How Perfect Liars Club Achieved Sold Out Shows at Capital Fringe, aka ideas to publicize your Fringe festival show
We've just finished our run of Perfect Liars Club shows in the crazy whirlwind that is the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, DC. After lots of dashing around, trying to persuade people of the merits of our show, we completely sold out our shows at our 90-person venue - several days in advance - with a hefty flow of pleading emails from people seeking extra tickets ever since, and lines of people trying in vain to buy tickets at the door. This was obviously really cool for us. People are asking how we did it, and really, I don't exactly know. Obviously getting some good reviews helped. But I'll tell you what else we did, in case any of it's helpful for ideas for others building audiences for their Fringe shows. NB none of our approaches cost anything but time, basic online skills, and the printing of flyers and programs/loyalty cards from Vistaprint. We have full time jobs, no proper marketing, media or PR knowledge, and were able to execute all of our publicity activities entirely in our spare time, alongside going to shows and having fun.
1. Pre-Fringe publicity prep
- Disclaimer alert: Perfect Liars Club is a pre-existing show which usually sells out in its regular, smaller venue. So we had the advantage of pre-existing audience and promotion platforms: a small mailing list, Twitter feed, Facebook page, website, plus we spoke about Fringe at our shows. (In fact, we transparently raised the price of our pre-existing show on one occasion to cover the exact cost of Fringe compulsory insurance, which may have given our regular audience a feeling of ownership of our Fringe shows.) However, it's worth noting that our analysis of ticket buyers has revealed that surprisingly only a small minority of our Fringe audience actually seemed to come from our pre-existing sources.
- We thought very carefully about the exact wording and finding an iconic photograph to put in the guide and official Fringe website, to catch people's eye. We reviewed past Fringe guides and identified the elements of the most eye-catching shows. We have no way of knowing how effective this was, except for overhearing occasional people at Fort Fringe noticing and commenting on our show while looking through the guide. Subjectively, we thought it stood out a little. And we used the same iconic image on all our publicity, which achieved a consistent, identifiable look and feel.
- We also thought quite carefully about our press release, using the provided template, but adding a section listing why we considered ourselves one of the most exciting shows at the Fringe. We sent out our press release to all members of the media provided on a list via Capital Fringe, and followed up by engaging these contacts on Twitter. Members of the media who had read our press release contacted us to compliment our approach to the press release, though despite this, before the show sold out, our media coverage was disappointingly minimal (other than reviews of course).
We also held a show in June which we branded as a 'Fringe preview' show to attract media attention and pre-Fringe publicity, which seemed like a good idea, though in fact, it didn't work - we sold out and the show was great, but we sent out our press release probably too late, so got no media coverage (though it may have helped to draw media attention to our show prior to the rest of the Fringe circus rolling into town). In this town, scoring a Fringe feature in the press seems to be primarily a matter of personal contacts (or a genuinely newsworthy story... or in the case of one newspaper, payment). I imagine pre-Fringe newspaper features would be helpful for ticket sales, but given our experience of selling out despite not having any, reassuringly not essential. We were not mentioned in most of the initial 'top picks for Fringe' articles, which was a shame but this did not doom our ticket sales. By the time newspapers really noticed us, and started making us pick of the week and things, we were already long sold out.
- We wrote free invited preview articles in DCMTA and DC Theatre Scene as soon as we were invited to do so, and they were some of the first to be published. We focused these articles on the premise of the show, and why we had come up with it.
- We manually inputted our show dates and details into most of the listings websites in town, ie all of the newspaper and local magazine calendars, Brightest Young Things, Sosh, etc - usually they just list 'Capital Fringe' generically, but this small effort made sure our show was explicitly listed too, merely by submitting it.
- We created a Fringe microsite on our website, full of information about our show, such as performer biographies. We did this ourselves, using our usual free website editor, Weebly.
- We created a flyer that had a puzzle on the back that (a) engaged people in the participatory, fun concept of our show, and (b) drove them to our microsite for the answer, and thus to a link to buy tickets.
