It’s weird, y’know? I spend all my days doing marketing of some way, shape or form. But sometimes, when you are doing something all the time, you get your head so involved in it, that you loose perspective on the very basis of why it is you do what you do.
I’m writing this the morning after having a meeting with Simon and some of my clients, the fine people at Itsazoo Productions. See, Itsazoo has a production coming up in March, and while I’m doing the PR for them, they wanted to get a sense of what else they could do on a grassroots level from someone who’d been there. Simon was recently part of a team that did a very successful production called The Twenty-First Floor at the PAL (which is where Itsazoo is producing Death of a Clown).
When you are learning about marketing, here is lesson number one: word of mouth is always, always, always the best way to sell tickets. We are so inundated with advertising these days (it’s everywhere), that we have learned to tune it out. It is for that reason that you need to have multiple touchpoints to get the word out about your show. But a 30-second chat with the person beside you on the bus, followed up by a flyer or postcard, is going to increase your odds of selling a ticket dramatically.
We love what we do as theatre artists. We are passionate. And when you really, really love something and believe in it, selling it becomes oh, so much easier and convincing.
So, the next time you are in a play, take a stack of postcards with you everywhere you go. Take a risk. Talk to a stranger about what you do. And you might be surprised at the result.