Tag Archives: Liz Femi

The “M” Word–Revisited

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by Guest Blogger Liz Femi

Liz Femi
Liz Femi

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my quest to cure, or at least temper, my marketing phobia. I would have easily lived peacefully with humdrum marketing anxiety for the rest of my days, until I wrote a play…and decided to produce it. I scoured the web for marketing tips that were suitable for theatre and settled on Clay Mabbit’s blog: Sold Out Run and his marketing kit: Reaching A New Audience. Over the past few weeks, as my team and I promoted,  Take Me To The Poorhouse (our show at the 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival), we applied Clay’s marketing strategies in Reaching A New Audience.

I am happy to report that the experiment proved successful.

Our efforts culminated in sold out shows almost every night of our run, not to mention a few laurels and an invitation to extend the run. (BEST OF FRINGE EXTENSIONS, BEST INTERNATIONAL, DUENDE DISTINCTION award nomination for excellence in acting)

How did it happen?

A combination of Clay’s Mabbit’s excellent suggestions and a darn-good, dedicated team.

What did we do?

We applied the modules in Reaching A New Audience, which include:

  • Foundation (marketing basics to create a well-oiled machine)

  • Your Perfect Audience (how to identify and tailor your marketing niche)

  • The Schedule (a detailed marketing calendar with suggested tasks)

  • Worth A Thousand Words (“visual ammunition”)

  • Use Your Cast (tapping into the talent you already have)

We tailored Clay’s ideas to fit a one-person show, along with our mix of flair–like a step-and-repeat for audiences to take pictures after the show, and raffles/token giveaways related to the story.

Reaching A New Audience image

Hits of Reaching A New Audience:

  • We varied our social media content so it wasn’t always focused on promoting ticket sales (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

  • We produced a pre-preview night generate pre-festival buzz.

  • We committed to a strong involvement in the fringe community by comp swapping, filling seats for other shows, seeing as many shows as we could, engaging in “fringeships” on twitter and in person at Fringe Central.

  • Identifying our audience and reaching out to target groups within and outside our networks (ex: African Artists Association, Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative, Directors Lab West, Actors Mastermind Group, friends in and out of the industry, and of course, family members)

  • We were also nominated for Best Trailer!

  • We attracted press to (podcasts, radio, blogs, print) to every show, even with almost 200 shows running simultaneously.

  • Weekend evening shows were easiest to fill, so we brought all hands on deck for the weekday afternoon shows. With consistent and varied marketing, we sold out almost every show.

    • On June 8th and 14th–we oversold and added an extra row of chairs

    • June 16th–full house without many advanced tickets but lots of walk-ups

    • June 19th–slow sales. Reached out to fringe community and Directors Lab to fill house. Quite a few walk ups as well.

    • June 21st–sold out. Extra row of chairs.

    • June 28th–full house.

Misses:

None.

Well…there is the price of the kit, which currently retails $147. You do have to carefully weigh the cost of the Reaching A New Audience with your production goals. For example, depending on the size of a production, one could rationalize the purchase as the cost of 10 seats at $15 a ticket, to get practical, effective, and organized tactics to help build an audience. In my opinion, the price would be too hefty for a one-show run.

Reaching A New Audience image

Finally, nothing beats the power of a strong team to help you get these marketing ideas off the ground and running, and even playing with your own variations along the way. That’s the best part…when marketing becomes a fun game.

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Poorhouse-Postcard-FRONT

Take Me To The Poorhouse is currently on a BEST OF FRINGE EXTENSIONS run in association with Theatre Planners.

Friday, July 12th @8:00 pm

Thursday, July 18th @8:00 pm

Friday, July 26th @ 10:00 pm

Running time: 60 mins

Venue: The Lounge Theatres (lounge #2) 6201 Santa Monica Blvd, Hollywood 90038

Tickets: $15. Available here.

 

The “M” Word

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by Guest Blogger Liz Femi

 

Fringe is in the air. Artists of all ilk are excited to bare their souls on Hollywood stages. But fringin’ ain’t easy. With hundreds of shows vying for audience attention, artists on a limited budget are left with no choice but to don the hats of marketing specialist, fundraiser, and publicist. Oh and of course, back to artist. Right. Each aspect is a feat in its own right, but I’d like to focus on marketing in this post. As someone who had a marketing phobia (I still do to some extent), I understand how marketing may feel like trying to hit a piñata in the dark–with some cruel, invisible entity spinning you astray. The truth is, whenever I feel this way, it’s because I don’t have enough information. I finally owned up to my part in the matter and began digging. In my search for how to market theatre specifically, I stumbled upon Clay Mabbit’s blog: Sold Out Run. The blog alone has an incredible amount of information. When I found out that Clay also wrote a book: Reaching A New Audience, and that the book details strategies to draw audiences of a digital age to the theatre, it immediately piqued my interest.

 

So we made a deal.

 

I would read and apply the modules in Reaching A New Audience and write an honest review based on my experience (Clay offered this opportunity in a newsletter to subscribers). Clay provides a ton of ideas in twelve modules, which he describes as “tactical steps of promoting your show.” He adds, “you can tackle one module a day, one each week, or whatever pattern works for you. Most of the modules can be completed in 20 minutes or less.”

 

Over the past few weeks, my team and I have been experimenting with Clay’s tactics in promoting my play, Take Me To The Poorhouse, at this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival. Modules in Reaching A New Audience include:

  • Foundation (marketing basics to create a well-oiled machine)
  • Your Perfect Audience (how to identify and tailor your marketing niche)
  • The Schedule (a detailed marketing calendar with suggested tasks)
  • Worth A Thousand Words (“visual ammunition”)
  • Use Your Cast (tapping into the talent you already have)

 

Here are examples of ideas we ran with:

1. Creating memes of characters in the show–

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Our Facebook fans enjoy our meme series and we still have several characters to go.

 

2. We added a blog to our show’s website, as a way to keep the site dynamic and current.

Take Me To The Poorhouse—blog

 

3. We also shot a trailer, one of the many ideas also echoed in Outreach Nerd, Cindy Marie Jenkins’s Social Media Marketing workshops.

Cindy’s insight has been an excellent complement to Clay’s module because it helps us really fine tune how to use social media to effectively disseminate the content in Clay’s modules. Hopefully the entire process will help quell those old, queasy marketing nightmares. Fingers crossed.

 

Reaching A New Audience currently retails at $147 and Clay has given me permission to read it for free. $147 is a hefty price to pay for a book. Is it worth it? Stay tuned for results in my follow-up post.

 

Take Me To The Poorhouse is currently running at the 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival

Friday, June 14th @8:00 pm

Sunday, June 16th @ 2:00 pm

Wednesday, June 19th @4:00 pm

Friday, June 21st @10:00 pm

Friday, June 28th @ 8:00 pm

 

Running time: 60 mins

Venue: The Lounge Theatres (lounge #2) 6201 Santa Monica Blvd, Hollywood 90038

Tickets: $10. Available here.