Magicians Marketing Problems

By Dominic Reyes

Dear Dominic,
I am struggling with my marketing. I fail to put into action what I know are good strategies with regard to marketing myself as a magician. Apart from not being the most organised person in the world, I guess that deep down I don't really like marketing & admin. One thing I cannot or will not do is outsource or hire someone to do it for me – I think this would be uneconomic for me.
Regards,
John

Hi John,

Why not just practice and perform magic for fun just as a hobby? Do you really have the desire to perform as a working magician? It’s a lot of hard work, and will take up time you could spend having fun learning new tricks…  

Most people just stick to that, and are very happy with their choice. However, if you definitely want to perform commercially, you HAVE to get involved in the business side of things and that involves magicians marketing.

 You are going into business as a magician.

I’ve no quick and easy fix for you. You just have to DO IT or get someone to do it for you. If you are not happy to pass on control of your marketing to someone else, then you simply have no choice but to make a PLAN and put that into action.

It sounds like you already know plenty of actionable steps you can take to move your career as a magician forward. So what’s really stopping you?

Is it fear of failure?

Doing nothing guarantees failure. ANYTHING you do, other than sitting and wishing for something, takes you a step closer to your goals.

Is it because it’s no fun?  

Playing with magic is fun. Paperwork and magicians marketing can’t compete. But it’s vital groundwork for creating opportunities to:

Perform and get paid for it! 

There really isn’t a better way to make your living, than by doing something you would happily do for free anyway. Creating a business out of your magic is worth all the time it will take to build up your reputation, contacts, and client base.

Fear of Decisions

Designing a website, producing marketing material, creating a showreel, finding venues and clients all require decisions. Choice is hard work and scary. It’s always easier to find something else to do, that allows you to avoid committing to a decision. Learning new magic tricks, feels like progress, but if you spend all your time practicing, without doing the work required to market your services, you are practicing for something that isn’t going to happen. That’s a waste of time..

Worried about the cost of magicians marketing?

You don't need to pay an expensive agency to market for you, or shell out for an online service. Do you know someone locally who will help you market for a share of the fee's the work they bring in generates? If not, contact your local university and reach out to the business, marketing, and media departments. Put up a sign on the department notice boards.  Would someone like to take you on as a really interesting project? It's good for their CV and you can offer them a percentage of the fee's the extra work brings in.

What to do:

Dreaming, hoping, and praying for something is useful, but it's main benifit is 'hope'. In the face of something that looks impossible, we need to dream or hope that it may be achievable or happen one day. The problem is that hoping doesn't make things happen all by itself. You need to define goals that you can work towards in small manageable steps to make big things happen.

Break up the tasks involved in your marketing into small actionable parts.
The goal can be seen as a ‘project', and the small steps involved in reaching that goal can be seen as ‘actions'.  

Here’s an example:

Project:

Creating a magicians website.

Actions:

Look at other magicians websites and make a note of the best points of each.
Create a list of features you want on your website.
Look at design companies to create a website for you.
Create an email that describes the sort of website you would like, with images of design ideas.
Get quotes
Commission a designer to build your website.

The big scary project of designing a website is enough to put anyone off, but if it’s broken up into individual tasks, each one isn’t that scary.. You can do one action each day, working to complete the product over a set period of time.

Now just take the first action and DO IT. Then on to the next and so on until the project is completed.

Here’s another example:

Project:

Get a local residency as a magician.

Actions:

Make a list of local restaurants and venues using google
Call each venue to ask who is responsible for event planning
Create a short letter of introduction
Send out introduction letters to each of the venues
Call each venue to ask if they have received your introduction letter, and ask if you can meet the event planner.

The big ‘project’ is broken up into small, quick, and defined short actions that don’t require too much choice or thinking. You then take the first single action needed to move the project forward and that is you NEXT ACTION, do it and then move onto the next.

If all this sounds like too much hard work, then you need to find someone that will do it for you. It's an essential part of being a professional magician.

What advice would you give John? Leave a comment below: