Category Archives: Marketing

Reflection on Marketing and Advertising

Reflecting back on the decisions made within the Advertising and Marketing team, i am thoroughly pleased and privileged on what we managed to create and achieve with the time period we were given.

Our first initial ideas towards trailers, posters and programmes have different and altered over the process, but only improved to the better. On reflection, i feel they have all been designed to coincide with the themes related within ‘the trial’. At the same time as this, we focused largely on trying to keep them simplistic and also in a way mysterious , without giving to much away about the show.

The advertisement of the show was also helped and acknowledged through our social networking sites, as well as flyers distributed around Lincoln, to try and attract a wide variety of audiences to which we achieved.

To look at future improvements we discussed an idea of perhaps trying to advertise the show more vocally and physically by performing small snippets in town or local cafe’s, or even handing out flyers in our characters to try and appear more visually exciting and draw people in to find out more.

Thanks

Rebecca Ward

Flyer Distribution

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Once the flyer had been created and they were delivered back from the printing house, we were able to start distributing them; the only problem was… where?

Everyone in the marketing team new Lincoln pretty well but we had to decide where was the best places to put our flyers as to reach the widest demographic as possible. We wanted to steer clear of just having an audience primarily consisting of a student demographic. Although there is nothing wrong with this, I felt that it would be more beneficial for STAMP Theatre as a company to gain some recognition and support from other key demographics too. I made a list of all the different possible places we could distribute the flyers, such as coffee shops, museums, other local arts venues, the university campus, hotels and B&B’s, restaurants and transport links such as the train station. We felt that these different places would give us the widest possible range in order to reach the different areas of demographics.

I printed out a map of Lincoln City Centre and began to highlight the different areas that the flyers needed to be distributed in. I colour coded each different section for example, coffee shops in pink, and then made it clear on the map where these places where situated. I then showed this to the rest of the marketing team and they decided which places they wanted to deliver the flyers to.

A hard copy of the colour coded map of the city centre and a full list of the places where flyers where distributed can be viewed in our Marketing Pack.

Thanks, Joe.

Creation Of The Programme ..My Role in Advertising and Marketing

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Within the creation of the Programme we had an immediate idea of making something that followed the theme and genre of what ”The Trial’ represented. We wanted them to try and look as professional and creative as possible as from the very beginning, as discussed at the first Marketing and Advertising meeting. As the audience entered the performance we wanted to try and create the feeling of mystery and slight confusion with the addition of programme’s presented in black envelopes. The idea of the black envelopes were suppose to create a message of the ‘summoning of K’s Trial’, and add something a little different and unique. From feedback from the audience we soon gained knowledge that some people were unaware they had to open their envelopes and thought this maybe something they had to do within the show. On reflection to this, if we were to do this again, maybe the idea of adding an ‘you are summoned or ‘please open’ on the front of the envelope would be more understandable than just a plain black one.

We also had discussion of how we were going to distribute the programme’s within the theater. The initial idea was to place them on the seats so as people entered they could pick them up but then we had the slight issue of the seats automatically folding up so there was a difficulty of them getting lost. In the end we simply arranged for the front of house people to distribute them as people were entering the theatre.

When designing the programme we approached a company named ‘Decon Design’ to which we discovered online and inquired for pricing and printing. After negotiating with the Co founder, we came together with a great price for quality designing and printing then agreed on what dates we needed them by ect. After some discussion with the Co founder, and how this new and upcoming business as creating a lot of advertising from us, we were kindly asked to be sponsored by Decon Design to which from this we created a brief template for how we wanted the programme to be set out with a clear idea of what we wanted to include. ..

Our Theatre Companies name and the name of the production we are putting on, along with our logo and the LPAC logo.
The Directors Note and the Show Copy
STAMP THEATRE- cast and what roles we all played within the production, along with our theater head shots.
Acknowledgements on the back that thanks everyone who has assisted us with the creation of the trial.

Inset is a copy of the final programme , with design and printing assistance by Decon Design

Rebecca Ward

Press Release

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my responsibilities as Marketing Manager would be to write a Press Release.

In order to do this I first looked at some examples of press releases from existing Theatre Companies such as: Look Left Look Right Theatre and Tortoise in a Nutshell Theatre. Both of whom had a press release published in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Guide on: How to Sell a Show. Here is the link to the online guide which I found extremely useful as it contained many handy marketing tips and advice.

https://www.edfringe.com/uploads/docs/participants/Fringe_Guide_to_Selling_a_Show.pdf

The Fringe guide suggested that when writing a press release you should use language that the general public can understand. It also mentions that you are effectively trying to sell your show as well give the public enough information without bombarding them details. For example, I needed to include the basics of, Who, What, When, Where and Why? Then after covering these points it was then possible to talk briefly about the style of performance and what sort of theatre company STAMP is. I had to be very conscious of what words I chose to describe as to make sure the press release would appeal to a wide range of demographics.

After writing the press release, I e-mailed it along with a promotional image to local press contacts. These included:

BBC Lincolnshire
The Linc
The Lincolnshire Echo
The Lincolnite

In order to make sure that we covered a wide area of demographic, I also e-mailed the release to other local newspapers and sites. I chose other towns close to Lincoln that had a working theatre. The reason for doing this was to try and branch out our marketing campaign so that it could reach the widest amount of the public as possible, and thereby increasing our potential for expanding our audience capacity. This meant that I also contacted:

The Louth Leader- the Riverhead Theatre in Louth has regularly attended shows by their local public.
Skegness Standard- Skegness is also a town which is travelling distance from Lincoln that has a fully functioning receiving house theatre.
Newark Advertiser- With a direct train only taking you 25minutes, and a regularly attended theatre, Newark was also a town that we tried to reach with our campaign.

We had the privilege of having the press release published by the Lincolnshire Echo and below is a link to their website where it was also published.

http://www.thisislincolnshire.co.uk/Lincoln-graduates-producing-innovative-work/story-19020281-detail/story.html#axzz2Tphz3s19

The full press release and our list of press contacts are available for viewing as a hard copy in our Marketing Pack.

Thanks, Joe.

The Flyer (Second Design) and Distribution

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After receiving feedback from the first Flyer, considerable improvements have been made. Firstly the size of the font has not only been increased but a different font has been used altogether. Corrections have been made to the time and ticket prices and the QR code now works properly. The picture has been made much darker as we felt that the prototype did not seem as powerful as we wanted. It also magnifies the initial impression we wanted to give of making the audience believe that the world in which the play is set is surreal and absurd. This is the design for the new flyer:

We have ordered 200 flyers from the company Decon Design who have also chosen to sponsor us! We will begin with on-campus advertising by placing flyers in the LPAC and ensuring that there is a flyer on each table at the beginning of the day. We will also place flyers in the University Library as it is close to the LPAC and has many students passing by. Outside of the University we will kindly ask if various coffee shops and cafes will display our poster in their windows. We will then head to the city centre and hand out flyers at our designated distribution zones.