SOR 56: Dave Levett Talks About How Even the Smallest Theatre Can Get Meaningful Data About Its Audience

I was spending some time poking around Twitter on the subject of theatre marketing, and I came across Lollipop Marketing. They are an agency out of London with roots in Sydney, and I convinced founder Dave Levett to talk with me about what he’s figured out so far about marketing theatre. We ended up diving into some great tactics and tools that theatres can use to start collecting demographic and psychographic information about their audience – and put it to use.
In this episode:
- theatre marketing at different sizes of theatres – the volume of theatre in London lets Dave see examples of what organizations of all sizes are doing to promote
- a common mistake that a lot of theatres make – not gathering and acting on data means that a lot of promotional material doesn’t hit the mark
- marketing vs. PR – too often lumped together, these two activities are not interchangeable
- the science of marketing – gathering data allows you to use insights about your audience to guide your marketing communications
- demographics and psychographics – the information you’re gathering about your audience includes both who they are and how they behave
Items mentioned:
- Lollipop Marketing – the company site for Dave’s marketing agency
- 9 Nifty Marketing Tools That Won’t Break Your Theatre’s Piggy Bank – blog post we reference in this episode with various online tools to help you improve your marketing
- PollDaddy – an online service that allows you create surveys (includes a free version)
- MailChimp – a full email campaign service that can be free if you have less than 2000 subscribers
Let Dave know if you liked this session
If you have a few seconds, you can let Dave (and me) know that you liked this session by telling him on Twitter.
Here’s a (free) way you can help the podcast
An important part of being discovered by new listeners on iTunes – far and away the most pervasive podcast directory – is to get reviews from your listeners. If you have found value in this podcast, I would very much appreciate you taking just a minute or two to leave a review. It’s incredibly easy:
- Go to the Sold Out Run page in iTunes.
- Click the number of stars for the rating you think this podcast deserves.
Thanks to Dave for taking the time to share his insights, and of course, thanks to all of you for downloading and listening.