Marketing a Musical

This summer I appeared in a musical called Enter Love. This was an original work by a very good friend, Lynn Lupold, among others. Because I cared about the people and the project I volunteered to lend my professional expertise and run some online promotion for the show. The show was wildly successful, selling out every single performance. So how did we get there?

Website

The website for the show is actually pretty basic. It’s a simple blog layout. What made it successful was the editorial calendar. When the site was created I mapped out 10 weeks of posts leading up to opening night. The topics included profiles of people involved with the show, casting announcements, photos and videos, and contest announcements (see below). The steady stream of new information helped us build inertia and interest in the show. Because we included individual profiles of people in the show, we made it very easy for them to tap into their personal networks by sharing a link to their profiles.

Email Newsletter

We knew we would have a small group of advocates who would love to help promote the show if we could arm them with the ideas and collateral to do so. On the website we created a signup form for anyone who wanted to receive a weekly email with tips on what they could be doing to help promote the show.

Facebook

An enterprise like this is ideally suited for Facebook. Armed with a decent camera you can walk into rehearsals and get a steady trickle of photos leading up to the show. Photographs like these get good traction of Facebook. Many of the photographs were of cast members who are regularly active on Facebook. Tagging them in photos drew a lot of online attention to the show.

Contests

We ran weekly contests leading up to the show in which people could win free tickets to the show. The details varied from week to week, but ways to enter included tweeting about the show, leaving a comment on the blog, or commenting on a promotional video on YouTube. I was honestly surprised that the contests did not draw even more attention, although they were certainly successful at raising awareness and buzz about the show.

Other Contributing Factors

Less it seem like I’m claiming sole responsibility for the successful promoting of this show, it’s worth mentioning other factors that certainly impacted the box office sales.

• Local celebrity. Many of the people involved in both creating and performing the show are well known names in Lafayette, where this world premiere was held.
• Creative. Thanks to John Metzinger the show already had a great logo and visual branding in place before I was involved.
• Video. Promotional, performance and documentary footage of  the show was captured and edited by video wunderkind Jack Klink
• Lafayette Civic Theatre. It’s not their first rodeo, and the theatre’s relationships with local media, the blog, and their existing promotional machine was also a key for this run.