- We created a 'loyalty card' scheme and secured prizes from local establishments to encourage people to attend, and in particular to attend more than once (our show is different every time). In addition to the direct impact of the loyalty card encouraging loyalty by offering incentives to return, we were able to use the loyalty card as publicity, both as a talking point and differentiator, but also in terms of promoting the prizes we had. In fact, despite lots of excitement about the loyalty card, we didn't have too many repeat attendees - but that impact may have been attenuated by our selling out early. Or not - who knows.
- We offered prizes, which didn't seem to be as huge a draw as we'd expected, but people did like it. We got the prizes by asking cool DC organizations we'd previously featured in our weekly Brit About Town blog (which talks about cool things to do in DC, and reviews things) to donate prizes and offered them thanks on our website, social media, mention at the show and in the program.
2. How we used social media
- We posted to our Facebook page every couple of days from the day the tickets went on sale, using new and potentially interesting content, avoiding repetition, though always including a link to the ticket buying page. We balanced this so we didn't overwhelm/bore and thus lose followers, and we kept them engaged, eg with biographies and photos of our performers (which were then organically shared across social media by our performers and their friends), a recording of our new theme song, and then once the show had started, with reviews and photos from the show. Once the tickets were moving fast, we intermittently provided stats to encourage action to buy tickets before they sold out. We encouraged people to like our Facebook page, but in fact, we didn't receive more than about 25 extra likes during the Fringe - but we did receive lots of sharing and likes of the content we posted. Facebook probably worked best for us by driving friends of the performers to the show - plus we posted details of our show to relevant Facebook groups we were members of, and to Facebook groups based in DC but less relevant.
- We posted to Twitter several times a day from the day the tickets went on sale, using official Fringe hashtags like #capfringe14 and #capfringeSOLDOUT to increase our reach, and engage with other Fringe-goers. Once we saw the tickets were moving fast, we intermittently provided stats to encourage action to buy tickets before they sold out, ie 'Only 6 tickets left for Saturday night! Have you got yours?" along with a link to buy tickets. We are regular Twitter users, and essentially posted and interacted in real time, retweeting any positive mentions of our show, sharing new content like our new theme song, and photos from one of the shows, and following others. We also did a lot of 'favoriting' and retweeting of other Fringe posts we liked, as Twitter is an interactive platform, not just one to churn out your own content, and we wanted to be part of the Fringe community (plus pick up some good recommendations for other Fringe shows, get advice, etc).
We would have made more use of real-time Twitter publicity if our venue had had cellphone reception! Instead, we emailed the attendees of our first two shows after the show and encouraged them to tweet about us and be entered into a prize draw. In fact only a few people followed through. We also reminded them that every show is different, and provided the link to buy more tickets, and a few did.
3. How we used our friends
- Fringe doesn't occur in a vacuum. We approached our 'friends', ie people who run story, improv and comedy shows around the city who were not necessarily our competitors or even in the Fringe festival, but had access to some of our target audiences. We asked them to promote us in their mailings, social media, on stage etc, which they generally did. NB this is different from swapping publicity with other Fringe shows, which we didn't really do so I can't comment on it - the people we approached were mostly our actual friends, as we go to each others' shows regularly, and we've previously promoted their shows on our Twitter feed and weekly Brit About Town blog, so goodwill already existed. A benefit of being local, and attending and promoting local shows throughout the year. However if you're an out of towner, you could achieve a similar effect with some strategic introductions, probably.
- We encouraged our performers to share information about our show with their friends on social media (we also gave them flyers, but they did not request or distribute very many - most of the flyers were distributed by the two of us who run the show). When we put photos of our performers online, we tagged them or otherwise drew the photos to their attention, which encouraged organic sharing through their friend networks - and made sure there were always direct links to buy tickets to nudge people to do that.
- We tagged the people associated with our show on Twitter whenever possible, particularly the organizations who had donated prizes. These organizations appreciated being mentioned and often retweeted our tweets, which always included a link to buying tickets, reaching entirely different audience cohorts, often at large scale. This delivered value to both them and us.
4. How we used our flyers
We ordered 1500 flyers and probably distributed about 900 of them (we sold out near the beginning of Fringe, so stopped using them).
