How did everyone market to corporations without the internet. I am a rather young guy at 22, but have done well over 600 corporate shows and was wondering how magicians marketed back in the day. Today we have the luxury of not changing our clothes and booking shows. I can just look up any company I want to work for, find out what they do, how they do it and who can hire me. It's great!

It's funny because I was just thinking about that the other day. I would also like to know how magicians used to market to a corporate audience. I too at only 18 have performed at many corporate gigs only through my website and business cards. I'm willing the bet the answer is "hard work" though. If it is then it is equally as impressive as anything!

Lots of direct mail, cold calls, video tapes and, then there were agents!

It's amazing that anyone got anything done prior to the invention of the Internet, email and websites.

Let's see...telephones, writing letters and personal contact was used with great success for years until about 10 years ago. I wonder if they would still work today?

Mark.

You can still get books on the business end of magic and how to market,
which were written in the 50's and 60's (
check out Magic, Inc. and Abbotts for starts).

You'll find all the clever little things we did to keep afloat.

Remember, we had to TYPE each and every letter
we sent out over and over too.

In a word, yes,
Hard Work!

Magically,
Walt

Now, bearing in mind that I gave Television up 18 years ago... I feel like I have so much LESS time to get things done now, than I did then. I am not sure how or why that works...

I'm not going to name names, but there are a LOT of magicians right here at the magic Café TODAY who only use their web site to support their mass mailing, and cold calls, old habits are hard to break, so in many ways the 1950's are still with us.
Al Angello

I HATE to sound old, but at 47, I guess that I am....to these 2 young men, anyway!

What amazes me, almost daily, is the ability that the average person has to produce high quality print work on their home computer, that we, "back in the day" (that would be anytime BEFORE the home pc) would have killed for!

I can remember how cool it was to know somebody with an IBM Selectric Typewriter.
Why you ask? Because this dinosaur device actually placed the typed letters in perfect alignment on the page, giving it an almost typeset look. We still couldn't really do full justification of the margins, but it was the best we could do!

Oh the days of cutting clipart out of the Abbott's catalog to place on my home made flyers.

Nowadays, even simple programs such as Print Artist or Print Master give the average person the ability to produce very atractive brochures and flyers that we used to have to pay BIG BUCK$ to some printer for.

I remember dreaming about having a four color brochure made for myself. But in the 70's and 80's, it would have cost well over a thousand dollars to produce an item like that. Only the top pros could afford it.

Now, any kid can produce a high quality, full color brochure to advertise his birthday party act, and he has no appreciation or idea how far we have come! Add to that the jaded factor - since it so widely available on the home computer, nobody is particularly impressed with what you create! It is expected anymore.

Gosh, what did we do before the internet? ...and Cell Phones? ...and DVD recorders? ...and VHS recorders? ...I remember being fortunate enough to be in front of my TV when the 1st Doug Henning Special ppeared on NBC. Lord help me if I hadn't - there was no re-runs, no VCR, etc. You just simply had to be there when they said it would be on - no DVD sales on Amazon.com later.....

...those were the days!

Sincerely,

Chris (an old person)

Just remember that even with the "ability" to create hi-end and hi quality printed materials at home, the golden rule still applies. Garbage in equals garbage out. It just is now higher quality garbage is all. What I am saying is that the ability is there to "produce" hi-quality materials from home. However, you still must have or aquire the proper skill and graphic design knowledge to really make it work and communicate well for you to your markets.

Kyle

That's one of the reasons I updated Dietrich and Jarrow's Trade Show Handbook. That book was published in 1973, way before fax machines, e-mail, personal computers, etc. Back then is was a long tedious process of cold calling, sending out letters (from a real honest-to-goodness typewriter) and/or promo kits, waiting and following up with a phone call.

Magic4u02 is right on,, Garbage in, garbage out. That's why I believe that it's usually best to let the experts do what they do best. I usually come up with my ideas and let others execute them for me.

Sounds to me to be the same process. Your still looking up companies and researching them. instead of the internet they used the phonebook. At some point you still need to call them and talk to them (cold calling). I don't think you can find out all you need to know just by the internet.
So the bottom line is, they did it just like you are doing it now just with different tools.

