Beginner’s Guide to Theatre Marketing

As the owner of a community theatre, professional non-equity, or even as a theatre educator, your plate is already pretty full. Managing your team, choosing shows, running rehearsals, and finding additional revenue streams are top priorities, alongside getting the word out about your theatre and its offerings. Indeed, ensuring you find and retain patrons and donors, generate organic buzz, and raise your social media engagement via innovative theatre marketing solutions should be cornerstone objectives for you.

While most people assume marketing is as easy as posting a few pictures to your social media platforms, there’s much more to it than that. A multi-pronged approach to theatre marketing will help you reap the most benefits, guaranteed. On The Stage presents a Beginner’s Guide to Theatre Marketing to help you on your journey to success. 

Back to the Basics

What is Theatre Marketing?

We know, we know – we’re really getting back to basics, right? But a refresher never hurts. So, what is marketing? Essentially, marketing is the act of promoting and selling products or services from a specific brand, usually backed by marketing research and advertising campaigns. 

In the world of theatre, marketing can look like a lot of different things, including: 

• A strong social media presence with continually dynamic content
• Email correspondences with patrons and potential patrons via newsletters 
• The offering of exclusive digital content to certain patron levels
• Group ticket pricing or promotional discounts
• The selling of tickets, merchandise, and other branded content
• Upselling patrons with pre-ordered concessions or merch at the point of sale
• Additional community events, networking events, or fundraisers  

So, yes, marketing comes in many shapes and sizes. Some efforts will work great for your theatre, while others won’t. It’s all a game of trial and error. But how to get started? 

Getting Started

With marketing taking so many forms, knowing exactly where to start may be confusing. That’s why your primary objective as you begin your marketing journey should be to determine your primary goals – what results you’re hoping to see from these marketing strategies. 

Achievable goals can include:

• Making More Money: Padding your bottom line is rarely a bad goal to have.
• Selling More Tickets: Perhaps you’re not seeing the turnout you wanted or have yet to turn a profit. Selling more tickets will rectify this issue. 
• Recruiting Team Members to Your Theatre: Whether you need more administrative help, actors on stage, or lighting and sound professionals, marketing can help drive that traffic.
• Gaining Community Partners or Business Sponsors: The best way to get your name in front of more people is through marketing efforts. This can help partner up with like-minded businesses and get sponsored. 
• Making Stronger Community Connections: Theatre, at its core, is about forming a community. Marketing can assist in reaching more people who can join your cause.

Audience Segmentation

Once your goals have been determined, you should take a look at your audience and your target demographics. More simply: Who is visiting your theatre, and who else would you like to visit your theatre? From there, it’s time to work on audience segmentation, which is a strategy that divides your target audience into smaller groups based on shared characteristics.

Why segment your audience? After consulting this data, you’ll be able to curate more personalized messaging – which will make your audience members feel seen, leading to stronger connections and greater brand loyalty. Additionally, you’ll be able to discover new leads on potential patrons and truly identify what your audience members care about. 

If you aren’t sure where to start when it comes to finding those shared characteristics, a few ideas include: 

• Purchasing Behaviors: What types of items are your audience members buying from you? How often? In what quantities?
• Industries: What jobs do your audience members have? 
• Interests: What outside-of-work activities do you audience members enjoy? Are they members of any other community groups? 
• General Demographics: What are your audience members’ ages, incomes, locations, and genders? 

Once you’ve sorted your audience members into these groups, you can focus on creating targeted messaging that feels both personal and well-researched. 

Learning the 4 P’s 

Another concept to understand when it comes to marketing is the ‘four P’s.’ These are the key factors that people like you should consider before enacting a multi-pronged marketing approach. Consider them the framework for organizing your campaigns. 

The ‘Four P’s’ are:

• Product: This is, of course, what you’re selling, whether it’s a physical object (merchandise) or a service (entertainment).
• Price: This ranges from the cost of the actual product – i.e., how much money it takes to create your show and market it – to the pricing structures you have in place. How will these affect your marketing strategies? 
• Place: Where will your ‘product’ appear? What are the best places to market your product so that your target demographics will see it? 
• Promotion: Promotion is essentially the avenue in which you communicate your product with patrons and potential patrons. 

