6/23/2023 0 Comments Tony scida the hodges partnershipmaybe even direct mail, if that makes sense. This can mean all sorts of marketing efforts, from email blasts to social posts. Once you know your audience and you have your story written out, it’s time to work to get that story in front of your audience. How do you get your story to your audience? A media advisory with a very short description and event location and time details can be helpful to include pasted below your signature. Congratulations, you now have an EPK (electronic press kit)! One thing you probably do not need is a full press release. While you’re at it, put bios of everyone involved and all the relevant high-res art and photos that you can find into this folder. Keep it in a document in a cloud storage folder where you can easily and quickly access it or share it with collaborators, volunteers, patrons, media members, etc. Maybe a little longer than an elevator pitch. Another important thing to consider when crafting your story is what your key audience members might find interesting about your story.īut, your story is not a dissertation or even program notes. What is unique about your group or program? Why would someone be interested in your performance among all the possible ways to spend their time? If there’s a first (a world premiere, the first time a notable visiting artist is performing in town, the first performance after a major award), that’s a good place to start. (Or if you missed an audience.) What is your story? If a poster or email or social post doesn’t speak at all to any of the audiences you’ve set out, it’s worth considering if it’s the right approach for your event. Write down two to three archetypes of audience members and, whenever you’re crafting your marketing materials, refer back to see how well those pieces speak to those audiences. If you can aim your message at those people, you can do more with less effort. Think about your audiences and, in particular, those who not only attend concerts but act as connectors, spreading word of the performances to friends and colleagues. But, I’d challenge you to break it down even further than that. If you perform music from a particular genre or era, there is already a subset of concert-going audiences who are interested in your genre. Primarily you are looking for people who are interested in going to concerts. (No, “everyone” is not an audience, despite many a CEO’s attempt to make it one.)įor your purposes, it’s probably relatively easy to narrow it down some. Even communications professionals and executives at big companies struggle to understand their key audiences. This can be a deceptively hard step in the process. Who is your audience?īefore you know what you are going to say or where you’re going to say it, you need to know who you are talking to. I use PR a lot below for simplicity, but we're talking specifically about the media relations area of the larger body of PR work. To a PR person, media relations, crisis communications, internal communications, speechwriting, events and investor relations are all “PR.” However, for our purposes, the terms PR, publicity and media relations are more or less synonymous. In truth, the practice of PR is as much about planning for the release of information (formulating story lines, identifying audiences which can include media, etc.) as it is about garnering publicity. That can give you the impression that all PR is about public perception. You’ve probably heard (or said) that something a company did was for good PR or resulted in bad PR. (Still interested in outsourcing that work? See the note below on hiring a paid or volunteer PR person.) What is Public Relations (PR)? “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” - Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) My hope is that with a little work structuring your PR approach, you can find you have the time and ability to get more publicity for your work all on your own. It’s easy to wind up with a haphazard approach to PR and it’s tempting to outsource that work to someone who isn’t so busy putting together programs and rehearsals. In my experience, musicians have all the skills necessary to be effective at PR and marketing but often have to learn the hard way how to marshal those resources in service of their music. My education was in music, but my career has primarily been in advertising and public relations, even though I also still play and teach.
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