Smart Marketing Strategies for Niche Markets

Marketing an Opera Company

You're heavily invested in the success of your opera company and failure isn't an option. That means you'll also need to invest yourself in the strategies and techniques it takes to effectively market your brand in the marketplace.

Communicating the strengths of an opera company is an unforgiving exercise, full of hurdles and hidden challenges.

A robust marketing plan cements your company's relationships with customers. When viewed from this perspective, marketing becomes a customer engagement concern in a opera company's planning process.

Public Relations Strategies

Public relations is more subtle, but no less powerful than a full-blown marketing push. If you want to send unrestricted marketing messages to your audience, buy a mailing list and perform a direct mail campaign. But if your strategy calls for sophistication, media buy-in and thought leadership, hire a PR consultant. The key to effective PR is to use nuanced messaging to attract the attention of reporters and media representatives. If reporters smell promotional content, they will back off from the story or create their own narrative.

Marketing Expertise

Don't have a background in marketing? That shouldn't stop you from taking a larger promotional role in your company by educating yourself about today's most effective marketing concepts. Entrepreneurs and leaders of opera companies are usually hesitant to engage in high-risk marketing. Since inexperience raises the risk level, the quality of the marketer is just as important as the quality of the message. Although a learning-by-doing approach is typical in this industry, we advise young marketers to seek the input of experienced professionals before committing time and resources to untested marketing concepts.

Loss Leaders

The majority of opera companies understand that more customers will walk through the door if a few products are priced at less than full retail value. Moreover, a loss leader marketing strategy can compensate for dead periods when customers tend to making purchases. A classic mistake of loss leader marketing is to create pricing without researching the competition. In a worse case scenario, you could be counting on pricing that is higher than your competitors. For the majority of opera companies, the real benefits of loss leaders emerge through the careful marketing of other products, usually offered at a much higher margin. Whenever possible, piggyback a loss leader approach with the purchase of bulk merchandise that can be bought at a discount.

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