Producing and selling a show is a lot and it can be very easy to get caught up in focusing just on that show and neglect the bigger picture for your business.
Having a marketing plan for your theatre company helps you to continue to grow your audience even when you’re not producing a show. This means you don’t need to start from square one every time you launch a new play.
Making a full-blown marketing plan can be daunting, so I’ve made a list of 5 theatre marketing basics you need to think about so that you can work on building and growing your indie theatre company outside of just promoting shows.
This might be for you if you’re:
Producing a play for the first time
Starting your own theatre company (or another creative business)
Have a theatre company but haven’t really thought much about the marketing
1. Who is your ideal Customer
(Hint: it’s not your mum, and it’s not “everyone”).
Not everyone is into everything, and that’s fine, but it’s important to know who your people are so you can focus your attention on them. To use an acting analogy here, it’s the same as being specific about character’s motivation. If your character has a clear objective, are you going to just loosely pursue it with everyone, or will you go directly to the person that can give you what you want? The latter, right? Same for marketing.
Think about your ideal customer - the person who is going to buy tickets to all of your shows. Get creative with this: give them a name, age, job, suburb. What do they love to do? What is important to them? Where do they get their information? Which way do they vote? How do they get to work? What motivates them? Draw them and stick the picture above your desk, because they will guide all your marketing decisions – how can you speak directly to them?
2. Think about your branding
I love branding, and if you’re a theatre person you probably will too because it’s just building a character.
When you see a character on stage you interpret a bunch of elements to build your idea of them: what they wear, how they move, what they say, how they say it, how other people react to them and so on. Branding is exactly that, it’s all the elements that shape how people see and think about your business.
Good branding - like interesting, fully rounded characters - is not just the aesthetics – the colours, fonts, logo – or what you say about yourself: it’s also what you do, and it’s all got to be consistent. A character might say they are one thing and do the opposite (looking at you Iago) – and sure, this makes for interesting drama, but you don’t trust the character. You want people to trust your brand, so you have to be consistent.
Think about some theatre companies, if they were people, who would they be? Sydney Theatre Company would be a very different person to Red Line Productions or Griffin Theatre.
What about you – what’s the character of your business?
3. Have a website
You need a website. A Facebook page just isn’t going to cut it. A website is like your digital shopfront, it’s a space that is entirely yours* and you can use it to connect with people. A website will also give you a nice sense of legitimacy: if someone googles you and finds a great website (with excellent branding!) your credibility has just gone up +5.
No web skills, no problem: there are heaps of drag and drop website tools and some chic templates ranging from free to a couple hundred dollars. Just remember, at the end of the day it’s not about having all the bells and whistles on your page, your priority is connecting with your audience. It’s not about you, it’s about them. Make the information interesting and easy to find.
*Never forget you don’t own your Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/whatever page and you’re not in control of how your content appears and to whom it’s shown.
4. Create additional content
Now that you’ve got this amazing website, give people a reason to visit it 365 days a year, not just when you have a show on. How do you do that? By creating cool bonus content that people will find interesting – think of it like the DVD extras of your page.
Having unique content on your website has three main benefits:
1) You have extra things to share to places like your social media or your email list (#5 ↓)
2) People have a reason to come to your site
3) Your SEO improves. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is essentially Google reading your website and showing it to people in their search results.
The potential content you create is limitless and you're creative so this is your jam. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
If you have some great programme notes, put them online.
Perhaps some of your actors would like to write a rehearsal room diary and give an exclusive behind the scenes look at the process.
If you know the writer of the play, interview them about their work (or if they are famous and long dead, create a funny fictional interview).
If you’ve done a play on the school curriculum, create some educational resources that teachers could use.
5. Get. That. Email. List. (and treat them well)
Don’t put all your eggs into one social media basket. Having followers on Facebook isn’t enough because you don’t own them, Facebook does. All it takes is for them to change one little algorithm and your followers may never see your amazing content. This is why you need an email list.
There are plenty of ways in which you can grow your list: ask people to sign up when they are booking, have a clipboard in the foyer, offer them something like a ticket discount or a free list of marketing tips (hi, please sign up for my theatre co’s email list here).
Once you have them, nurture them and treat them well because they are solid gold. Don’t just spam them with promotions for your shows, make being on your list worth their while and enrich their lives. Give them things that will make them love you (this is a great opportunity to collaborate with other companies, maybe you can do a swap and offer freebies to each others’ shows) and then you can ask them to buy tickets.
(Remember that people need to opt in to your email list, Australia has some pretty strict anti-spam laws.)