Adam Harrell

I recently closed a modest small-house production of my new play Shakespeare in the Dark at the Fertile Ground Festival here in Portland, OR. But this blog is not about that play — you can visit my NPX Profile for more info. As the title implies, this blog will share five key elements I learned for mounting a dynamic, organic, and — most important — effective digital marketing campaign with arts festival-sized budgets (in other words, not a lot).

1. Goal-Setting

With a budget of only $800 with my payroll and co-producing fees occupying $700 of that sum, I had to get creative with how I approached this campaign. The first thing I did — which should be the first thing every marketer should do — is set some ambitious yet realistic goals to strive for. We had two performances in a space with ~80 seats, giving us 160-ish tickets to sell. These were my initial goals:

• Stick to focusing in and strengthening one digital channel (Instagram) over time rather than spreading the message thin.
• Supplement digital marketing channel with physical collateral, like posters and leave-behind postcards, an official press release, and in-person networking.
• Gain at least 150 organic followers on Instagram before opening night.
• Reach theatregoers and arts lovers in Portland and each of its surrounding suburbs.
• Improve ticket sales over my previous year’s festival production, which sold a total of 37 tickets over two performances in the same space.
• Do not spend much more than $100 on all of this.

2. Key Art

Once goals were in place, the first order of business was designing and establishing key art, colors, and branding that would be eye-catching and guide the design philosophy through the rest of the process. I used the wonderful GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) (which in case you didn’t know is an absolutely FREE, OPEN-SOURCE graphic design app that gives you all the features of Photoshop without the annoying subscription fees) along with FREE Creative Commons clipart to create it. The gallery below showcases the short and wide web versions, postcard (front+back) and poster art variants, as well as the custom IG profile image, respectively:

3. Building a Content Calendar — and Content!

Full disclosure — I chose Instagram because the free Meta Business Suite analytics and scheduling tools, while not perfect, are among the most robust you can get for a free platform. The Planner is especially handy.

@shakespeareinthedarkpdx launched mid-February. With a cast of nine, the lynch pin of the content centered around a series of “Meet the Cast” posts over the month of March, which was supplemented by a selection of curated Shakespeare memes, occasional story updates, video clips, and audience reactions. ChatGPT along with DALL-E assisted in generating some nice teaser images to kick it off.

Note that these weren’t generated with a cold prompt, i.e. I did not explicitly tell it to create an image like this. Rather than brute-force the prompt, I prefer to train the GPT memory on aspects of the tone and audience, and keep nurturing its curiosity until it offers to generate images organically. These typically yield much more useable, on-theme results. GPT also helped craft the Meet the Cast post series, and was instrumental in curating the appropriate hashtags.

4. Targeted Paid Ad Placement

Meta ad boosts do wonders! And they are scalable to your budget. The three strategic boosts I made over the course of the month alternated from $5/day for 3 days to $7/day for 5 days, a decent medium for a campaign of this scope. Of our 14,000+ profile visits in the month of March, a good 84% of those visits and 53% of interactions were thanks to ads. So if you’re running a show account and not running some form of digital ads; you definitely should. Reach was customized to Portland and its surrounding metro areas.

Ads were supplemented by key press release placement in Broadway World PDX!

4. Measurement

With most of the campaign automated, I focused on producing, directing, and acting in my show and let it do its thing. Here’s how it performed against my initial metrics goals. For simplicity’s sake, some results are measured from the month of March, which was the bulk of the campaign, so they are cumulative from the previous two weeks of February:

GOAL: Gain at least 150 followers before opening | RESULT: 159 followers gave us 77 external link taps to the ticketing site.

GOAL: Improve ticket sales over last year’s festival | RESULT: Over 40% increase in ticket sales (37 to 82).

GOAL: Do not exceed much more than $100 | RESULT: $130 spent.

5. Demographics

Our audience showed up from all over, and the content’s tone and charm gave us a very even distribution and wide appeal:

I hope this helps inform your next small-scale production. With a bit of design know-how, you can leverage these tools to punch above your weight, and put more butts in the seats! Til next time.

Free Tools Used

GIMP – Image Editing

Apache OpenOffice – Document editing/program design

ChatGPT (free version) – IG post copy and refinement; image generation

Meta Business Suite – Automation, scheduling, and metrics tracking