How to market touring arts events more effectively
How to market touring arts events more effectively
By
Heather Maitland
This comprehensive guide to market touring arts events includes chapters on setting up a tour, campaign planning, communicating with audiences and monitoring and evaluation. The guide features case studies, top tips and comments from over 60 practitioners and is based on research responses from over 40 companies and 50 venues. As well as being an excellent tool box for those new to touring marketing it is also a valuable refresher for marketers and venues with front line experience.
What is touring marketing?
The touring of arts events presents a series of unique challenges to marketers, whether they are based in a presenting venue or in a company, because neither a presenting venue nor a touring company can achieve its objectives on its own. The company is the expert on the product, but the venue is the expert on its audiences and the local marketing environment.
They are a team even if their offices are at opposite ends of the country, maximising their resources of money, time, skills, knowledge and goodwill by pooling them to achieve a common purpose. In many ways marketers will be trying to achieve the same things and can identify complementary aims, but each venue and company will also have different aims and very different needs. Marketers need to:
• share responsibilities and so share the workload
• share information to make sure that each understands the other’s objectives
• be honest with each other and not hide the challenges they face in their own organisations
