Postcards for Those Who Fringe

Continuing from where I left off yesterday…

The next tool I used to promote my magic performance at the Fringe was a postcard with all the specific details about my show. Postcards are, hands down, the best form of print material you can have for the Fringe.

First, they are relatively inexpensive to produce at about $.15 apiece for 1,000 postcards. I used an online print vendor called 48HourPrint, but there are many others (like ModernPostcards) that will do as good or better.

Allow me to interject one personal exhortation. Do yourself a favor and pay someone to design your postcard for you. I know that we all have software that will allow us to layout photos and text, but we don’t all have an eye for good design. And if your postcard looks amateurish, people will assume that your performance will be amateurish too. So make sure that your promotional materials are every bit as good as your performance is. Thus ends the personal diatribe.

You can design your postcard as a self-mailer, provided you leave certain areas free of print for the post office. Your print vendor will often provide templates showing you which areas are verboten.

I chose not to use my postcards as a self-mailer because I would have to sacrifice valuable space, and because I’m not convinced that enough people will come to see a play they’ve never heard of before (mine was an original work, as I believe most Fringe performances are) just because they received a postcard.

Let’s examine some of the marketing challenges specific to Fringe performances. As I alluded to above, unless you’re doing Hamlet or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof you will need to find a way to convey what your performance is about. A postcard is a very poor vehicle for this (due to space limitations), so it will need to be supplemented somehow. I opted to speak with people face-to-face, and to write personal letters.

Your performance has several dates & times and they are irregularly distributed. Postcards do very well here. By giving your prospect a postcard, he or she will have a record of each performance date each start time. Carry postcards with you at all times and hand them out liberally. It sure beats having someone try to write down, “…Thursday the 19th at 8:30, Friday the 20th at 7:00, Saturday the 21st — no show…”

Because of the variety of dates and times for my magic performance, I decided not to produce any posters (nor did I write chalk messages on the sidewalk, nor did I use any other marketing devices of this ilk). Posters can work to promote a Fringe show — but only to a degree. And there’s the rub. Because I wanted to be as profitable as possible, I needed to keep my expenses down. This required that I use only the marketing tools that would produce the most bang for the buck (and the most torque for my time).

Posters can work for bands, because there is less to remember (Radiohead, Saturday, June 7th at 8:00, Fox Theatre). And posters can even be effective for a more traditional theater run (The Odd Couple, Fridays & Saturdays at 8:00, Sundays at 2:00, through the month of June at the Dairy Center).

But because I needed to convey so much detailed information, I realized that I needed a promotional piece that people could walk away with.

You’ll need to map out a strategy for how you will use your postcards to determine how many postcards to produce. There’s no point in printing 5,000 postcards if you only know 20 people (I hope you know more than 20 people…).

For my show, I make a list of everyone I knew in Colorado for whom I had a mailing address (I didn’t send them as self-mailers, instead I included the postcard in an envelope with a short letter inviting them to come). Then I make a list of all the networking events I would attend between now and opening night and set a distribution goal for each event. I made a list of postcard friendly businesses that allow people to leave stacks of promotional material, and calculated how many postcards I would need.

OK. That’s what I know about using postcards. I think I’ll do one more post about promoting your Fringe show to wrap up some loose ends. But again, I’ve got a magic gig to prepare for, so I’ll stop right here.