Making the Most of Your Cinema’s Marketing Budget
Your marketing budget is set, but how do you make sure you get the most out of those precious dollars? If you’re a nonprofit, you want to make sure you’re a good steward of resources on behalf of your donors. If you’re a for-profit business, you want to make sure you’re protecting your bottom line. We all know marketing is important and you have to spend money to make money, but how do you make sure you’re spending your money the right way?
Where is your audience now?
Before embarking on a marketing campaign, you need to have an idea of where your audience is currently discovering that you produce something. This can start by looking at the marketing you’re currently doing, but the best way to do that is to survey your audience. When you run this survey, remember that the method you use to survey them may skew the results. If you email your mailing list with the survey link, it seems likely that those people will tell you that they mostly hear about the show through your emails. The same goes for your social networks.
You want data about your audience at the time they are your audience – that means they need to have a survey in their hands when they find out about your production. In a digital environment, this may mean giving them a link to a poll before the show starts, or giving them a poll when we are able to welcome audiences back to our spaces. Include a link to the survey in your digital program (BroadwayWorld Stage Mag is a turnkey digital program solution) is a great way to encourage audience response and data collection.
With this data in hand, you can now begin the process of reviewing your current marketing activities. If people notice that they see information about the show in one specific way but not others, is it a good idea to move some of your resources to those areas? Most likely the answer is yes. If the billboard works, maybe you should pick up a second one somewhere else in town. If the newspaper works, make sure you’re still in the newspaper – and maybe invest in a bigger ad.
Survey data about your audience is an immediate way to understand how others who fit your audience profile might discover your productions. Knowing how they discover your productions is a great way to know how to spend to attract more viewers who match this profile. If you need help reaching and surveying your audience, BroadwayWorld launched a search service last year.
Develop your marketing
Once you know what is working in your current plan, you need to start thinking about expanding your marketing. It doesn’t have to be an expensive project, but it will cost you money, and you shouldn’t be afraid to let these tests run their course. With the continued implementation of privacy laws and features in web browsers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find your audience through interest tracking on websites. You need to find the audience you may be missing from your current marketing plan by specifically researching posts where those audience members will be present.
The first stop you should make? BroadwayWorld.com. As the world’s largest theater site, our coverage goes well beyond Broadway and the West End – we have 145 regional markets focusing on local news. Add to our ability to effectively geolocate your marketing, we can ensure that whatever content audiences are listening to on our site, we can show them marketing from productions happening near them – or businesses based near them. them in the case of digital events. You may think you can do the same targeting through Facebook, but take note of this article from The Intercept which delves into the many potential issues and lies that get in the way of Facebook’s interest targeting.
We’ll discuss the metrics you should be looking at in a moment, but it’s important to note that as you grow your marketing, most marketing efforts take time to get established. There is no single marketing solution, and there is no single marketing that you can wield like a magic wand and conjure up an audience for your productions. You want to be sure you stop spending in a way that isn’t working, but you can’t trade something that works for one group of audience members for something that works for another group without risking losing the one of these groups.
What metrics should you use to make sure your marketing plan is working?
The key to really getting the most out of your marketing budget is to make sure you’re constantly reviewing and adjusting certain metrics that can give you an idea of what’s actually working for you and your marketing plans. While there are a number of metrics you can look up that will tell you something, here are some important metrics and what you can learn from them:
Traffic sent by marketing elements: it most likely takes the form of clicks or CTR, and that’s the main question for most marketing pieces: does this campaign send people to our website or to the ticket link in the way that I wish they would? Now, if the call to action for the campaign doesn’t involve trying to send people to your website, that might not be such an important statistic, but those clicks might be one of the ways the most immediate to measure the impact.
Site bounce rate: Once people landed on your website, did they stay? This metric won’t tell you if a piece of marketing is working, but it will start to point you towards a potential disconnect between your marketing and the eventual conversion of prospect to customer. Your marketing elements are there to turn people into qualified leads – by interacting with your marketing, they’ve shown interest – and then it’s where you send them that’s going to move them further down the sales process. If you’re generating clicks but not sales, the problem probably isn’t with your marketing materials, but with converting leads.
Prints: An important metric for all forms of marketing (remember the rule of 7 we talked about in last week’s article), users must see your logo and message multiple times before taking action. You’ll also want to keep an eye on impressions to try to understand if there are elements of your marketing campaign that drive awareness that leads to stronger implementation of other elements that have appeal. more explicit action.
Getting the most out of your marketing budget, no matter how small, is about making sure you keep doing the things that work, while experimenting and developing new marketing elements to discover new ways to bring in audiences. to walk through your doors (in person or virtually). When doing your own experiments, be sure to work with partners who are also striving to find new ways to reach their audience.
Want to learn more about how BroadwayWorld is working to find new ways to reach our audience? Join us on January 27 for a brand new webinar:
An update from BroadwayWorld
This month, we take a look back at 2020 and look ahead to 2021 by exploring trends in data collected from surveys deployed by BroadwayWorld of theaters and audiences, how we read (and the trends we see) in the news of the industry, and we will be joined by the editor of BroadwayWorld Robert Diamond to discuss all the new features, programs and opportunities BroadwayWorld has launched over the past year – and how these can be used to boost your marketing.
Join us on January 27 at 3:00 p.m. EST for a look at the state of the industry from a business, public, and media perspective! Register here !
