London or Bust…ok mostly bust

I've just finished a very hard summer in London working on The Writers' Room, a great one-act show by Michael Shannon, that I toured from Belfast to London with Accidental Theatre. It was the first show that I have brought to London, appearing in the London Festival Fringe in July and the Camden Fringe in August, after we debuted it in Belfast at Pop-Up Pick 'n' Mix in June. We had a fantastic time bringing it to London but it was an immense challenge for our unknown company to market in such a large and daunting metropolis.

We learned a huge amount about marketing and I thought it may be helpful to others if I put some of what I learned down. A lot of what is below is distilled from the advice of Laura Willis, Jess Baker, Esther Fowler and Neil Laidlaw, thank you to them! Couldn't have done it without you.

The Advice

• Create a short video promo (no longer than 30 secs) and forward to the festival/venues marketing/press officers, along with an e-flyer, and ask them to distribute throughout their various systems – email, website, FB, etc

• Target everyone you know in London with this info too to raise interest

• Keep your FB page up to date with info on the show including the video, audience comments, behind the scenes footage, etc

• Encourage your local theatre sector to promote the show to their contacts in London – reiterate the objective of raising the profile of your emerging theatre company in London, to engage them and encourage them to support you

• If anyone who would be known in London has seen the production, ask them for a short quote to use in promotion. Add this to the promo, any flyers you get produced, etc

• Contact local arts networks or groups (i.e. new writers networks) and tell them about the play – the subject matter being of relevance to them

• Ask festivals/fringes/venues/other companies if they'd allow you to exit-flyer other shows that are running that may have a similar audience

• Contact other companies that are performing at the same time and seem to have a similar ethos, and see if you could do some dual-promotion – rave about each other!

• Contact your University Alumni association who may have networks they can distribute info about your show to. Plus they like to know what we're up to.

Whats on Stage Ticket Offer

Neil thinks this is worth paying for – give an offer for your first week/week and a half. WOS have a lot of theatre fans who like to see stuff, and like to get a discount. With all offers you can limit the offers to a max of 20 per night. I didn't use this but it sounds good.

Better when it's a strong and visual image – apparently they don’t often run with production shots (though if it’s very good they do). Time Out does run with production shots, but they prefer a good image for their pic and caption.

Press Release

Getting the tone and format of the press release exactly right I often find challenging but found this post on creative bloom about how to write one useful and this post about how to make it more likely it'll be read even better.

When getting format right, I found great examples of good Press Releases on most of the major theatre's websites in their press sections. I like the one from the Southwark Playhouse.

Including listing info under the press release was very helpful when sending to listings sites and to main newspapers.

Offers/Discounts – general

Neil thinks it's commonplace to reduce your ticket price – one of the reasons for hiking it up to begin with. He suggests reducing it to £10 to allow you to take advantage of the Lastmiunte.com tickets for a tenner section – apparently this does work.

He also strongly suggests not having a concession policy in the final week – if you're doing well this can make quite a bit of difference.

E Footers

Getting a plug underneath another theatres weekly newsletter/special offer.

I've found this to be very good and many theatres are very willing to help out if you give them plenty of notice, and specific dates to send by. You usually need to reciprocate these with a mention on your own eflyers. Similarly, asking for mentions on social networking sites and reciprocating those is great. Neil also thinks it can be worth offering free programme ads, as in reality we will struggle to sell space in a programme so this is a much more economic use of it. I've found most marketing teams are happy if we just reciprocate with mailings, facebook and twitter.

Ones I found open to it: Kings Head, Union Theatre, Southwark Playhouse, Arcola, Theatre 503, Landor, Greenwich Theatre, Stratford East, Finborough, BAC, Riverside Studios, Lyric Hammersmith, Tricycle, Hampstead, Soho, Bush, Royal Court, National, Roundhouse, Out of Joint and Young Vic.

Like most things I found contacting a named person at each theatre's marketing department much more successful than using a general email address. Most theatres have their full teams contact details somewhere, but you often have to hunt around a bit. Also having pre-written copy and a specific image ready for mailings, facebook and twitter is really handy.

Poster/Flyers distribution

This is mostly sewn up by London Calling or Impact, Neil has found Mobius Industries to be cheap and good.

I'm really not sure how good flyering is, this summer we had mixed results. The best coming from exit flyering specific shows and venues of similar target audiences or in the same venue as we were playing.

Neil says it’s hard to make an impact, and London Calling will charge a minimum of around £500.

Audience Clubs

Metro Reader Offer

Another good way of getting free promotion – they will run a reader offer and then you tell them how many people booked and they invoice you £3 per ticket. Tough to get, but worth pursuing.

Direct Mail

The best way of selling tickets – Dress Circle can provide a mailing list. However it does prove to be expensive by the time you have printed the letters and paid for envelopes and postage.

Reviews

Time Out – Most Important – the real ‘fringe goers’ guide – a critics choice can shift a lot of tickets.

Evening Standard – Less important than it used to be, but again can get the word out.

London Lite/ The London Paper – Difficult to get, but this should be interesting to them.

Metro – Very good if you can get them, but they only cover one show a day and all of the West End shows want to get them.

Guardian/Telegraph/Time/Independent – Good for profile, not so important at selling tickets. A great review in any of them will move some seats but the demographic of their readership does not fit well into fringe going (generally).

Daily Mail – Baz Bamibgoyes Colum is great to get in to – it does sell tickets

I did find targeting some of the smaller newspapers, locals, quite useful too, especially if you have an angle/hook. I had great success with the Irish World and Irish Post, strangely enough.

That's it, hope some of it is new and perhaps helpful.

R