So you’ve made a great show, and put together an amazing lesson plan! Let’s bring in the people.
Marketing your improv company online can be highly effective to reach new audiences, build your company brand, and find new people to join your organisation.
Why market your improv company online?
Having an online presence, including a professional website and active social media profiles, helps establish and strengthen your brand.
Reach a Wider Audience
Online marketing allows you to reach broader audience, breaking geographic barriers and exposing your improv company to a larger market including people from neighbouring towns, cities and even countries.
Cost-Effectiveness
Online marketing is often more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods. Social media platforms, email marketing, and online advertising can be relatively inexpensive compared to print or TV advertising.
Targeted Marketing:
Online platforms allow you to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviours. This helps tailor your marketing messages to a relevant audience that is more likely to be interested in improv.
How to market your improv company online? 10 tips for marketing success
With these in mind, there’s a number of steps you can take to be more effective online in your marketing.
Here’s 10 tips to promoting your improv company using digital channels.
1. Video And Photography Is Key
Posts with images regularly receive up to double the engagement of posts without. And video regularly doubles that again. As they say, “a picture paints a thousand words”, so it’s worthwhile investing in good photography and videography.
These will be your organisation’s face to the world, so when taking them, the higher the quality, the better. However, make sure the file size of the ones you upload is appropriate for web. Nobody wants to wait for twenty 5MB images to download.
2. Create A Content Calendar
A content calendar is a great way of keeping track of all the posts you are making on social media. It ensures there is no cross-over if multiple people manage the page, and enables you to regularly publish content throughout the week. A simple calendar can be put together using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
When populating your calendar, consider all the different types of content you can use. Videos, photos, infographics, memes, quotes, questions, live video, polls etc. Don’t be afraid to mix it up, and to test to see what works best for you and your audience.
3. Facebook And Google Are King
Facebook is the dominating social platform, and Google dominates search. Together, these two companies will be able to find the bulk of your audience.
Social media methods include:
• Facebook Organic: regular unpaid posts and content that you post on Facebook
• Facebook Paid Advertising: Facebook’s platform to serve paid ads. The people you target don’t need to be people following your page (but can be if you’d like).
• Google Ads – Display: These are ads served by Google on regular websites. This means you can get an ad on news websites (for example), without having to organise ad placements with every separate organisation.
• Google Ads – Text Advertising: These are the paid search results at the top of a Google search page. You can pick and choose the words that you want to appear for, and the price you’re willing to pay to secure that spot.
After these two, Instagram, followed by Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, would be your next most likely platforms. Make sure that every platform you use has a distinct purpose. E.g. Using Instagram for behind the scenes pictures, or LinkedIn to connect with corporate clients.
4. Remarketing
Remarketing is the process of targeting people who have already been to your website with relevant ads. You may have seen this before, where products you’ve put in your cart online seem to follow you around the internet.
To set up remarketing ads, you will need the Facebook Pixel (for Facebook) and the Remarketing Tag (for Google). These are little pieces of code that you can embed in the header section of your website. Most website content management systems (e.g. WordPress, Weebly, etc.) will let you copy and paste these codes simply into your site.
Once these are installed, you will be able to target people who have come to your website. As people who come to your website are (typically) people who are interested in your company, it is a much more cost-effective way to target potential audiences and students.
You can also create a similar audience by using the Lookalike function (in Facebook) or the Similar Audience function (in Google Ads). These are people that Facebook and Google consider to be close matches to the type of audience you are remarketing to.
5. Start An Email List
Email is still one of the best ways to connect with your audience. Dollar for dollar, it’s also one of the most cost-effective methods as well.
Use your email list to promote your shows, let people know when classes are on, show off things you’re proud of, and keep your people engaged with what you are doing.
Note, make sure everyone has opted in to receive emails before sending them. Regulations are getting stricter and stricter around the world, and you don’t want to get caught out for spam, just because you forgot to ask if it was ok to send an email.
6. Competitions
Because everyone loves to win. A double pass to one of your shows can be a great way to engage your audience. You can also give away tickets to shows of other groups you support to help build relationships.
The reason to use competitions is for data collection. Use a form on your website to collect entries, rather than running the competition directly through Facebook or social media.
Not only will you be able to use the data for emails (as long as you warn people in the competition terms), you can also remarket to these people, as they’ve come to your website.
Word of warning, getting people to like your Facebook page to enter can be a breach of Facebook’s terms and conditions of competitions. The above method of collecting data is the best bang for your buck.
7. Optimise Your Pages For Mobile
Make sure your website is optimised for mobile, as this is where most of your traffic will be coming from over the next few years (if not already).
This means, responsive websites, big call to action buttons that can be easily clicked (e.g. Buy Now), and big readable text.
Your audiences will thank you for it, and your conversions will be higher.
8. Optimise Your Pages For Social
Make sure your webpages look good when the link is shared on social media. This is a tricky one that often gets forgotten.
Your page titles should be descriptive, and make sense out of the context of your website, e.g. a title for your homepage:
On The Fly | Improvised Comedy & Theatre
vs
Home
Facebook will pull this information when you share a link to its platform.
You also want to ensure that each page has a default image that represent the content of that page. Again, most web systems have a section for this. Do a search for ‘Open Graph Tags’ for more information on getting this to work if you’re having errors.
9. Optimise Your Pages For Google
This is that SEO thing that everyone seems to be talking about.
Like above, make sure the titles of your pages reflect what someone would be looking for in Google. This means including your keywords (the words people are searching for) in the titles of your pages.
Ensure that your site has a clear structure, and everything is easy to find. Nothing should be hidden more than three clicks away from the homepage.
SEO can be a mammoth task, and is a constantly changing field. While there’s always new tips and tricks, the best way to think about it is: ‘How do I make my website as clear as possible for users to find the information they need to accomplish their goals?”. Design your site with that in mind.
10. Engage With Your Fans
After all, it’s social media. Talk to your fans, ask questions, prompt discussion. Anything you can do to get people talking about and with your brand improves its chances of getting shown by Facebook in the timeline.
Encourage your students and audiences to share your content; and create content that is shareable. And plug your social channels in the real world, on programs, flyers and after shows. Sometimes a little prompt goes a long way!
Final thoughts on marketing your improv company
So, there you have it—10 fantastic tips to market your improv company in the digital world! Now, let’s roll up our sleeves and put those strategies into action. Let’s fill those seats and make your improv shows a hit
