Aug 07 2007
Now that you’ve worked really hard programming your company’s next slate of offerings, it’s just a matter of letting the world know about your new season. To help draw the biggest crowds to your theatre, you’ll need to examine your marketing strategies.
People Power Most theatres manage their publicity in one of two ways: by maintaining an in-house marketing director and/or team or by hiring an outside publicist. There are pros and cons to doing your promotion through either of these methods. An advantage of working in-house is your intimate knowledge of your theatre’s productions. But if you’re short-staffed, you’re going to become overextended and exhausted. You need to be at the top of your game to promote your product, which is your theatre’s season.
If you decide it’s better to hire an outside publicist, a major benefit may be the objectivity that he or she will bring to the job. However, outside publicists tend to juggle many clients at once, so make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle. Ask your friends and associates at other theatres for recommendations, then interview no less than five publicists before making your choice. Asking the following questions can help you glean crucial information about the person’s organizational skills, interest in and awareness of your specific product, networking abilities and general work ethic: During the past year, which one of our productions do you think was marketed well? Which production would you have marketed differently, and how would you have done so? How have you specifically built up your media contact list? Who do you envision getting most excited about our season's upcoming work, and how do you intend to bring it to their attention? What do you consider to be reasonable deadline time to get press releases to media contacts? Remember: You always want the publicist who represents you to be friendly, positive, and most important, courteous.
Promotion in Motion Once you’ve hired the right publicist, they will need to review the workings of your current marketing plan. So much of quality promotion is rooted in plain, old-fashioned common sense, but it’s amazing how even the most experienced theatre pros lose that basic practicality. Educate yourselves in the following no-fail rules of effective marketing: Think Outside the Box. “Even if you’re doing a well-known play, such as a Shakespeare piece, don’t assume your audience already knows everything about A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” points out Deb Pickman, a veteran publicist who is currently the marketing and communications manager for the University of British Columbia’s theatre department.
“Pull provocative lines out of the writing and use them in your press release. Look on the Internet for interesting facts or trivia about your play. Talk to your director about their vision for this particular production. All these bits and pieces can be used to focus your release’s message and communicate how wonderful and unique your production is.” Image Is Everything. Creating the perfect signature visual for your theatre means never settling for less than the best. “Use a great color photo,” advises Pickman. “Have your photographer take 50 rolls of film if you must. Your photo should be highly evocative of the show you’re advertising. Focus on your actor’s face for the image: your performer should be acting in character in the photo. A clear image on your posters is crucial. Your potential audience shouldn’t have to read a word to understand your show’s concept. If the design isn’t arresting, they won’t read it.”
Choose Your Words Carefully. Press releases should be succinct. “Press releases should run 200 to 300 words on the average,” says Pickman. “An e-mail release works best if it’s kept to about 50 words. Also, if you’re doing a mass mailing via e-mail, watch your subject line. Writing ‘Free Tickets’ is always good. Make it fun — if people don’t think your show’s going to change their life for the better, they’re not coming” WinOverYourCritics.
“Know where your media’s head is at,” says Pickman. “Are they clued in to cultural tourists as well as their local readers? Pitch every writer and editor you know who might be able to give you space. Also, use a personal approach. When preparing a really nice press release package, a thing I always do is enclose a handwritten note on beautifully colored paper — that personal touch is rare, and it gets the attention of the person you’re contacting. In addition to the basic elements, like the press release, photo, bios of personnel, fact sheet about the play and performance/ticket information, I also like to put something free and fun inside — a pencil or key chain with the theatre company’s logo.”
Working the Web The Internet can be an effective promotional tool for any theatre organization, but many companies that try to use various modes of Web marketing face some pitfalls. Updating content on Web sites, Web listings or e-mail contact lists can be labor-intensive. Also, standing out from a sea of competing online promos can be challenging. And how do you know you’re targeting the right customer online?
Many theatre organizations have navigated Internet promotion very successfully by hiring an e-marketing company to help them every step of the way. E-marketing firms can be invaluable for a number of reasons: they do all the work for you to make your season sound as commercially appealing as possible, they take complete responsibility for handling your technical essentials and they hook you up with potential customer populations you never knew you had. BeDynamic Inc. (www.bedynamic.com), a company based in Seattle, provides the travel and tourism industry with single-source Internet information that promotes cultural, arts, entertainment and sports events in numerous destination cities; it has become a significant and emerging resource for theatre companies across the country.
“BeDynamic’s approach has always been to see the theatres and organizations within a destination as our strategic partners,” explains Nancy Lemieux, CPO of the company. “They’ve pulled all their information together and need help marketing it, plus help managing all that on an ongoing basis. We help them with that by having an organization send us their information directly; we can produce that information in a single Internet source so more people can see it. We target hotels, airlines, any travel supplier who is really trying to promote a destination to sell their product.”
Even though BeDynamic fully facilitates the process for its clients, those clients’ needs remain top priority. “We represent an organization as they are trying to represent themselves,” says Lemieux. “We need to know how a theatre organization wants to be represented. Is a company’s press release and marketing material really where they want to be? If so, great, but if not, the company can have a conversation with us. We don’t try to editorialize. Because we’re working typically with Web copy, we do condense some press releases by pulling out the information our clients want. We keep the facts — the nature of what a theatre event is intended to be.”
Latifah Taormina, executive director of the Austin (Texas) Circle of Theatres, uses this form of e-marketing to create a comprehensive events calendar for her organization.
“I had a kind of wait-and-see attitude about e-marketing — you know, all these Web sites say they’re going to do this and that, but do they really?” she says. “I had BeDynamic touted to me by three independent sources at a conference quite accidentally. They are a wonderful organization in terms of content management. ”
E-marketing “changed the whole way we staffed ourselves,” adds Taormina. “We had a staff marketing director, and now we work with marketing consultants to get much more targeted, specific work for less money than what we were paying that staff person to do. Initially, e-marketing sounds like a huge investment, but I think it’s worth every penny. Web site marketing gives us a visibility we’ve never had before. This allows us to be in front of people in terms of what we do for our community and in terms of attracting sponsors who want that visibility. It’s very important.”
Other forms of e-marketing to explore may seem a bit grassroots, but many publicists highly recommend FaceBook, and/or setting up a MySpace page. Before you tackle either of these options, research other theatre companies’ current postings/pages and determine what you like and don’t like about the way your competition presents itself. See whether their graphics translate well. Decide whether their copy is effective or out-of-place in this kind of genre and figure out how you can do it better. You might also want to explore Flickr (www.flickr.com), a Web site that allows you to post promotional photos and graphics, that can then be downloaded by a client at no cost. Research advice on the specifics of setting up your page extensively through Google before you start, and ask for hands-on help from your Web site designer or a tech-smart staffer.
E-marketing is really what you make of it. If you think out the process with care, and execute your promotional moves wisely, the law of averages will reward you with prominent reviews — and a full, happy house. Lisa Mulcahy is the author of the book Building the Successful Theater Company (Allworth Press).