No one ever said theatre marketing is easy, but it is important. After you've spent all the time to get a production ready to perform, there's nothing more deflating than playing to an empty house. You have to fill the seats!
So you've found yourself in charge of marketing for the theatre. Should you be exceptionally blessed it is a full-time gig in which you earn enough to pay your bills, but it's much more likely one of many occupations that take up your time. Either way it falls to you to get seats marketed and improve the exposure of your theatre.
The whole thing starts off with determining who you are. What is your unique hook? Do you think you're a family-friendly location? Are you more about experimental fare? Dinner theatre? It really is acceptable to try out different options, but you need a catchy element that distinguishes you from competing local theatres. You achieve that by recognizing your personality, and choosing material and creatives that recognize that vision.
In the end you should establish a good name for creating great shows. Why don't we suppose that you're without a doubt delivering fantastic content and our focus is merely getting the word out there regarding it. You create your reputation a single show at a time. So it is your responsibility to advertise each individual performance, and the snowballing impact of each show is the thing that makes up your standing as a theatre.
Your most important advertising tool is a website. It does not automatically make any difference if you have a website for every distinct show or only one for your whole theatre. It is definitely quicker to manage a single, good internet site that you can use for all performances. The most important thing is that it's painless for you to add new material - in particular pictures and video clips - on the site. If you have someone available familiar with HTML back to front, that's terrific. If not you need to have your internet site created so that a non-technical person can still make updates.
You will also have to get on excellent terms with your local press. Bear in mind they're searching for newsworthy pieces. If you'd like them to include your story, you need to let them have an interesting hook. The fact that you are putting on a show may get covered in the local arts calendar, but if your performance has some exceptional angle relevant to the local community you may be able to land a real story. Is your performance the tale of a local historic figure? Are all the props provided by local firms? Was it authored by a local? You may not have a lot of content to use, but it's worthwhile to put on your thinking cap. Virtually any angle surpasses no angle. (Do this for enough consecutive performances, and your local media outlets will start coming to you to ask what performances you have in the works.)
Social networking is an especially cost-effective method to promote your production. You could be convinced that your audience isn't actually participating in social media, but you would be surprised. There are more Facebook accounts than people today in the U.S., and those accounts cross a myriad of age and income levels. Additionally lots of the cast members in your productions could be active on Facebook. When they are posting photographs from your show with their community of close friends on the site, they are actually promoting the performance (and the theatre) for you. Ensure it is straightforward for them to share. Be participating in Facebook.
Your intention with each and every performance should be to boost the number of individuals signing up to your newsletter. Have subscribe forms in the lobby and feature it in the program. It's a good idea to do a mailed newsletter as that is the delivery quite a few patrons will want, but you might also look at an email variation of your newsletter. Some of your fans might have a preference for that format, and you can save a bundle on mailing expenses for that part of your subscribers that's comfortable receiving the latest announcements from you on their monitor.
