Building and maintaining an audience

How do we attract an audience?
Here are four tips to help you find and keep a growing audience.
1. Put on a good show! This may seem like a , well yeah but how’s that help get people in the door thing, but, it isn’t. When you set out to produce a theatrical event the attitude with which you conduct yourself matters. You may think that you can produce junk and have a great promotional campaign and still rake it in at the box office, beware! Everyone attached to your production knows what kind of show it will be, and THEY, not your posters will be selling the tickets. People hear about the quality beforehand, so make it good, get your people excited about how good it is! Give them permission to bring in an audience and watch how ell it works!
2. Design a good promotional campaign. Don’t scrimp, and I don’t mean money, make the best posters you can make. Contact as many news sources as you can contact, write the best press release that’s ever been written. Find tie ins to other local events and go promote yourself there. Make sure that EVERYBODY hears about your show and how great it is going to be, because one thing is certain 100% of the people who do not know you are doing a show will not show up! Guaranteed! So go on make another dozen calls, pass out a hundred more fliers!
3. Give people their money’s worth. Once you’ve papered the town with fliers and posters and invited the mayor and his dog make sure people have a good time! Don’t make walking into your theatre feel like a bad experience. Start by doing this: leave the building, right now! Go ON, do it! Okay now walk in as if you’ve never been there before and you are coming to see a show, don’t know a cast member, read an ad in the paper, coming to see a show. What do you see? Is the first impression a good one? If not, what can you do about it? Would a coat of paint in the lobby make all the difference in the world? Does the “NO EXCHANGES, NO REFUNDS!!!!” sign make you feel like a kid who just broke the rules? Make sure that as a stranger you would feel welcome and be excited to be there. Then carry this process through an examination of every part of what you are doing, is the theatre clean and comfortable. Is there adequate lighting for entering and exiting? Do you play music before the show? Are the restrooms clearly labeled? Make sure that IF that customer chooses not to come back it isn’t because of something that could have been easily helped.
4. Once the show is over keep in touch with your audience. Find a way to update them on what you are doing next. Start a website or blog to inform them of your upcoming projects. Always make sure to say thank you, remember, theatre without an audience is just a room full of people who are probably too full of themselves!