- As instructed by Capital Fringe, we left a pile of flyers in the box office the first day they allowed it. By the end of our run, hardly any had been taken. So the value is likely to be more visual as people walk past than people actually taking these flyers away and reading them.
- We handed out flyers and chatted to people at the Fringe preview night. We found this evening was mostly full of competing artists with their own flyers, and while we enjoyed hearing about their shows, I don't think we picked up many audience members that night. We had a similar experience at the Fringe opening night party: it felt like everyone was being bombarded with vast numbers of random flyers but most seemed too focused on promoting their own shows to be particularly interested in scrutinizing other people's flyers, and those who didn't have a show were overwhelmed.
- We took a targeted approach to flyering after that, and our ticket sale trends associated with these dates indicated the significant success of this method. Part (a) of this method was flyering outside Fringe shows with similar target audiences to ours, as the audience left after the show. If we'd had more of us doing this, we could have probably been far more successful by increasing coverage, but mostly we flyered outside shows that we actually went to see, since we're about fun and enjoying other people's shows, not just running around flyering for ours. We definitely saw people from these flyer sessions coming to our shows. Part (b) of our approach, and probably most effective, was flyering as audiences exited NON-FRINGE shows happening locally just before and during the festival, in our case the local storytelling, comedy and improv shows around town. This felt like the most successful approach for us, as it enabled us to access the audiences of shows which have already created big followings, and to target audiences who not only had a declared interest in our genre of show, they had a proven commitment to actually getting tickets to see shows. And when we handed them our flyer, it wasn't one of a huge handful of different Fringe shows like in the beer tent; we were generally the only people flyering at their venue. This approach probably brought people to the Fringe who might not otherwise have attended, which was good for our audiences, but also for other Fringe shows, as it helped raise the profile of the whole festival and brought new audiences.
I don't think these tactics are especially revolutionary, and I don't know which specific methods worked, but I hope some of them may be helpful to you. We may have done other things which I can't remember, but this is what comes to mind. We had a lot of fun, and our publicity work was not at all onerous. Capital Fringe asked us to do more shows, but we're exhausted! But we'll be back in September! If you want to keep on top of our future shows, join our mailing list.
Now we can't wait to see more Fringe shows. See you around the beer tent!
PS You may have heard we plan to donate our profits to charity - this is true. But we decided not to make a big deal of it in our publicity, other than to encourage people to donate prizes, because we felt it would give a different tone to our publicity and show. We wanted to attract audiences on the basis of people liking the sound of our show and wanting to participate, rather than people buying tickets based on where the money was going.
1. Pre-Fringe publicity prep
- Disclaimer alert: Perfect Liars Club is a pre-existing show which usually sells out in its regular, smaller venue. So we had the advantage of pre-existing audience and promotion platforms: a small mailing list, Twitter feed, Facebook page, website, plus we spoke about Fringe at our shows. (In fact, we transparently raised the price of our pre-existing show on one occasion to cover the exact cost of Fringe compulsory insurance, which may have given our regular audience a feeling of ownership of our Fringe shows.) However, it's worth noting that our analysis of ticket buyers has revealed that surprisingly only a small minority of our Fringe audience actually seemed to come from our pre-existing sources.
- We thought very carefully about the exact wording and finding an iconic photograph to put in the guide and official Fringe website, to catch people's eye. We reviewed past Fringe guides and identified the elements of the most eye-catching shows. We have no way of knowing how effective this was, except for overhearing occasional people at Fort Fringe noticing and commenting on our show while looking through the guide. Subjectively, we thought it stood out a little. And we used the same iconic image on all our publicity, which achieved a consistent, identifiable look and feel.
- We also thought quite carefully about our press release, using the provided template, but adding a section listing why we considered ourselves one of the most exciting shows at the Fringe. We sent out our press release to all members of the media provided on a list via Capital Fringe, and followed up by engaging these contacts on Twitter. Members of the media who had read our press release contacted us to compliment our approach to the press release, though despite this, before the show sold out, our media coverage was disappointingly minimal (other than reviews of course).