Choosing the Right Channels

Honing in on the ‘Place’ segment of the ‘Four P’s,’ you need to choose the right channels to promote your theatre and its offerings. And remember, what works best for some theatres will not land well for others – marketing is not, in fact, a one-size-fits-all method. 

Here are a few channels to consider as you’re breaking down your marketing strategies: 

• Social Media: Depending on your audience and target demographics, social media can be one of the easiest and most effective ways to market your theatre. Consider boosted or sponsored posts to increase engagement. 
• Email: An excellent way to connect with patrons, email marketing has a high return on investment (ROI) and is relatively easy and inexpensive to enact.
• Theatre Website: A best-in-class theatre website should be one of the main channels for your marketing efforts. Ensure it’s up-to-date, sleek, and informative. 
• eBooks: If you’re hoping to wrangle in more theatre professionals, creating educational content in the form of eBooks can help establish you as a credible source in your community for theatre information. 
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Make sure that when people in your area search for theatre, community theater, educational theatre, or whatever niche of theatre you may be in, you have worked your SEO so that your business shows up on top. 
• Printed Materials: Going old school can often reap rewards. Consider printed fliers, show programs, mailers, and other tangible channels to appeal to the non-digital crowd.

Theatre Marketing KPIs to Watch

A KPI – or key performance indicator – is a measurable metric that indicates your theatre’s success as it relates to a marketing goal or objective. Considering your KPIs can help you to make informed decisions about your theatre and adjust your strategies to ensure you hit your goals. A few KPIs include: 

• Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of visitors to your theatre’s website or other digital platform who take a desired action – like buying a ticket or subscribing to a newsletter. 
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This is the total financial cost of acquiring a new patron. 
• Return on Investment (ROI): An ROI measures how much your theatre earns on a marketing strategy compared to how much it invests. I.e., are your efforts worth the results? 
• Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV): This measures the potential revenue a patron can produce for your theatre over the time they are involved with your theatre.  
• Organic Traffic: This is any activity on your theatre’s website generated by free search engines with no financial intervention. 
• Engagement: This is the total of likes, comments, and shares your posts receive on social media.  
• Reach: Reach represents the total number of unique accounts that have seen your posts. How many eyes, essentially, are on your work?  

Leveraging Theatre Marketing Technology and Integrations

Once you’ve settled into your marketing groove and feel more confident to try more complex maneuvers, it’s time to start leveraging integrations. Integrating your technology – or combining all your marketing tools in one place – will help you streamline your processes and fuel targeted efforts by connecting your social media accounts and email marketing tools. This, in turn, will provide you with deeper insights across all your platforms, as well as streamlined automation, cross-platform access, and a better understanding of your audience members at large.

A few elements of integration you should consider include:

• Social Media: Connect your top social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and X, which will allow you to automate a series of engaging content with a few clicks.
• Google Analytics and Meta Pixel: Track your audience’s engagement and develop a deeper understanding of their purchase journey.
• Your Marketable Database: Reach a wider audience and grow your marketable contact list by marketing across multiple platforms.
• Targeted Marketing Campaigns: Utilizing patron relationship management tools coupled with third-party marketing tools and social platforms can empower you to create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns.
• Mailchimp: Create robust email marketing and automation solutions that maximize ROI.

How On The Stage Can Help

If you’re looking for a partner in your marketing journey, On The Stage can help. In fact, we can support all your marketing and promotion needs with one robust platform – whether you’re looking to drive community engagement, increase ticket sales, or just elevate the experience for all. The tools OTS offers will allow you to: 

• Grow awareness of your program through social platform integrations, email marketing, targeted marketing campaigns, and show art
• Increase conversion rates and sell more tickets through Broadway-style show sites or a customizable ticketing widget embedded on your website
• Nurture and grow your patron base with ticket buyer outreach, patron relationship management, engagement tools, reports, and insights
• Increase efficiency and effectiveness by seamlessly integrating OTS with social platforms and marketing automation tools

Our consolidated platform has everything you need to successfully market your productions and generate more revenue. If you’re ready to get started, book a personalized demo today.