Fill In The Blank Theatre debuted their first show at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on Wednesday the 20 of May 2015 to an audience of 152 people. We successfully sold just over a third of tickets to ‘The Man Whose Memories Fell Out’. 43 of these tickets were on the door sales on the day of performance. I am pleased with the overall sales of the tickets as my goal for ticket sales was 150 and this just exceeded that.
The overall marketing campaign was a success for ‘The Man Whose Memories Fell Out’ and we quickly learnt that the online strategies were more effective than the other ones. Our main target audience was the students within the Lincoln School of Fine and Performing Arts and upon reviewing the sales report from the show it reveals that 98 of these tickets were booked by students from the school. This means we were able to successfully targeted this audience. Our online campaign along with the distribution of marketing materials on campus helped us in achieving this.
Other successful techniques of marketing were the distribution of promotional material in the city centre along with two radio interviews that we took part in with Siren Fm and BBC Radio Lincolnshire.
The final statistics on social media sites were…
Facebook-348
Twitter-174
(Stats recorded 24/05/2015)
We successfully gained an online presence throughout this process. The statistics show that this was mainly at the beginning when the company first formed and slowly increased throughout the weeks.
We pushed the social media sites mainly to LSFPA students which would have aided us in the final ticket sales. We also pushed this with the general public as the links to the sites were on all promotional material.
We found that, although flyering is a great way to get the company into the city centre, it is not always the most beneficial way of drawing attention to an event. The general public do not always react well to flyering and it is a time consuming marketing strategy. Although we did do a lot of distribution, we found that featuring the posters and flyers for the show in shop windows and on counters was a way of constantly having a presence in the city centre without overpowering the general public. This way we reached a larger audience in a less time consuming way.
As previously mention in the blog post titled Creating a ‘Cyber-Community’, social media becomes a places for people to share their opinions on the product showcased by the company. Therefore, after our first performance of ‘The Man Whose Memories Fell Out’, we received via social media lots of feedback. Here is an example of some of the comments we received on Twitter…
Overall, we were very happy with the feedback we gained from the audience. As both a performer and marketing manager, I have been overwhelmed by the positive feedback we have gained and I think being part of Fill In The Blank Theatre has taught me how to work as part of a large company whilst performing and has taught me to have confidence when working independently on marketing work.
-Alice.
Works Cited-
Crow, P, (2015), The Man Whose Memories Fell Out. [electronic print] https://www.flickr.com/photos/61839232@N02/17713112130/ [Accessed 21 of May 2015].