We also held a show in June which we branded as a 'Fringe preview' show to attract media attention and pre-Fringe publicity, which seemed like a good idea, though in fact, it didn't work - we sold out and the show was great, but we sent out our press release probably too late, so got no media coverage (though it may have helped to draw media attention to our show prior to the rest of the Fringe circus rolling into town). In this town, scoring a Fringe feature in the press seems to be primarily a matter of personal contacts (or a genuinely newsworthy story... or in the case of one newspaper, payment). I imagine pre-Fringe newspaper features would be helpful for ticket sales, but given our experience of selling out despite not having any, reassuringly not essential. We were not mentioned in most of the initial 'top picks for Fringe' articles, which was a shame but this did not doom our ticket sales. By the time newspapers really noticed us, and started making us pick of the week and things, we were already long sold out.
- We wrote free invited preview articles in DCMTA and DC Theatre Scene as soon as we were invited to do so, and they were some of the first to be published. We focused these articles on the premise of the show, and why we had come up with it.
- We manually inputted our show dates and details into most of the listings websites in town, ie all of the newspaper and local magazine calendars, Brightest Young Things, Sosh, etc - usually they just list 'Capital Fringe' generically, but this small effort made sure our show was explicitly listed too, merely by submitting it.
- We created a Fringe microsite on our website, full of information about our show, such as performer biographies. We did this ourselves, using our usual free website editor, Weebly.
- We created a flyer that had a puzzle on the back that (a) engaged people in the participatory, fun concept of our show, and (b) drove them to our microsite for the answer, and thus to a link to buy tickets.
- We created a 'loyalty card' scheme and secured prizes from local establishments to encourage people to attend, and in particular to attend more than once (our show is different every time). In addition to the direct impact of the loyalty card encouraging loyalty by offering incentives to return, we were able to use the loyalty card as publicity, both as a talking point and differentiator, but also in terms of promoting the prizes we had. In fact, despite lots of excitement about the loyalty card, we didn't have too many repeat attendees - but that impact may have been attenuated by our selling out early. Or not - who knows.
- We offered prizes, which didn't seem to be as huge a draw as we'd expected, but people did like it. We got the prizes by asking cool DC organizations we'd previously featured in our weekly Brit About Town blog (which talks about cool things to do in DC, and reviews things) to donate prizes and offered them thanks on our website, social media, mention at the show and in the program.
2. How we used social media
- We posted to our Facebook page every couple of days from the day the tickets went on sale, using new and potentially interesting content, avoiding repetition, though always including a link to the ticket buying page. We balanced this so we didn't overwhelm/bore and thus lose followers, and we kept them engaged, eg with biographies and photos of our performers (which were then organically shared across social media by our performers and their friends), a recording of our new theme song, and then once the show had started, with reviews and photos from the show. Once the tickets were moving fast, we intermittently provided stats to encourage action to buy tickets before they sold out. We encouraged people to like our Facebook page, but in fact, we didn't receive more than about 25 extra likes during the Fringe - but we did receive lots of sharing and likes of the content we posted. Facebook probably worked best for us by driving friends of the performers to the show - plus we posted details of our show to relevant Facebook groups we were members of, and to Facebook groups based in DC but less relevant.
- We posted to Twitter several times a day from the day the tickets went on sale, using official Fringe hashtags like #capfringe14 and #capfringeSOLDOUT to increase our reach, and engage with other Fringe-goers. Once we saw the tickets were moving fast, we intermittently provided stats to encourage action to buy tickets before they sold out, ie 'Only 6 tickets left for Saturday night! Have you got yours?" along with a link to buy tickets. We are regular Twitter users, and essentially posted and interacted in real time, retweeting any positive mentions of our show, sharing new content like our new theme song, and photos from one of the shows, and following others. We also did a lot of 'favoriting' and retweeting of other Fringe posts we liked, as Twitter is an interactive platform, not just one to churn out your own content, and we wanted to be part of the Fringe community (plus pick up some good recommendations for other Fringe shows, get advice, etc).
We would have made more use of real-time Twitter publicity if our venue had had cellphone reception! Instead, we emailed the attendees of our first two shows after the show and encouraged them to tweet about us and be entered into a prize draw. In fact only a few people followed through. We also reminded them that every show is different, and provided the link to buy more tickets, and a few did.
