Advertising vs Marketing…..best practices in musical theatre

One of the main jobs of a producer is marketing and advertising.  But, what is the difference between the two?  To me, marketing is about knowing your show, understanding who your audience is (And YES, you must decide who exactly your audience is. I sometimes hear writers tell me – the whole world is my audience…NO that is not the case.) and coming up with a strategy for selling your product.  Advertising is the method used to communicate – it is the media involved.  Here are some ways I have discovered for marketing your show.

Website – Having a website for your show is essential.  It says you are serious about your show, and it is easy to create these days.  If you don’t want to do it – hire someone to do it.  But make sure you have one, and make sure you maintain it regularly. Put a lot of pictures and graphics on your website.  Make it visually pleasing…and make your audience want to click on the subpages to learn more.

Wikipedia – Getting a listing in Wikipedia is tricky, but it does add credibility.  It is much easier if you have already had a production.  But give it a shot.  If they reject the submission, adjust it and try again.

Articles/Blogs – Some of the smaller papers have the space and love stories about locals doing theatre. Start with a local paper (or a paper from where the composers are from) and petition them to do a feature on your show.  Of course, it helps even more if you write something and submit to them.  Everyone loves to have their work done for them. Be sure to give them pictures as well – everything helps.

Posters/postcards/flyers – Once you have a production scheduled, then you can move into getting these printed.  But, don’t do this until you are ready.  You never know if the title will change or the main graphics.  And, hopefully the theatre will help pay for these items.

In any event, you must have an excellent graphic artist to do most of the graphics for almost all of these marketing ideas and you need someone (you!) to update your website regularly.  All of these are essential to keeping information about your show out there…..and of course…networking….networking…networking…..more about that in a future blog.

Any other advertising or marketing ideas that I forgot?  Please let me know.  The more we share information the better.

Larry Little
Producer