SOR 45: Don’t Lose Ticket Sales To Promotion Fatigue

If your promotions look too similar show after show, people will begin to tune them out - don't let that happen!

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Ever see a movie trailer so many times that you actually got sick of it? The first few times it seemed interesting, but after too many viewings you wouldn’t have gone to that movie if they paid you. That’s promotion fatigue, and you want to avoid making people feel that way with the marketing you are doing with your show.

Thanks to Joel for his email that inspired me to talk about this subject. He’s in a community with 20 amateur theatres all vying to serve a population of 50,000. Your exact numbers may be different, but most of use deal with market saturation in some form. It makes promotion fatigue a very real danger and a very real opportunity to set yourself apart.

In this episode:

• keep using your hook – whatever the unique draw is for your show, you want all of your promotions to emphasize it (good) – which makes it easy for all of your promotions to sound the same (bad)
• use different mediums – you can keep things fresh by building your marketing materials in a variety of formats
• reveal something different every time – every marketing piece should share some new bit of information or impression about the production
• market across multiple channels – the message automatically feels a little different when it’s delivered through a different channel
• spread out your promotions – you can lessen fatigue just by making sure that you aren’t bludgeoning them with your message in a short span of time
• broadcast touches versus engagement touches – engagement touches still bring someone closer to buying a ticket, but they don’t count (much) toward promotion fatigue

Items mentioned:

• Email statistics from Return Path – an infographic with a lot of statistical data about email use (and the source for the number I shared in this episode of the average email subscriber receiving 416 commercial emails each month)
• The Open Book Project: Putting Together a Marketing Calendar – take a look at an actual marketing calendar I put together for promoting a show
  

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