The website (www.rubbishtheatre.com) was one of the first things I created for Rubbish Theatre. Having a go-to place for audience members and other artists to visit was important for me as visitors can find our manifesto, pictures, information, our team and contact information all in one place. For this, I used a website called ‘Wix.com’ to design our website, I designed the entire website from scratch and used a simple layout so it would be easy to use. As soon as our website was up and running and our Logo was completed I created the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages for Rubbish Theatre. Securing a good handle for each social media site was important to me so as soon as we decided on the name ‘Rubbish Theatre’ I secured the handle ‘@Rubbishtheatre’ so anyone searching for us could easily find our pages. One of the most successful posts was the trailer I made for our show, on Facebook this received a whopping 1.4 thousand views. After analysing the ‘insights’ section on Facebook, which tells the owner of a page all the statistics of each post, I discovered that videos were the most successful in terms of likes, shares and views. The likes and followers for each page are as follows,
Facebook: 237 likes
Twitter: 81 followers
Instagram: 132 followers
Given the fact that Facebook had our largest following I made sure that any big announcements were posted onto Facebook first, also our live feed posts during our 24 hour cycle were mainly on Facebook whilst only posting one on twitter. Regular tweets have been posted onto twitter throughout our rehearsal process keeping our audience up to date with any news, what we had been up to in rehearsals and sharing our instagram posts. Another marketing tool I used was posters and flyers, working with a local photographer we captured an image of our actors face looking intensely at an orchid with the orchid in focus and the face just out. Using a face in marketing tools is important because we as humans instinctively register faces first before anything else, in fact “The ability to recognize faces is so important in humans that the brain appears to have an area solely devoted to the task: the fusiform gyrus” (Independent). After spending an evening watching ‘Youtube’ tutorials I learnt how to use Photoshop and designed the poster and flyer myself, thus saving money. After giving the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre the required number of posters and flyers I contacted the ‘New Theatre Royal’ in Lincoln and thanks to the generosity of the owners I was able to place the other posters and flyers in their box office and around the theatre. Because of this, I was able to target a very specific audience that is already in a theatre therefore would likely be interested in our show.
Our Rubbish poster/flyer