I have a big show coming up in a town of about 8000 It is Sept 23 & 24 with three shows being performed. Open to the public of coarse. We did lots of advertising and think it should go over well. This is what we have.

Flyers in every public posting part of town
Bookmarks in Libraries, every book checked out gets a bookmark
37 Radio Commercials
On Air Radio Giveaways
Radio Interviews
Four Ads in The weekly newspapers (ie. 4 weeks worth)
An article being done about the show the week of the event
Flyers going into as many schools as possible and being sent home
A Monster sign being put up 10 days before the event outside the Theatre so cars can see it.

Think there might be more, but that is the JIST of it. We normally get booked by other companies to perform in theatres but thought we would venture this time; We just started our advertising this past week. Bookmarks are going into the Library two weeks prior, this way people wont forget and Radio Ads run starting 8 days prior to the shows. Giveaways start 3 days prior and interview the day of. I am trying to get on the LOCAL TV STATION but no return yet. I am going to send out another release this week.

Tell me what you guys think and if there is anything you recommend or don't.

Thanks,

Mike

Mike,
Sounds good...
How does one purchase tickets...are they at ticket outlets, charge by credit card over the phone, order online, etc....or are they only available at the door?

Best wishes for the show,

Kevin

The Center that is holding the event gets a lot of traffic and one of the things we agreed upon was that they would sell tickets for us. I gave them a set # of tickets so that I will know exactly how much should be there and it is in the main part of town too.

I am not worried about that. I also anticipate that a lot of sales will be day of and at door.

Advanced tickets sales are what you need to concentrate on. At door sales that are expected usually leave you shocked and wondering what went wrong. That is the one main drawback when doing fundraising shows for organizations and is the main point that you focus on. It will be no different when you do they selling your self. Pre sales of tickets are the key to any successful show promotion. Market the daylights out of pre show ticket sales. Give them a discount for buying in advance and make buying easy. You will smile all the way to the bank. If you do want to push day of sales then give out free tickets to the kids at school that are only good when presented with purchase of an adult ticket. Make sure they know that there has to be one paid ticket for each pass used. You don't want 3 kids with one paid adult ticket as that won't pay the bills.

Good Luck and I hope you have lots of fun and great success. You are way ahead of most performers, you are making it happen.

Martin

Mike-

Ive added a few comments in other posts as we do shows very similar to you etc

Try & get a promo for 10-15 minutes in the school assemblies as well as get your flyers passed out-don't rely on people saying they will distribute for you-they don't!! All they do is dump a pile on a desk for people to pick up.

You must put the flyers in peoples hands.

Martin makes a great point about pre-sales. I agree!-Also at the first show give away comps (free tickets) to newspaper people, the mayor, celebrities, guests etc -you must fill the hall at the first show-this is your advertising for the remaining 2 performances-everyone will be talking about you.

Also, if you have given away a few comps-at least you can get donations once 500 people are in the hall-but not if there not there!!

Good luck-Keep us posted

Here's a couple of things we do when touring small towns:

1) On every radio interview bring 5x2 tickets as a giveaway for the fastest 5 listeners who call the radio station

2) In bigger towns you can perform a publicity stunt on the main square or so (this was one of the secrets of the Houdini's success). It is more powerfull than any TV commercial.

3) Regarding TV, you can ask the local TV station to be your media sponsors (they get the right to record parts of your show and show them on air after a couple of months, and in return they give you free commercials). This will also give you some publicity after you're gone, so the next time you appear in the same town with a new show, people will already know you as the guy from TV.

4) In very small towns (usually the kind of towns where absolutely nothing is going on), we stand in front of our van (a huge billboard type poster covers the whole van) together with the dancers in costumes. The dancers hand out the flyers and we don't hesitate to shake hands with people passing by, handing them a flyer and giving them a little explanation about the show (the flyer itself is dead, but when it comes together with a couple of spoken words, it becomes very poweful). Having in mind that prior to the show (with all pre advertizing) you become the star of the town, people love when the stars come down to earth and talk to themn (and sometimes perform a trick for them as well).

5) In areas where the theatre is huge (just yesterday we had a case of a 1 500 theatre in a town of 7 000) and a couple of weeks before the show, we are still not sure whether we will manage to get the full house, we organize a little live presentation (2 weeks before the show) for the shool principals of that area (not only that town, but a couple of neighbouring towns as well), directors of local companies (the ones that employ a large number of people), tourist agencies from towns within 200 km ratio (they can organize busses of people to come and watch the show, plus they can sell the tickets), etc. We organize the live presentation in a conference facility of the best hotel in town or in some restaurant or so. The presentation includes a video of some parts of the show (just to show them that they've never had anything similar in the area), a little talk and free food and drinks for everyone. One of our assistants is Taiwanese (and her family runs a catering business), so we bring some exotic Taiwanese food. The directors, principals, etc, are always ready for cooperation when they are fed well LOL... We offer them a certain percentage of every ticket they sell and they often accept the organized sales.

5) Talk of the town method. This is what we do if we are lucky get a theatre in a certain town for little or no money and we don't have much time to advertize. Just recently we got a theatre of 500 seats in a small village of about 5 000 people, but they wanted to have the show on that very week, so we didn't have time to organize the propper advertizing (except for the van method and a little bit of radio commercials). What we did was we asked them to give us the theatre for 3 days (in towns like that with a fairly large theatre like that, if you have one show with 2/3 of the theatre full, you may be considdered lucky). What happens is that on day 1 we get a 70-100 people only. But as the small towns are the places where people talk a lot to each other, on the following 2 days we get a full house (and guess what, even many of those 70-100 people that came on the first day come to watch the show again). If you have a good quality show, this method (although it might seem risky) is very good.

This is just a couple of ideas from our tour. Sometimes we struggle to survive, but many times we earn huge quantities of money!