You’ve booked the venue. You got the best director your budget could afford. You’ve been rehearsing twice a week for 2 months to get your original show up on is feet. You’re ready to entertain the masses. Yet nobody knows a thing about all of this work, you’ve got rent to pay for 6-8 weeks, and a bunch of actors itching to get their time in the limelight! What are you going to do?!
Well, I’ll tell ya! Follow these 5 easy tips to help get the word out:
- Get great cast photos
Place an ad online (Craigslist.org, PerformInk.com, Yesand.com, Chicagoimprov.org) looking for someone with experience to give you high quality photographs of your cast. If you can get pictures taken on the actual stage you are going to perform in, even better. Get some staged shots of the group as well as some action photos while the cast is performing a scene.Make sure the pictures you receive are at least 300 DPI (dots per inch) as that will allow you to use these in newspapers, magazines, and websites. Try to negotiate with your photographer to see if you can get them to edit the photos as well. Sometime they will do it for free as part of their service. Typically a lot of raw images you get need color balance, exposure correction, and some kind of editing to make sure they’re at their best. Do not have them run any kind of special filters on the pictures as it could make them unusable to others looking to use them to help you promote the show. Also, make sure you credit the photographer. It gets you in good graces with them and may prompt them to spread the word about your production. - Pick a catchy title for your show
This is always a fun exercise especially in the theatre world. Many groups write their own original material and don’t have a definitive idea as to what to call their show until they’ve decided on what is going to make it into the show. Others just pick a title arbitrarily and shoe horn the title into their marketing materials. Others have the luxury of having a title as someone else wrote the material and made that decision for them (oh Rocky Horror Picture Show revivalists…you have it made!)For those of you who write your own material, if you’ve got the luxury of having time to tie in your title with your material, please do so. A popular title schema people use to generate title names is to take a pop culture reference (a movie, book, or TV show title) and spoof the name. For example, I’m currently in a show right now with Salsation Theatre Company, NFP entitled Textual Healing – an obvious spoof of the song Sexual Healing performed by Marvin Gaye. The material in the show deals with communication and relationships in our day and age of cellphones, texting, and social media. The title totally fits the material and has a twinkle of something familiar for people to latch onto when they see/hear about it. - Create an eye-catching flyer/poster
Now that you’ve got your title, show logistics, and pictures, you can parlay those into a fancy postcard flyer. Again, you can post up online ads for this service. Have a face-to-face with them to communicate what you want in the graphic if possible. If not, at least talk to them on the phone. Get an estimate of how long it will take them to create your graphics and what restrictions you have when using it. There are many people willing to do the work for free or for very affordable prices (like us!). Try to find someone who has experience with marketing theatre shows as they will understand what timelines/pressures you face producing the show (again, like us!) - Publish a Press Release
This is one of the easiest yet most overlooked aspects of promotion. A press release sets you apart from your run-of-the-mill productions as it implies your actually serious about what you’re putting up. You will send these to anybody and everybody willing to listen/read. Your press release should include:- Who, what, when, where, why, and how much
- Show graphic and/or cast photo
- Contact information (phone number, email, and website)
Try to keep this information limited to one printable sheet (called a one-sheet). There’s no need to give extra information about your show unless it’s requested 🙂
- Get It Out of Your Hands ASAP
Your press release needs to be in the hand of the press (newspapers, websites, and blogs) within plenty of time to increase the chances staff gets a chance to read about your awesome creation. Give yourself at a minimum 4 weeks before opening night to send out your press release to your contacts. I’d recommend sending it out 6 weeks in advance with a follow up email 2 weeks out from opening night. This ensures that you have considered their time to review the mountains of press releases they get every day while not being annoying about reminding them they need to come out and see/review/promote your show 😉
That’s it! Sounds easy enough, right?! Get crackin’! There are more tips to come in the future.
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