Helen’s tips are an in depth guideline as to marketing, planning and making the most of your event.
Planning
- Start planning early, don’t leave marketing & communications to the last minute
- Be clear about what you want to achieve: good attendance, specific type of attenders, media coverage, promoters seeing your work
- Develop a press list of contacts
- Start setting up your social media activity: twitter, facebook page, blog etc and generate followers early and keep talking to them
Timescale
- Build marketing & communications into your overall timescale
- Have a plan of what you’re going to do when, e.g. send out press releases, produce leaflet, set up online presence etc
Budget
- Marketing costs money too, if you spend no money on it, don’t expect to reach your objectives
- Allocate some resources to cover marketing activity in your overall budget
Understanding the needs, benefits and opportunities of being part of a festival
- Why are you participating in this particular festival – what are the benefits?
- What information does the festival need to help you to promote your work, e.g. copy, images, background information?
- Are there opportunities to work with other artists to jointly promote your work within the festival?
- Will you get chance to see other people’s work, talk to other artists?
Understand your audiences
- Who are your audiences? – artform specific, venue specific, festival specific, looking for new work, young, old, families, couples etc etc
- How and where do they find information about shows?
- How can you target them effectively – what type of marketing activity (print, social media, PR etc)?
Creative thinking on your marketing and communications
- Be creative about your marketing and communications – brainstorm with colleagues/friends about how to promote your show and then choose the most appropriate and deliverable ideas
- Talk to other artists and venues about what they do
- Learn from your mistakes and don’t repeat them!
Consistency in the look and feel of your identity & your key messages
- Make sure whatever you produce for your show looks good and that you are consistent in how you use your logo & typeface for you as an artist or your company – if in doubt keep it simple
- Is the copy legible and can anyone understand it? Get rid of the pretentious arty copy!
- Do you have good strong images that press can use, that you can use online and in print?
- Make sure you are consistent in how you talk about your show – can you explain it in a sentence?
- Is it easy for people to book tickets?
How to stand out from the noisy crowd
- Festivals are crowded marketplaces with so much choice and limited time to make a mark so think about how you can profile your work
- Don’t fall into the trap of naff PR stunts just to get coverage if it’s not consistent with what you are trying to portray as an artist
- Is there something in your show that you can use for PR purposes?
- You’ll need to build up the marketing and communications activity as you get closer to the opening of your show
- Listings – very easy to get placed in listings but you need to do it well in advance
- Press releases – keep it simple, short and make sure you cover the who, what, where, when, how, why & contact details
- If you produce print (leaflets, posters, postcards etc), think about where you’ll distribute it, how you’ll do it, when you’ll do it and the cost of distributing that print if you use a third party agency. Be aware that flyposting is illegal in most cities but there are often official flyposting sites
- Think about how you profile your show at the venue, e.g. window dressing, posters, leaflets, show reviews. Can the venue tell their customers about your show?
Ongoing activity
- Don’t stop when you get busy or when your show has opened, or even if you’ve only performed for one night
- Need to keep an ongoing dialogue with your audiences
- Use your time wisely – standing on a street corner handing out leaflets is not necessarily the answer and you should have a permit (unless you’re in Edinburgh!)
- Any quirky stories that the media might be interested in or you can post online?
Evaluation
- Build this in from the start
- How will you know if your show has been a success – audience numbers, media coverage, quality of the experience for the audience?
- Talk to your audience if you can – even if it’s over a drink in the bar after the show – find our what worked and what didn’t
- Questionnaires – is this appropriate for your show and for the venue? What do you want to find out, why and how will you use that information?
- Whatever you find out, use it to inform what you do in the future
- If you develop an audience database of email addresses that you can use in the future, just make sure you adhere to Data Protection issues
- Can you use any of your evaluation to promote your next show?
