June 3, 2008

Vertical Marketing Tactics for Dance Companies

Yesterday, I wrote "A Vertical Marketing Strategy for Dance Companies," in which I recommended that dance companies consider the benefits of targeting specific market segments with a direct interest in the themes and subject matter of your artistic work.

In today's post, I would like to offer three specific approaches you might want to implement in order to cultivate these niche markets:

1) Dance Video Responses on YouTube

YouTube is the largest video sharing site. Yet, if you post a dance video, you may end-up with very little traffic.

One way to jump-start your viewership is to post your video in response to another video (preferably one with a lot of traffic). Continuing with yesterday's theme of a dance performance that deals with theoretical physics (relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory), you could post such a dance video in response to Brian Greene's Ted talk about string theory:

This way, when YouTube visitors watch Brian Greene, they may decide to view the videos that were posted as responses.

To make your YouTube video more attractive to this audience of theoretical physics fans, consider the image at the exact midpoint of your video - this is the image that will be displayed in the YouTube video window before somebody starts to play your clip. Is there a way you can make this image especially attractive to the non-dance audience you are trying to reach?

Also, the description and tags you add for your video are very important. There's both the short description and the "more information" description. Take time to write a compelling and clear description that speaks to the audience you want to reach. And, also do a little research to figure out which search tags others in the physics world use to identify their videos.

2) Blogger Cultivation

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has done a masterful job of cultivating dance bloggers in New York City. They reach out to us, they invite us to all of their performances, they set-up interviews, and seek our feedback and recommendations. Their work is a pleasure to see and, to put it simply, they care about us.

They're now performing in their NYC theater through June 15th. Here's a clip:

This same very worthwhile approach can be taken by dance companies that want to cultivate the goodwill and coverage of bloggers in a specific field. Say, you were investigating issues in your dance relating to neuroscience and creativity over the coming year along the lines of "Entity" from Wayne McGregor's Random dance - see my post.

One of the first things I would do is build a list of all bloggers who cover neuroscience, cognition, creativity and related topics. There are many blogs in this category. I would then link to these blogs in my blogroll, post comments on these blogs, and introduce myself to the bloggers.

I would also encourage these bloggers to use my content, especially, videos that were created with their specific audience of readers in mind. I realize that a philosophical and psychological jump has to be taken here on the part of these science bloggers. Some neuroscience bloggers will wonder why on each they would want to embed a dance video about cognition. I admit, that there is work to be done. But it is doable with persistence and innovation.

Consider the relevance of this "Making of Entity" video in which Wayne McGregor says that this performance is a result of collaborations with cognitive and neuroscientists at the 51 second mark:

Clearly, neuroscience bloggers will eventually see the connection and relevance of this video to the analysis and information they provide their readers.

3) Dance Industry-Specific News

If you want to make a huge splash with your target audience, simply dance the latest news related to this niche market. There are a huge number of news-related items everyday about neuroscience, for instance.

Why not create three very short dance pieces in the studio each week. Each piece is no longer than one minute and deals with a specific news story of interest to your audience. The relationship between your dance and the news item does not have to be that concrete -- just somehow covey the general idea of the story.

Then, you can create channels on YouTube, Blip.tv and Vimeo promoting these clips and also promote them to the bloggers who you've been cultivating.

The follow video clip is not directly related to this idea of dancing the news. I include it here because it has been viewed over 3 million times and it shows what a little creativity can do in terms of grabbing people's attention. I think that if you can find an interesting angle or innovative approach to your dancing the news videos, you'll be able to generate a lot of buzz. Plus, as with this video, you don't need a large budget or an expensive venue.

I came across this guy backflipping into jeans on The Winger:

Upcoming:

In continuation of this post, I'll include three more online approaches you can pursue to cultivate new dance audiences for your interdisciplinary dance performances and projects:

1) Social media press releases

2) Encouraging user-generated media

3) Teaching the dance moves

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