Bill & Ted Face the Music Executive Summary
Alright Dudes it’s time for a most excellent introduction to the Social Media Marketing strategy for the upcoming release of Bill and Ted Face the Music. First, I will start with a brief explanation of the franchise for those of you who are most bogus and have never seen a Bill and Ted movie. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was released in February of 1989. “Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are high school buddies starting a band. However, they are about to fail their history class, which means Ted would be sent to military school. They receive help from Rufus (George Carlin), a traveler from a future where their band is the foundation for a perfect society. With the use of Rufus’ time machine, Bill and Ted travel to various points in history, returning with important figures to help them complete their final history presentation.” (IMDB.com) Fast forward 30 years and now we see Bill and Ted making a return to the big screen in an all-new adventure. This time around Bill and Ted are married with children when a visitor from the future tells them that a song written by their band Wyld Stallyns can save life as they know it and bring harmony to the universe. (IMDB.com)
Target Demographic
The Target Demographic for my marketing efforts are split into two groups. Group 1 are people in the age group of 16–30 mostly being male. I feel like this is the age range that will find the movie most humorous and therefore they are who I will be marketing towards. The 2nd group are what I call the “nostalgia demographic” these are the people who were fans of the original Bill and Ted movies, I estimate them to be 46 to 60 now.
Marketing Strategy Overview
It is my plan to market Bill and Ted Face the Music on three different social media platforms, those being Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It is my goal by choosing these three platforms I can reach an audience with a wide age range which is necessary due to my target demographics for this film.
In order to assure that my social media plan is headed in the right direction I established social media SMART goals for my marketing strategy.
Facebook: Every post made will have at least 300 comments and all video posts will be shared a minimum of 500 times.
Instagram: Every post made will have a minimum of 7,000 likes and followers will increase 10 percent by October 1st.
Twitter: Every tweet will be retweeted at least 200 times and have at least 1,000 likes.
Campaign
We are using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for a few reason. Firstly they are three of the largest social media platforms and will give us the most exposure. Second these platforms combined have a wide range of average age per user. Lastly Orion Pictures has already created a substaintial following on these three platforms under the handle @billandted3.
Platform Demographics
Facebook: The hardest age to reach will be the nostalgia demographic, to help deliver our messaging towards them we are using Facebook. With 2.7 active monthly user on the platform we have our highest likelihood of reaching them here. (statista.com)
Instagram: Looking at the Distribution of Instagram users as of May 2020 done by Statista, we see that 35 percent of users are between the ages of 25 and 34. The second-largest age distribution being those 18–24 with 21 percent. Having this information, we know that Instagram will be a good place to reach our demographic of 16–30-year old with over half of the app’s users falling into that age range. Instagram is also the perfect platform for sharing movie trailers and promotion images as the platform is visual intensive.
Twitter: The last platform we will be using is Twitter, looking at the Distribution of its users we see the largest demographic falling in the 25–34 age range with 31 percent of users. Looking at the graph as a whole we see less disparity in the distribution of age compared to Instagram. There seems to be a decent amount of people of all ages on the platform and therefore it will be a place to reach both demographics new and returning viewers of the franchise. (statista.com)
Voice
The voice for this campaign will be most excellent, meaning that we want to communicate in the same voice and tone in which Bill & Ted from the film communicate. This means talking in informal sentences full of colloquialisms such as dude and righteous. Communicating in this voice our the @billandted3 social handles will be the most genuine for the fans and helps to establish the tone of the movie across the different social platforms. We can see that this is already how the social media team has been communicating, looking at an Instagram post as an example: “Whoa! There’s only ONE day left to submit your most excellent fan art…” (Instagram, @billandted3)
#Hashtags
When looking at what hashtags we want to use we want to think about what this film will be about, what the brand is about, and what will bring in the most traffic. Out of the gate, we know that we will be using the title of the film in a few variations as hashtags. These hashtags will be #BillandTed (83.5k), #BillandTed3 (13.9k), #FaceTheMusic (27.8k). We also want to create hashtags that are easily identifiable as belonging to the Bill and Ted universe. Some examples of these are #mostexcellent (9.1k), #WyldStallyns (14.6k), #timetravel (999k). Lastly, we want to use hashtags to draw in fans of our Actors for the film such as #AlexWinter (20.4k), and #KeanuReeves (908k), (Numbers based off of Instagram).
Partnerships & Influencers
When looking at who will be perfect influencers to work with to promote the movie the most obvious choice is the two main actors, Alex Winter who portrays Bill and Keanu Reeves who portrays Ted. While Alex Winter is on Social Media and is actively promoting the upcoming Bill and Ted film, Keanu Reeves is not a user of social media and therefore cannot be a social media influencer for the film.
One brand I would like to see a partnership with on social media would be Guitar Center, which is the largest music retailer in the US and has a following of 1.3 Million on Instagram, 1.7 Million on Facebook, and 214.3k on Twitter. I believe that this brand audience of musicians would appreciate the message of Bill and Ted and I think the two could do a great partnership to promote sales for each other.
Example Post
Pre-event: Facebook post.
Get ready to rock, Bill and Ted Face the Music will be available for streaming in Two weeks!!! Tag your most bodacious buddy that you’ll be watching with. #BillandTed #BillandTed3 #FaceTheMusic
During-event: Instagram post.
For those of you who weren’t able to time travel the wait is over. Bill and Ted Face the Music is Now Streaming! #BillandTed #BillandTed3 #FaceTheMusic #timetravel
Post-event: Tweet.
Example post for November 3rd, 2020.
While we wait for Bill and Ted to unite the world remember the wise words of Abraham Lincoln, “Be Excellent to each other, and Party On Dudes!” #BillandTed #BillandTed3 #FaceTheMusic #2020election
Sadly we can’t all be as bodacious as Bill and Ted. For those of us without access to a modern technology time machine we will be patiently anticipating the August 28th release of Bill and Ted Face the Music.
