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Being More Creative in Marketing the Arts Successfully marketing an arts program requires a lot of creativity, both for the normal reason that marketing is about reaching people in new ways, and because those you are marketing a theatre program to likly respond best to creativity. There are a few steps you can use to help yourself be more creative in your marketing efforts. The first step to being creative is to presume that you are creative, because you are. Confidence is the most important step to creativity because even the greatest idea that is never brought up is not worth anything. Everyone is creative, and those involved in theater should be aware of this, and should be aware that creativity in one area can easily extend to other areas. Creativity is simply a matter of putting things together in unique ways, just like story telling in a theater which is a matter of putting together knowledge of the art and society, marketing is a matter of putting together an art form and knowledge of society. For this reason creativity rather then being a spontainious event is typically a matter of someone having the things in their brain to put together and thinking about these things enough and in the right ways to have them jump to the forefront of their mind. In this way it can be said that creativity is merely a matter of knowing the elements that will go into your final ad. For many it is this last part that is the difficult one, how after all can you know what is going to be in an ad that you have not yet created. Obviously you can't know exactly what is going to be in such an ad but you can have a general idea about it. You know for example that it has to be something to do with your target audience and the theatre and arts programs, and the perfromance that is being done by these. So in being creative about ads you must learn all you can about the arts program you are marketing, and you must learn all you can about the target audience. Begin by thinking about how that demographic feels about different events at the moment, they are a culture and so you need to connect your cultural program to them where they are at. Think of what is it that they find funny, what do they find beautiful? Is their a comic strip they follow regularly, news they are interested in, movies they love, plays they have watched? Write these things down along with the different aspects of your arts program and performance, pay special attention to what message you want to get across to the target, perhaps to widen your target you can make a few messages that would fit within your brand. After you have studied the problem think about it in different ways put your knowledge together. Write down every idea you have, no ideas are bad ideas at this point. Ideas jump off of each other, they come from each other so when you are trying to come up with one all of the ideas you have are the steps to the right one. Think of creativity as being like a puzzle if you can't solve it this might mean you do not have all the pieces or are not seeing them all. So as you hit impasses (which you likely will) there are three things you can do, walk away from the problem for a moment or immerse yourself back in learning more about, experianceing, or restudying the culture in question. By rethinking you allow your brain to cycle through the ideas again, allowing it to reorient itself. Finally you can also go to others for ideas and help, for in the puzzle that is creativity it is easier for two people to find the pieces then for one person. Remember always that more minds are better, so you should always ask for input, ask others to go through the process as well. Brainstorm with others even if it is only a few others, after they have gone through the basics of the process have them through out ideas, thoughts and more. However one of the big problems that groups will have is not wanting to finish, groups take longer, and at times they never finish because they never feel anything is good enough. Sometimes you will have to take that information and run with it (if you have the ability to do that) rather then trying to do the finishing of the ad in a group. Being creative takes one last thing besides knowledge and thinking, it can take practice, so if you need to create ads create a few of them, and as you do you will find that they tend to get better over time. signers are marketers in many ways, and they are usually fairly good at planning new ways to reach the people in the area’s they live. |