Social Media Marketing Strategies

Marketing can often be one of the most challenging jobs to get right for theatre groups. The biggest issues are a mix of the sense that “We all know how to post something on Social Media”, the rotation of people as committees and time commitments change, and how often there’s the biggest focus on promotion, without getting people all warmed up to buy tickets first.

As a marketing coach, I often recommend that theatre companies take time to create a strategy that can work through the changing hands of the team,and help create consistency.

Here’s what that content plan needs to include:

A really clear outline of the three or four core values of the theatre, and how these are lived and breathed in everything you do. This helps anyone creating the content to make sure it’s in alignment with the content. For example, you could have “inclusive”, and then you need to check if your content is demonstrating this.

A clear and consistent posting plan. One of the biggest mistakes is ramping it up on promotional posts, but not having posts that help people more naturally interact with your content in between these posts. There’s also a feast or famine in posting schedules. I normally recommend using a social media scheduler, and choosing your frequency and then sticking to it. It can be three or more times a week, but posts should be published around the same time every week.

The plan also needs to have a range of content. Yes to upcoming notices about your next show! But add in behind the scenes images, photos of the cast and crew, talking people on a journey. You can also give up history or facts about the show. If you’ve sold sponsorship postings as part of your offer, then have a set “Sponsor time” every week so you can plan and schedule these in advance. You can also choose a time to profile a cast or crew member, and introduce them to everyone. All of these posts bring in the human aspect and help people feel more connected to your whole journey. I recommend having set days for each type of post, to make sure you get the right split. 

Make sure you take time to create some posts about frequently asked questions. These can be easily reused with a little tweaking for each show. They could include where to buy tickets, what time people should get to the theatre, how to sponsor your company, and perhaps how to become a part of future shows. 

Keep the colours and branding consistent. I love colour and fonts, so I’m all good with a little chaos! But you need to have clear rules about what fonts, and what colours you’ll use. I recommend having a Theatre canva account, and putting some of that all-important budget into having the Pro version so you can use it to store your brand colours and fonts in there to make everything more consistent.

If you’ve got a designer in your team, get them to make you some templates in Canva. These can help take your content to a new level and make it less stressful for whoever’s in charge of the marketing. 

Embrace video! Video helps you reach past your current audience - and you can grow your audience. Get your teams to sing trending audios, do some funny voice overs and dance to show what you’ve got!

If you’re not sure you have anything interesting to post, I want you to think about all living more like goats in trees! I’m not sure if you’ve seen the photos of the goats in trees in Morocco (it’s worth a google), but I am captivated by them! They are doing something I think is so cool, and different!

Here’s the thing. They’re just being themselves. They’re going about their day, doing their tree climbing and leaf chewing thing, staring out into the shimmering light surrounding them, and they don’t think, “I’m doing this so people will love me!”

People love the little stories, the little events, the moments, and images that help feel they are part of our stories. So don’t worry if your post is just about another rehearsal, or a costume fitting, or perhaps a meeting about lighting.  People will love it. Because you’re a goat, in your tree, and they are here for it!

In my book Be a Spider, Build a Web, I teach that we want to build a sticky web with our social media content that helps people come, stay and want to buy from us. To do that we need to drop back on content that’s heavily promotional all the time, and include posts that help people build a hunger to buy those tickets, or even sponsor us. That’s the kind spider way. 

Get a discount on Rachel’s book  at mymapitmarketing.com by using the discount code BEASPIDERDISCOUNT