001: Introduction | Show Formalities | What to Expect

Welcome to the first episode of the WellAttended Podcast! We are super excited to be able to share theatre and event marketing insights from successful event producers. In this episode, I discuss my background as a theatre and event marketer, why I started WellAttended, and what to expect from the WellAttended Podcast.

Transcript

WILLIAM: Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of the WellAttended podcast.

This episode will be a little different from the norm as I will be showing my journey of marketing events and why I started WellAttended.

I’ll also chat about the format of this show, my goal for this podcast, and how it will benefit you, and why you should keep listening in the future.

If you haven’t heard of me before, my name is William Rader and I’m a magician and the founder of WellAttended. I’ve been a magician for the past 10 years performing for clients such as Prudential, MassMutual, Dot Foods and Copyblogger.

I’ve also produced my one-man show in art galleries, private shows, warehouses, and theaters. Besides producing my own show, I produced theatre and variety shows, fundraisers and conferences.

When I first started producing shows, I couldn’t find many materials specific to event marketing, so I learned most of what I knew through business marketing books.

Since I was performing full-time, I had to be very creative on how I could quickly build my audiences to make money. I remember one of the first ways I did this was by producing a variety show which took place over three weekends. I didn’t have a following and I really didn’t know how to sell tickets.

I decided to headline the show and have two other performers open for me each night. This meant that over three weekends, I had a total of six different performers bring their audiences to my shows. Their audiences became my audience and this allowed me to quickly start building my own following. I highly recommend this technique if you are just starting out or if you’re looking to reach new audiences.

As I continued producing shows through lots of studying marketing strategies, and believe me, a lot of trial and error, I learned the best and most effective ways to market events.

During that time, I also used almost every box office management solution out there and I just wasn’t happy with them. I either had to wait for a check to arrive for my shows, it was difficult for me to set up my seating charts, or there were too many features that made setting up my shows a pain.

Other companies, who I won’t mention, said they would help me promote my shows but they wanted me to discount my tickets. And that’s just something I didn’t want to do. So, in 2014, I partnered up with my friend, Micah, and together, we created WellAttended.

WellAttended is box office software that allows you to sell tickets online, over the phone and at the door. We’ve designed this specifically to help you increase your ticket sales and revenue. For example, you can use Facebook tracking pixels to target your marketing to your audience.

We send automated abandoned cart emails if people don’t buy ticket, and there’s even advertising space on the tickets for you to sell to businesses.

Right now, we work with everyone, from theatres to fundraisers, festivals, and variety shows. Today, I manage the marketing for WellAttended and talk with all of our new users. This means that if you have any questions or if you want to see a demo, you’ll be chatting with me directly and I’ll be happy to show you what we’re all about.

Just go to our website at WellAttended.com and request a free demo.

Now, when I’m not working with clients, I travel to conferences across the country to speak on marketing. Specifically, I focus on how to build an online following to increase ticket sales. I discuss techniques like how to build an awesome website, how to build an online following with newsletters and social media, how to write compelling blog content and how to use your box office to build repeat patrons.

If you’re interested, you can actually download the ebooks that I give away at the end of my workshops by visiting WellAttended.com/resources.

Now, let’s talk about this podcast for a few minutes.

In this series, I’ll be having 20 to 30-minute chats once a week with event producers to discuss marketing techniques and strategies to help you sell more tickets and increase your revenue.

We’ll get marketing insights from successful theatre producers, magicians, jugglers, musicians, variety entertainers and professional marketers. guests will be showing actionable advice on each episode that you can start using immediately.

My goal with this podcast is to help your events be successful and to create a community to help one another.

If you have any marketing questions that you want answered, you can send us an email to podcast@WellAttended.com. Also, be sure to join our WellAttended Facebook group to talk about episodes, ask your marketing questions and share your advice. We’ll also keep you up to date with our latest ebooks, blog posts and podcast episodes.

Now, before I wrap this up, I want to give a huge thanks to Kris Sheppard, host of the Successful Performercast and Mouse Scouts, for all of his advice on how to get this show off the ground. So, thanks a lot Kris!

In the next episode, we’ll jump right into the interviews and trust me; you don’t want to miss them.

You can learn more about us by visiting WellAttended.com. So, thank you for listening. I look forward to talking with you in the next episode.