Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada
For almost a year now I’ve been proactively marketing myself to several cruise lines as a way to augment the work that my agent does for me. Now some might say that it’s the job of the agent to pro-actively market me to the lines, but I view my relationship with my agent as team effort. This particular agent only takes a 10% commission on gigs, so it’s not like they’re making so much off me that they can really afford the materials or time to sell me as much as I’d like to be sold, so I ran the idea past them of a semi-regular direct mailing to keep my face crossing the desk of the various entertainment buyers for the cruise industry and they were happy to OK my efforts to assist.
Is it a lot of work? Well, the reality is that these semi-regular mailings (about once every 6 – 8 weeks or so) aren’t all that hard to create and there are only 12 lines that I mail to, so it doesn’t really require all that much effort on my behalf, and the simple exercise of making the effort achieves two things – 1. It puts my face on the desk of the buyers for these 12 lines once ever month or two and 2. – It shows good faith on my part to my agent and demonstrates a willingness to make and extra effort to sell my show. It really doesn’t take that much time to get the postcards into the mail and the benefits far out weigh the relatively small investment of time to make it happen.
What do I include on the postcards? First off I either send out one of my Promotional Postcards or a large format postcard (5 x 7) that I then doctor up with my image so that it shows images of me in some sort of interesting location… I did this at the beginning of the Alaska Cruise Season with a picture of me super-imposed onto the Vancouver Cruise Ship Terminal and suggested that cruise lines consider using a guy who already lives in the place that many of the ships depart from – seemed logical to me…
Each postcard has a similar format. First I put a quote at the top (someone important saying something great about me), next comes the sales pitch where I try to sell the benefits of hiring me. This is followed by an appeal or a ‘call to action’ and each card ends with the contact information for my agent. That’s it. Nothing too complicated, just a chance to have my picture cross the desk of the buyer’s desk and suggest that hey… This is a guy you should hire!
I did this with another agent years ago and after a year of doing it with very little in the way of hard core results I started to question wether it was actually worth doing or not. Then I got a gig at one of the venues I’d been sending cards to and when I showed up, there on the wall next to the desk of the person who I had been sending cards to was a bulletin board covered with my face… I never doubted the benefits of this sort of mailing again. You may not get a gig in the week or the month or the year after one of these mailings has been sent out, but eventually you likely will and if you booked one gig from having sent out five, ten or twenty postcards, well likely that one gig more than compensates for the effort of doing the mailings in the first place.
