SOR 016: How To Delegate Theatre Marketing Tasks

Listen Now:

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe for more episodes:
iTunes Stitcher

The only thing worse than trying to handle all of the promotion for a show yourself, is to delegate it to other people – only to see the ball get dropped. Selecting talented people is only part of a successful delegation. You also need to have them working on the right things with the right set of expectations.

When I originally started preparing this episode, it was going to be a comprehensive overview of strategies to cope with the overwhelming prospect of promoting a show. There are so many things you can and should be doing, trying to keep it all straight can easily send your mind reeling.

I realized that if you are feeling overwhelmed right now, dumping all of these strategies on you at once may not be the kindest thing I could do. Instead I decided to just address on one item you can focus on to reclaim a little bit of your time: delegation.

In this episode:

• the skills you need – marketing requires more than just warm bodies, there are specific skills that you need someone on your team to provide
• subject matter expert – the unique role on your marketing team of someone who is a member of a community that you want to reach out to
• enjoying delegated tasks – if you delegate tasks to someone who isn’t excited to tackle them, you are setting them up for failure
• developing a team you take with you – there are benefits to effectiveness and efficiency when you keep working with the same people across mutliple productions
• the five levels of delegation – you may not want to micromanage, but there are degrees of freedom and responsibility for a delegate and you need to be intentional about establishing them up front
• how training can be encouraging – the light at the end of the tunnel when delegation doesn’t seem to be saving you much time

Items mentioned:

• The Open Book Project – a new project where you look over my shoulder as I promote a theatre production in real time
• Who Do You Need On Your Theatre Marketing Team? – an old post where I talked about the skills you need on your team (I expand on these with additional skills in this episode)
• The Five Levels of Delegation – an explanation of the five levels from Michael Hyatt’s blog

Have a question?

Have a marketing question (or comment) that you’d like to hear featured on a future episode of the podcast? You can leave me a voicemail.

I could use your help

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 think this podcast is valuable, I would very much appreciate you taking just a minute or two to leave a review. It’s incredibly easy:

1. Go to the Sold Out Run page in iTunes.
2. Click the number of stars for the rating you think this podcast deserves.
3. Write a sentence or two about what you like (or don’t like).

Thank you so much for being a listener. I couldn’t do this without you guys.