3. How we used our friends
- Fringe doesn't occur in a vacuum. We approached our 'friends', ie people who run story, improv and comedy shows around the city who were not necessarily our competitors or even in the Fringe festival, but had access to some of our target audiences. We asked them to promote us in their mailings, social media, on stage etc, which they generally did. NB this is different from swapping publicity with other Fringe shows, which we didn't really do so I can't comment on it - the people we approached were mostly our actual friends, as we go to each others' shows regularly, and we've previously promoted their shows on our Twitter feed and weekly Brit About Town blog, so goodwill already existed. A benefit of being local, and attending and promoting local shows throughout the year. However if you're an out of towner, you could achieve a similar effect with some strategic introductions, probably.
- We encouraged our performers to share information about our show with their friends on social media (we also gave them flyers, but they did not request or distribute very many - most of the flyers were distributed by the two of us who run the show). When we put photos of our performers online, we tagged them or otherwise drew the photos to their attention, which encouraged organic sharing through their friend networks - and made sure there were always direct links to buy tickets to nudge people to do that.
- We tagged the people associated with our show on Twitter whenever possible, particularly the organizations who had donated prizes. These organizations appreciated being mentioned and often retweeted our tweets, which always included a link to buying tickets, reaching entirely different audience cohorts, often at large scale. This delivered value to both them and us.
4. How we used our flyers
We ordered 1500 flyers and probably distributed about 900 of them (we sold out near the beginning of Fringe, so stopped using them).
- As instructed by Capital Fringe, we left a pile of flyers in the box office the first day they allowed it. By the end of our run, hardly any had been taken. So the value is likely to be more visual as people walk past than people actually taking these flyers away and reading them.
- We handed out flyers and chatted to people at the Fringe preview night. We found this evening was mostly full of competing artists with their own flyers, and while we enjoyed hearing about their shows, I don't think we picked up many audience members that night. We had a similar experience at the Fringe opening night party: it felt like everyone was being bombarded with vast numbers of random flyers but most seemed too focused on promoting their own shows to be particularly interested in scrutinizing other people's flyers, and those who didn't have a show were overwhelmed.
- We took a targeted approach to flyering after that, and our ticket sale trends associated with these dates indicated the significant success of this method. Part (a) of this method was flyering outside Fringe shows with similar target audiences to ours, as the audience left after the show. If we'd had more of us doing this, we could have probably been far more successful by increasing coverage, but mostly we flyered outside shows that we actually went to see, since we're about fun and enjoying other people's shows, not just running around flyering for ours. We definitely saw people from these flyer sessions coming to our shows. Part (b) of our approach, and probably most effective, was flyering as audiences exited NON-FRINGE shows happening locally just before and during the festival, in our case the local storytelling, comedy and improv shows around town. This felt like the most successful approach for us, as it enabled us to access the audiences of shows which have already created big followings, and to target audiences who not only had a declared interest in our genre of show, they had a proven commitment to actually getting tickets to see shows. And when we handed them our flyer, it wasn't one of a huge handful of different Fringe shows like in the beer tent; we were generally the only people flyering at their venue. This approach probably brought people to the Fringe who might not otherwise have attended, which was good for our audiences, but also for other Fringe shows, as it helped raise the profile of the whole festival and brought new audiences.
I don't think these tactics are especially revolutionary, and I don't know which specific methods worked, but I hope some of them may be helpful to you. We may have done other things which I can't remember, but this is what comes to mind. We had a lot of fun, and our publicity work was not at all onerous. Capital Fringe asked us to do more shows, but we're exhausted! But we'll be back in September! If you want to keep on top of our future shows, join our mailing list.
Now we can't wait to see more Fringe shows. See you around the beer tent!
PS You may have heard we plan to donate our profits to charity - this is true. But we decided not to make a big deal of it in our publicity, other than to encourage people to donate prizes, because we felt it would give a different tone to our publicity and show. We wanted to attract audiences on the basis of people liking the sound of our show and wanting to participate, rather than people buying tickets based on where the money was going.