Marketing Culture and the Arts: Creating the Plan

            It is important to begin any process with a plan, and marketing is no different, after all you likely would not have a major performance without a script, and a director’s instruction. These things constitute the plan of your performance. To market in such away that you get an audience you also need a plan for marketing the theater.

            A plan is a means to help you know what you are doing, it is a way to let everyone know what part they need to play, and what needs to happen in order to insure that everything gets done. It is also a way to show what you are doing so that you can improve where things need to be improved, this way you do not simply hopscotch between different ideas, with no real strategy for how the different ideas are supposed to work together and what they should do as a whole. Each marketing plan must therefore begin with a statement about what it is your performance group wishes to achieve, and what the purpose of the theater is as a whole. Doing this provides bases for what you plan will say as will as how it will say it, in order to build a culture of theater in your town.

            Begin your plan by looking at your competitors, in the case of a theatre your competitors are many of the leisure activities which people could do instead. They are also simple apathy, a lack of interest and desire to be involved in the art community. It is important to understand the people in your community; different people will react differently to different tactics. Get censuses on the community; discover the average income, the size of families, and the numbers in different age categories. This will help you to form a picture of the types of ads you want to place, and perhaps where to place them. Along with this basic information it is also possible for you to collect some survey information on your community, creating questions you want to ask. You can also hire online or offline survey makers to help with this depending again on your budget. The importance of understanding your potential audience cannot be stressed enough, as you are dependent on the people’s lifestyle and culture of your community.

            As you go through these processes you should continue to ask yourself what it is that you want your marketing to achieve. Is it greater diversity, a larger audience, a stronger more educated community, or just a better cash flow your theater can stay in business? All of these things are important to any arts programs, and to a certain extent all of them will be present in your goals. However you should choose one or two of these to focus on, because they will all affect your decision making. Dropping the price of tickets for example could increase audience size but decrease income, while increasing ticket price could decrease those attending the performance while increasing the income of your arts program. As you look at your goals keep in mind that each of these requires you to reach out to a different set of people, that set of people is your target audience, and it is them that the rest of your strategy should focus on.

            Your marketing program should include a mix of methods for reaching your community and getting people involved in the arts. Brochure design, poser design, and flyers are all common methods for theaters to reach and audience and should likely continue to be used. Distributing such things is of course is the trick, you can of course place them around the theater, and perhaps hand them out on the street, however these things do not insure good targeting. Better places for the arts to market could include book stores, independent book stores could for example be contacted, and asked if it would be possible to place flyers near the theatre sections of their store. There are also various civic groups which are known to volunteer for various organizations, from Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, to older clubs it is possible to get volunteers to help you distribute or even find ways to distribute your brochures and flyers.

            Marketing can also include newspaper spreads, magazine ads (if your city is big enough to have its own), radio ads, and local TV station ads. All of these cost money, and again require targeting. This means you must think about and examine what sections of the paper and which papers your audience reads, what TV shows they watch, and radio shows they listen too. It also means that you must weigh the reach of these verses the cost to conduct them. Finally it is important to make certain that such campaign methods work in conjunction with your other methods. The internet is presenting a new avenue for marketing arts programs, however the internet does have the difficulty of being a global rather then a local phenomenon, and while it is my wish to change this, at least where the arts are concerned for now it can be difficult to market with enough reach locally to make a huge impact. This said there are some methods you should think about, these include a webpage with the ability to sell tickets (a Paypal.com account for this purpose is free costing money only as a ticket is sold, and they take all major credit cards). There is also Geotargeted PPC ads which can be targeted to those searching for terms in your area, or on websites related to those terms. In a small community however most people interested enough to search for performance and theater information online will likely know something about your arts program. It might be necessary to be smarter to expand your reach by including relevant interest items, such as art in general, or movie musicals which are based on performances similar to the one you are conducting. You can also market on Yahoo Local among other local services so that when people search for information on the community they will see your ad. Keep in mind however that lots of people going clicking on your ad is not always best, as this can drain your marketing budget leaving you with nothing to show for it.
            Sales are the life blood of most any arts program and your theater should rely fairly heavily on these, from booths in key places in town, to your theater booth, to the telephone and door to door attempts, a sales force can help you find interest area’s and allow you to gauge in real time how your marketing program is doing.

            Every once in a while your marketing tactics will hit a wall, the arts after all are a very fluctuating enterprise. When this happens having a good plan will help you to see that you are doing everything possible and so will prevent you from mentally defeating yourself. A good plan will also allow you to gather good metrics on the population regarding what you are doing, to help you figure out if there is anything else you could be doing. In short a marketing plan for the arts is the means by which you can help to insure the continued success of the marketing program for the arts in your community.