Grey Ghost – Dolling Out The Details

July 10, 2018

That day has come, after months (sometimes years) of prototyping, consulting, R&D, and in manny cases in the firearms industry, destroying several iterations of your shiny new product, its time to get the word out and get them into production and out the door in nice little boxes.

But unless your market, no ones know about it. And no matter how fantastic the product is, if no one knows about it, how can they purchase it?

These days we in the firearms sector can’t advertise on Facebook or pretty much any social media site. Most of us have decent number of social media followers, so what do we do to get attention and get the word out about our fantastic new firearms product? There are a couple of answers.

VIDEO

Video is my far the most engaging format for posts on social media, regardless of platform. Instagram has just opened up their video platform to 60 minute videos, jumping form 15 seconds. Very telling change don’t you think? You may have noticed several new SaaS (Software as a Service) offering on Facebook that will take you images, and create a video slideshow, just to get the post recognized as a video on Facebook and get it better distribution. I hate that personally.  A slideshow isn’t a video ,the two are drastically different. Perhaps thats the director in me getting bitchy, but, well, rant over. For now.

Video can tell a complex story in a very short time. If its engaging, it can do ore than just intro you new product, it can drag you page stats and follower number up drastically, and get you into new networks. They are reusable in many case (if well produced with some forethought) and can be shot in a single day to product several videos, maximizing the ROI of your marketing dollar.

ARTICLES AND REVIEWS

A bit trickier than simple social media marketing, but very powerful, and often completely free (outside shipping your product to a reviewer and back) as its an “impartial” journalistic review. These relationships take time to build and develop, but believe me. These content producers need things to write about and will work with you to review your products. THe drawback is you dont control the narrative, so the review can be damaging. You need to initiate relationships with a mind to developing them long term ,and well ahead of product launch. In some cases the :buildit and they will come” thing actually works and you get folks calling you to review a product, but that pretty much only happens when you are running a planned and co-ordinated pre-release campaign with, you guessed it, lots of pictures and video WELL prior to your launch date.

The following are just two videos we did for S&J Hardware for their Grey Ghost Universal Shotgun. These had pretty much no other info with them other than the video and the campaign motto “Get ready to get Ghosted”, and got record breaking views and engagement numbers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It also resulted in a net gain of over 400 new likes on the page that had 4k followers, a 10% uptick. In 5 days.

Success is about strategy, and strategy is about planning. As a small firearms business ,you may not know how to do this. Thats where we come in.. Reach out. Have a quick chat with us, and we can quide you on both process and execution of a plan to get everyone to know about your fantastic new product.

Grey Ghost Teaser from S&J Hardware on Vimeo.

Grey Ghost Teaser Two – The Shoot from S&J Hardware on Vimeo.

 

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BrentAlpha

Brent is a long time IT guru, ex-Army Reserve (no tours) gun loving fool who parlayed his IT and firearms addictions into a filmmaking and marketing career. He has been in the firearms/tactical sector in Canada and the US in various roles for 12 years. Currently he is CEO at Telos Alpha, CTO at Telos One, and volunteers his time and skills at Quinte Humane Society and the Trenton and Belleville Military Family Resource Centers.

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