Guides

Promoting a show nobody's heard of

Getting thirty people into a room, repeatedly, with no budget — the honest mechanics of comps, lists, posters and asking.

Every audience-building tactic is a variation on one uncomfortable truth: for your first year, people don't come to see the show. They come because someone in it asked them, personally. Promotion is the craft of asking well, at scale, without becoming That Person.

The personal ask, done right

A group text blast is a broadcast; a real ask is one message to one person with the date, the price, and why them — "you love murder mysteries; we're improvising one Friday." Each member asking five people properly outdraws every poster in the neighborhood. Track it loosely as a team ("how many are you bringing?") not to shame anyone but because saying a number out loud makes people ask.

The corollary rule: never let a friend attend twice before a stranger attends once for free. Which brings us to comps.

Comps are marketing, not charity

An empty seat earns nothing; a stranger in that seat might come back at full price and bring someone. Be generous and targeted: comp the improv class down the street (they're the most likely regulars in your city), comp venue staff, comp local performers of any kind. The only bad comp is one that displaces a paying stranger, which — early on — you don't have.

The list is the asset

Every platform algorithm will eventually stop showing your posts to your own followers. An email list is the only audience channel you own. Collect addresses at every show — paper and pen at the door outperforms a QR code — and send one email per show cycle: date, venue, one funny sentence, a ticket link. Nobody unsubscribes from short.

If you're playing in a city we cover, put the show on the calendar — free, human-reviewed, links to your ticketing — and claim your troupe page so there's a page to point people at that isn't a social profile.

Posters and socials, honestly ranked

Posters work in exactly two places: inside the venue itself (booking next month's audience from this month's) and on genuine community boards — coffee shops, colleges, laundromats. Anywhere else they're decoration.

Social media's real function at this scale isn't reach, it's proof of life — the page a curious person checks to confirm you exist and are funny. Post show photos with faces, short clips with clean audio, and the next date. Clean audio matters more than video quality: a great clip with bar-noise audio reads as amateur; a phone clip where the laugh lands reads as a show worth seeing.

The compounding move

End every show by telling the audience the next date from the stage — the MC's one call to action — and get the next date booked before the current show happens so there's something to announce. Audiences are built show over show, like rent: thirty people who had a good time, asked again, well, is the entire machine. Everything else is decoration on it.