Lemon Moon — An Entertainment Digital Marketing Case Study
Lemon Moon is the precautionary tale of two brothers, Clark and Winslow, who abandon their lives on Earth to head for the new opportunities on the Moon. But the only thing they’ve ever done together is run a lemonade stand as six-year olds so they’re trying that again on their new, sparsely populated home.
Over the 2020 Easter long weekend, with the whole of the United Kingdom in lockdown, social media use spiking, and Netflix beginning to run out of new shows, I decided to put my social experience to use to market the pilot (currently only) episode.
With just a finished episode and not much else, I launched a fresh Facebook page with the bare minimum — profile picture, cover picture, the teaser, and a scheduled post about what’s coming next.
With four days of just-your-four-walls, I spent £250 (~$500AUD) on a link click campaign to drive a cold audience of comedy fans to the Twisted Mirror Lemon Moon page. As Twisted Mirror is a global comedy streaming platform, I targeted major English-speaking countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom—with interests in:
- Comedy films
- Comedy television
- Sketch comedy
- Comedy
I served them the teaser as the creative.
With this £250, I reached 106,904 impressions with 66,912 reach (1.6 frequency) and drove 935 link clicks back to Twisted Mirror for a CPC of £0.27.
Learnings:
Off that 67k reach, the follow up post received a massive (lol)40 reach. This means that almost no-one went through to the show’s page to find out more. That’s a good learning.
The teaser got three comments from complete strangers which is a good start — mostly positive, which is also good. There was one tag from a stranger so I’ll take that as proof that there is an audience for the project though we’d likely have to burn through more cash to find it.
There was no negative feedback on the post.
Takeaways:
I was hoping for 1,000 link clicks at least so this isn’t the excellent result I’d hoped for but that’s okay. In future, I’ll keep audiences on platform and optimise for video views of a teaser with a remarketing campaign that serves the full episode — roughly splitting the budget 70:30 for prospecting:remarketing.
I’d also run a stronger organic campaign and distribute the budget (small as it was in this case) across various pieces of creative rather than just one.
I feel like I hit the right audience and, without a strong goal other than ‘push people to watch Lemon Moon on Twisted Mirror’, I’d consider the campaign a success.
As an experiment in web series digital marketing, there’s still tons to learn but comedy audiences are fertile and pretty receptive to new content.
Stay tuned to my new show Retcon, a light sci-fi about a time travel agency, its staff, and its clients as they unmake their old lives and get paid by the hour.
