An Audience Awaits

May 27, 2017May 29, 2017 Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager Arts Council England, audience, Audience Segments, distribution, flyers, marketing, posters

Reflecting on our show, I believe it is important to consider the audience we received, feedback we collated, and how this data could have differed through different marketing techniques based on ACE policy.

Arts Council England divide the Audience Spectrum into 10 distinct groups:

Metroculturals, Commuterland culture buffs, Experience seekers, Dormitory dependables, Trips and treats, Home and heritage, Up our street, Facebook families, Kaleidoscope creativity, and Heydays.

Based on my knowledge of the LPAC’s usual audience (mainly College of Arts students and younger to middle aged people), I predicted that our main audience segment would fall under both:

Meteroculturals – “Prosperous, liberal, urbanites interested in a very wide cultural spectrum” (Arts Council England, 2017).

and

Experience seekers – “Highly active diverse, social and ambitious, engaging with arts on a regular basis” (Arts Council England, 2017).

These groups are both what ACE call “highly engaged” (Arts Council England, 2017) with the arts. Therefore, much of our marketing was focused on social media, particularly Facebook which these audiences use on a regular basis. The promotion of our material across Facebook was targeted to people between the ages of 18 and 40. However, what I noticed from seeing our audience on the day and the feedback we received on social media was that a large proportion of our audience were older than this, and mainly fell under the Trips and Treats segment. These are people who “Enjoy mainstream arts and popular culture influenced by children, family and friends” (Arts Council England, 2017). This is because our cast invited their families and family friends to celebrate the occasion.

Learning from this, I would have perhaps approached marketing our show slightly differently and spent more time distributing flyers and posters in town and making conversation to members of the public who fell under this category, rather than targeting younger people and students on campus and in trendy coffee shops. The feedback we received from our older audience was wonderful and showed us that our show is suitable for people of all ages, not just the young.

Works Cited:

Arts Council England (2017) Culture-based segmentation. [online] Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/participating-and-attending/culture-based-segmentation [Accessed 27 May 2017].

The finishing touches

May 10, 2017 Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager colours, design, distribution, flyers, marketing, posters, target audience

It’s just 2 weeks away from our performance now, and our print has been finalised and is being distributed!

In regards to our flyers, I made the decision to have our design printed in different colours. I did this to ensure they were eye-catching and appealing to different people, as whilst it is widely known that red reaches the back of the retina first (hence why I chose it for our poster design), different people are drawn to different colours based on their personality. This is in-keeping with the theme of individuality and expression running through our show, reflecting the idea that different people view the world very differently. I believe these colours all complement each other and stand out both on their own and in a set, and I hope to test this theory when we distribute them in town and around the university campus.

Our posters are beginning to pop up around the city; I have made sure that they are put in places relative to our target audience to ensure maximum reach and that this correlates with ticket sales – there’s no point putting them in places our audience will not visit! A prime location for our type of audience is independent coffee shops, and many owners have been very keen to put up posters and flyers as they are driven to help promote emerging companies/the arts!

Social Media Marketing: the early stages

March 10, 2017May 29, 2017 Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager adverts, audience, Facebook, Instagram, marketing, outreach, social media, statistics, Twitter

The first few weeks of marketing have been very successful. As something I’ve never really done before, I was apprehensive about the time management side, understanding algorithms, and gaining a decent following. However, what these past few weeks have proved is, it’s a lot more fun than I was expecting!

So what have we been getting up to?

Facebook

Our Facebook page is by far the social media account that our audience is interacting with the most. We have over 300 likes, and our posts are reaching over 5,000 people. It has been proven that videos are the most powerful marketing tool on Facebook, so we’ve been uploading little snippet videos from rehearsals regularly, a lot of the time using the ‘Boomerang’ app. Boomerang records videos on a four second loop, making the image appear to go backwards and forwards – it’s a great little way of previewing our work without giving too much away, and they’re fun to watch!

Since videos are such a great way to connect with our audience, we decided to create a video advert on Facebook which will be pushed out to a select audience of our choosing (18-50 year olds). We used a Boomerang video from a movement rehearsal, and within an hour of the advert going live, it had already reached 80 people outside the organic audience (people who like our page and their friends).

Something we have also been doing on our Facebook page is introducing our company members individually to get a better connection with an audience, allowing them to know a little bit about each of us. We’ve been posting these daily between 13:00-14:00, the peak hours for Facebook use in the week as people at work are often on their lunch breaks and want to catch up with social media.

Within this, we tell our viewers three things each company member loves the most, keeping the theme of our upcoming show, love, in people’s minds. It also emphasizes people as individuals and what sets each other apart, something deeply rooted in our company manifesto.

Something else that is happening on our Facebook page is the promo for our first fundraising event! We are holding a quiz all about love on the 7th March and have gained a lot of interest through promoting the quiz and the prizes to our Facebook followers.

The event information reads:

The Pin Hinge Collective presents

The Quiz of Love!

Think you know about love? Reckon you know your rom-coms from your tear-jerkers? Bet you’re clued up on your famous couples? Can you REALLY remember the lyrics to that cheesy 80s ballad you always attempt?
Test your trivia at The Swan with some VERY exciting prizes to be won, including
PAINTBALLING FOR 4 as the GRAND PRIZE!

There will also be a raffle for the chance to win a romantic stay in a B&B for two lucky people!

£2 to play
Teams of no more than 4!
All proceeds go towards our fundraising campaign for our new show.

Details of our company and show can be found at:
facebook.com/thepinhingecollective
twitter.com/pinhingetheatre
thepinhingecollective.wordpress.com

We’d love you to be there!

This event has been viewed by 269 people and reached a total of 1.8k, but of course due to venue size this large number would not be possible…

We’re aiming to have around 60-70 people attend and to hopefully achieve this, we’re going to do a countdown to our event as a reminder, and push the event through sharing and Facebook advertising.

Instagram

Instagram has also proved a popular tool, however not so much so as Facebook. Far fewer people use Instagram than Facebook so the difference in numbers isn’t surprising, as well as Instagram being far less interactive and familiar to use than Facebook. However, we post Instagram updates regularly, focusing on mainly photographic material than videos, although Boomerang videos are also now incorporated into Instagram so we do tend to replicate relevant videos on there as well as Facebook.

Since our show will be very visual, we understand that our Instagram use will develop as the show does, and in turn, our audience engagement will increase. However, the engagement we’ve been getting so far is excellent, we’ve been getting lots of likes on our photos and the correlation between Instagram likes and Facebook likes is interesting to watch, as people who like one page often go and visit the other.

Twitter

Our Twitter experience has been somewhat different from Facebook and Instagram. We’ve found it hard to establish a following due to the large amount of ‘traffic’ on Twitter and accounts/tweets getting lost in the masses. I believe the next way to get around this is promoting our Twitter account on Facebook to make people more aware of it, and engaging with other theatre companies and venues in order to make a connection!