, multi-platform strategies have strongly focused on the production and distribution side of media industries. Lately, demand-side factors have become more important. For example, the impact on the success of movies of online communication and searching has increased. The article puts forward and tests, in the context of the German movie market, a method which may be used to measure and analyse growth dynamics and interdependencies among different communication behaviours taking place on multiple platforms. Pre-release web-monitoring procedures are essential to identify the nature of these dynamics. If there is positive feedback, more attention should be drawn to those platforms and vice versa. This study reveals strong intra- and inter-platform correlations. These findings, which point to strong path dependencies and an unexpectedly high degree of interchangeability among different platforms with different users, suggest that a more streamlined procedure for monitoring social media can be developed, which may reduce effort and cost. Increasing the reach of a trailer, the number of likes, and comments were found to lead to disproportionally low negative evaluations for movies. Based on these findings, multi-platform marketing strategies should aim to draw as much attention as possible to fan pages and movie trailers. Based on findings in this paper, marketing strategies for art and auteur movies should be widely spread. For blockbuster movies, online search processes were consistently found to precede online user communication. Providing information about the movie long before the theatrical release is therefore essential to increase the probability that the movie will be indexed by online search engines. The methodology of this article can be applied to other research regarding online user communication, such as success-factor research about hedonic and experience goods in general.

Keywords:

• social media monitoring and analysis
• online search behaviour
• pre-release online word-of-mouth
• multi-platform communication strategies
• latent growth curve and path modelling

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Wolfgang Seufert for his ongoing support and advice. Thanks also go to the participants of the European Media Management Association's annual conference in Tallinn as well as the World Media Economics and Management Conference in Rio de Janeiro for their inspiring remarks and constructive criticism on previous works on that research topic. The author is indebted to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable notes on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. DMAIC stands for define, measure, analyse, improve, and control. This approach originates from quality management and is part of a quantitative approach to improving organisational performance (see Alharthi, Sharaf, and Aziz (2014) as well as Walker and Barnes (2010) for implementation in the field of media and communication; see Creveling, Hambleton, and McCarthy (2006) for an implementation in marketing).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Felix Sattelberger

Felix Sattelberger studied Communication Science, Business Administration, Economics and Intercultural Business Communication in Jena (Germany) and Bloomsburg (USA). He is research associate at the department of media economics at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. His primary research interests are success factor research, social web monitoring and product related word-of-mouth communication.