1. Get a list of clients (schools, corporations, etc)

2. Send out a postcard addressed to a certain department (Choir Director, Holiday Party Chairman, etc)

3. Wait for them to call.

4. Send out promo when they do call.

5. Book gigs.

Now the return will be around 1-2% so the more names, buisnesses, the better but NO COLD CALLLING, they call you and you get people who are actually interested in booking you.

YMMV.

I do a form of "cold calling". However, when I cold call I am not selling anything to anyone in the process. My cold calling system is one in which I am "qualifying" my leads only.

By this, I mean that I start off with a master lead list of suspects. This is through research, yelow pages, online etc. This master list is full of names and contacts and numbers. However, this list will not serve me well on my ROI (Return on Investment) if I do not go and qualify these leads.

Qualifying the lead for me means making a cold call to the contact I have on my rough list and asking them politely if I may send them information for consideration and to whom should I send that information to? It is really as easy as that.

The idea there is that I am asking permission first to send information and I am asking for correct contact information. This is a way I can make sure who the decision maker is and if I have the right information. By going through this process, I qualify all my leads and can make sure that;

1) They are expecting my mail
2) They have approved me sending ti to them
3) It is going to the right person who will make the decision on hiring me

In this way of cold calling, I am now going to have a much better possible ROI because I used cold calling to qualify these leads.

When I cold call, I usually use a script something like this:

" Hi (person's name). My name is Kyle Peron and my wife and I are local entertainers specializing in family-friendly magic shows for events much like yours. We saw that you are holding the (such and such) festival on (date) this year and we wanted to know if we might be able to send over our promo packet of information for possible consideration. Would that be ok? Thank you so much? To whom should I address the information to? Thank you. And do I have the corrrect address? I have (then I state the information I have for them to correct it if it is wrong)."

That is my basic cold calling script pretty much. It is short, sweet and to the point. I do nottake up a lot of their time, I am friendly towards theperson on the phone and I am asking permission first. I am not really hard selling to them and I have found I get a much better response.

In a lot of cases, the person I am calling is a "Gate Keeper" any ways and I need to get past them in order to get the information on the decision maker. If I am polite and friendly to them, I run a much better chance of getting the information I request. I also can then use their name when I do make contact with the decision maker later on.

I hope this helps a little bit. It is a different form of marketing and it works for me. I use this partial system every time I am working my new festivals for the season or getting into new markets and it works great.

This is something you can do or you can hire someone to do for you. In either way, the process is the same and it would give you a much better ROI.

If anyone has any questions about the information above, just let me know. I would be happy to go into more detail with you.

Kyle

Cold calls
I quit my day job so I could have a bit of self respect. To twist peoples arms over the phone, who ARE NOT interested in entertainment is simply degrading. I am very easy to find, and I will never BEG for business. I do 200 shows a year by waiting for them to call me.
Al Angello

Tell us how you do it?

I was fortunate enough to have the internet at my finger tips. Before I had a web site I went to the library, got a phone book and copied the pages of companies I wanted to work for. It was long hard work, but it paid off. Most companies never had an entertainer call them and ask if they'd like to receive free inforamtion about how to make their next company event unforgettable. My very first "corporate" gig was for Sony when I was 15. Now I know that sounds like BS, but it is not! My dad worked at Sony and I got to go to work with him one day and was showing people some card tricks. Then someone asked me to come to the Christmas party and do magic. I decided to do walk around magic and it went over pretty well. Except that I had sponge balls in each pocket along with, 3 decks of cards, 4 silver dollars, rubber bands, and every other magic thing I owned. In the end I used 2 decks of cards and that was it. I only got paid about $100 or so. And every year after that I've been invited back, despite my dad quiting.

Today I am working on a web site (I took mine down to pursue a career as a firefighter/paramedic) which will be up in about a month. But I used to do pretty much the same thing, find companies, call, ask to send them something (who doesn't like getting free stuff) call them back and see if they want to book a show. I did that at every time of the year too, not just holidays. Then once every other month I'd call them and chat with them for a while. I never called just to "sell" my show. I still get calls asking where their call was! So we chat about our lives, work, I tell them about the lives I save everyday and that's that. I feel that to get booked for a show the booker must really like you. I charge an amount that is almost double for corp. gigs that the magicians here in San Diego charge, and I did stay booked. I think that they booked me all the time because they knew me as a friend, not someone just trying to sell them. The saying is alway true, "it's easier (and less expensive) to keep the same clients than it is to get new ones." I live by those words!