In the last article, we started with the basics: 10 steps that you need to form an entity and get it off the ground. Now we’ll move into building your audience base. Next month we’ll continue with the basics of branding, marketing, and PR so that you can sell what you have—this is more important than most singers give it credit for. After that, we’ll finish by talking about hiring and managing a team, creating a board, and fundraising.
So, how do you build an audience base for a new opera company? The answer is simple: person by person. This is the way that you built your fan base as an opera singer, and you should consider your opera company just an extension of your personal singer brand. There are a few elements of building an audience that we’ll cover in this article, including e-mail lists, social media, and list sharing.
Let’s talk about e-mail lists first. If you are a solo founder, you probably have an e-mail list of tens, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of people that follow you—family members, friends, fans . . . there’s no difference. They’re all potential audience members. If you don’t have an e-mail list, sit down, open up a copy of Excel, and begin one. List the e-mails in a single row down the left side of your Excel spreadsheet. Or you can list e-mails separated by a comma in Word.
Next, head to ConstantContact.com and sign up for a free e-mail account. This will not require a credit card. Follow their instructions to fill out your first e-mail template and insert your e-mail list into your account. (The reason to use Excel or Word for uploading of lists is simple—it is easy to insert lists in these formats into Constant Contact. Other formats and programs can be harder to upload.) You can use this account for free up to a certain number of e-mails—and by the time you reach that number, you will likely be able to afford their cost per month.
This is how you are going to contact your fans on a regular basis. I suggest that you send e-mails no more than once a week, but at least twice a month. Occasions that are great for e-mails are any shows that you are doing (both e-mails before the show and after the show, to show audience approval/acceptance of the show), any press your company receives, and the occasional newsletter with fun and interesting facts.
Second, you’re going to want to use social media for your company. There’s a standard list of social media sites that most tech companies use today for social media branding. The most major ones include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. But it’s common today to also see opera companies using Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, and Foursquare/Google Places, as well. I would add SoundCloud to this list as another site you want to consider, because opera is about sound. You’ll want to have an iPhone or other smart phone of choice, for starters, to be in constant contact with your users.
Ideal social media users post to Twitter (and, through it, Facebook and LinkedIn—we will talk about this in a minute) about four to eight times a day. Don’t try to make every post perfect. Just make sure they are respectful and error free. It goes without saying that posts that have profanity, insults toward colleagues, or sloppy grammar won’t make you look good.
It may seem like social media is going to take a ton of time, but here are a few tricks you can use to make it easier to do. First, you need to register your company’s name/handle on Twitter, which you can do easily using their home page. Next, register it as a company on Facebook. For Facebook, you will need 25 “Likes” from friends to make your page live. This is where your handy-dandy e-mail list comes in! Use it to get your friends and family to like your page and get you started. Finally, make a page for your company on LinkedIn.
Once all three pages are live, you can link your Twitter account to your Facebook account, so that every tweet you make also posts on Facebook (see support.twitter.com/articles/31113-how-to-use-twitter-with-facebook for more info). If you want to overachieve and really make your life easy, then link your Facebook page to LinkedIn. For how to do this, go to smallbusiness.chron.com/facebook-twitter-linkedin-52410.html, and voilà! Every post you make on Twitter feeds through to all three sites, saving you lots of time!
You can also make your life easy in terms of setting up Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and Vine. This is where your iPhone comes in handy. At rehearsals, use any down time when you are not singing to take pictures through Instagram and use whatever filters you like to make them look nice. You can select certain pictures you’ve taken and post them to Facebook as well.
I like to use Pinterest a little more esoterically. I have made lists of vintage opera posters, opera jewelry, and costumes. These lists snag theater geeks that also want to pin things like this on their pages, and some may be in your area. A couple of hours is all you need to set these pin boards up on the Pinterest site, and they can gain you interest for months after, possibly even years. Try to be unusual. “Biggest Opera Divas” or “Best Vintage Opera Costumes for Sopranos” are page names that might get some specific and avid attention.
Make sure to also film videos in rehearsal. Video ideas include things like your first rehearsal, tenor and soprano sing-offs, people talking about the show from the aspect of their character, and overviews of the show from the director. The more unusual, the better, particularly when you are posting to YouTube. Once you have a few quick video snippets, place them on YouTube in a YouTube channel (their home page can show you how to do this). You can even videotape and post entire shows on YouTube, which can come in very handy for grant-writing. Instead of sending in a DVD of your last several shows, some grants will now allow you to add a YouTube link for your shows, saving you tons of time.
While filming videos, also log in to Vine on your phone and do a few quick “vines” when you have time. These are short, three-burst videos that illustrate a funny or critical company moment. It never hurts to have a video stream in a place secondary to YouTube.
SoundCloud is another project that will take you just a few hours to do, at most. Head to the SoundCloud site, make an account, and post any sound clips you can make within the remaining time you have at rehearsals. Use the sound recording app on your iPhone to do this. Sound enthusiasts in the area might begin to follow you.
Your goal with all social media is to use it to build your e-mail list, person by person. Think of it like placing a couple of personality-filled billboards on trafficked virtual highways. The more people that stumble over them, the more people you might get to join your e-mail list on your site.
Foursquare and Google Places are useful sites once you get people to your shows. You want your audience to use these sites. I suggest setting up a reward—like a free glass of champagne or free small box of chocolates—for any audience members that check in when they come to your company’s performances. It’s small change for you and only requires a visit to your local grocery store, and it might just tip any of your social-savvy users over the edge to attend a show.
Social media is key in getting visitors to your website and, subsequently, e-mails entered into your e-mail list. We’ll talk more about websites in the next article on branding, but let me make a point about websites here. The purpose of your site is getting people to either buy tickets for a show or join your e-mail list. People debate which of these two elements is more important and which should take precedence. My advice is as follows: if you are a new company, you should make sure your e-mail collection module on your website’s home page is front and center. Once you have shows live and several thousand fans, you should change it to be your ticket sales module—but not until then.
Some have asked me why post to social media when most opera audiences are older and don’t use computers. The answer is simple. You need to target a younger audience and woo them in, or the already dwindling opera audiences in the U.S. will shrink further.
Finally, let’s talk about list sharing. Contrary to what you might expect, most opera companies are happy to share their list if you have a comparable one to share. As stated, opera audiences are diminishing, and companies know they can get further with a combined list of opera fans rather than just their single one. Most opera companies want to trade with more established companies whose lists are bigger than their own. If you are starting out, however, don’t assume that trading isn’t possible for you. A nice e-mail explaining what you are doing, your company’s mission statement, your own experience, and the size of your opening list will often go a long way. You’ll be surprised at how supportive they will likely be.
A quick additional note about this, as well. Never forge e-mails to make your initial list larger in order to trade with other companies. Such a move could get the company you trade with blacklisted with their e-mail provider. An e-mail provider will blacklist any company that sends out a lot of e-mails to addresses that get a spam notification—in other words, e-mail addresses that have either blocked you or are not real. When a company is blacklisted, it can take months to be able to e-mail their clients again. It can be crippling for them, and that company will never work with you again.
Next month we’ll discuss the basics of branding, marketing, and PR of your new entity to your now growing e-mail list. Send any question in the meantime to gthiers@operamoda.com.
