The advice I give to someone creating their first
marking strategy would be to research.
I think that's the most important thing, understand the venue, understand the production,
think about the director's vision. Think about what collateral you're going to produce.
Does your target audience go for more traditional media, so print
or advertising in newspapers. Are they going to be more excited by social media and online content?
You'll only know that by research. What you get at the end, if it's well researched,
will be something you know will work really well and be really effective.
Before you create your marketing strategy, you've sat down with your director,
you've worked out what the vision is and what you need to know from that point on is
who is this production for and where can you find those people?
They're probably the two most crucial things for any marketing campaign.
The way I research an audience before creating my marketing strategy is to
really think about the people that I am targeting.
What's their age? What's their gender? What do they do as a job? What do they do in their leisure time?
What do they go and see? Are they culturally savvy? Do they go to the theatre a lot?
Do they go to art exhibitions? Are they someone that doesn't go to the theatre
or get involved with the arts at all, but this production would be really good to target them with?
Think about what they do in their spare time, what websites they use, what newspapers they read,
because that helps you to target them through different mediums.
I had a really good tip from a manager once which was to
find a picture of that target audience, whether it's a younger person,
an older person, whatever that might be, find a picture in a magazine or print it out from online
and stick it next to your computer, then any time you're doing anything
within your marketing campaign, look at it and think,
'How is this targeting this person'.
With all of our marketing strategies and our campaigns, we sit down right at the very beginning,
with the creative team, and find out from them what the USPs are in their production
so that's the Unique Selling Points.
Find out where the production is going to be set, who the designer is.
All of this information, you take that on board and you make sure that whatever creative you
create around that production, it matches as closely as possible.
When it's a new production you have to do something which is called a concept.
For example it's Don Giovanni and the director has decided that it will
be about what's going on in Don Giovanni's mind.
It's very, kind of, inward looking and you have to somehow make sure that the creative, the poster
the adverts, all reflect that.
There's lots of different marketing materials you can use when planning your campaign and
depending on what the production is, who you're trying to target, will depend on
the effectiveness of them. I tend to work across traditional media so,
flyers, posters, and not forgetting that we talk about posters as outdoor so
that could be huge banner advertising, on the tube, on the trains, or on buses you can take the whole
back of the bus if you want to. So there's the more traditional side in terms of print and outdoor.
Then you've got your online and your digital, so that could be everything from producing
your own two minute trailer showing everything about the production and getting people excited.
You might want to build an app, so you might be thinking there's a lot of content within this production,
I think our target audience would like to engage with it more on an interactive level.
Then you can also consider social media which is obviously
hugely important in any marketing campaign now.
So what advice would I give someone who wants to do marketing, probably the best
thing to do is to get as much experience as possible.
You're going to learn more about marketing by actually doing it, so get out there,
try and get some work experience with different marketing companies so you can
learn on the job.
The advice I give to someone interested in a career in marketing is to get experience.
I think it's really important. And then just always be learning.
Get an internship somewhere, look at organisations you like and try and get work shadowing
or work experience there, because it's just really important to learn what's out there
and to get insight from people that are doing the job at the time.