Get Your Performance 100% Booking Ready and Stay at the Top of Your Game
Reviewing and renewing your performance and offering are vital to getting those all-important bookings. You may have been doing well and getting all the bookings you need, but without regularly refreshing your act and your publicity you could find that your performance gets a little tired and the bookings are less frequent.
Here are our 7 pointers to help you keep your act fresh and create a healthy income from your talent this year. If you’re new to professional performance then it’s a great idea to set a calendar reminder to do this every 2-3 months – for the rest of us, January is the perfect time to sharpen up your offering, ready for a successful year.
- Record your Act
A simple but brilliant way to really scrutinise and review every aspect of your performance. Record or video your whole performance offering if you can, or just a section of it if you’re short of time. Then watch it through and consider what you can change and update. For magicians for example, this would be new tricks or for singers, new songs or even a new genre of music.
What performances have you seen that you found really inspiring? What really fires you up and makes you smile? Can these be incorporated into your act? Is your act too long, too short, or should you change the order of your performance to make it flow better?
You could even create a New Ideas book or document, that way if you can’t implement all your ideas immediately you can come back to them and include them later.
2) Review your Reviews
This is an excellent way to make sure you continue to offer performance that attracts bookings, and repeat bookings.
Take time to go over all your recent reviews – what did your bookers really like and even more importantly, what didn’t they like? Try to look at any criticisms objectively (it can be hard to hear, but helpful in the end), do they have a point? Have a few clients made similar comments?
Your reviews are like your own, personal market research and the best way to iron out anything that’s not quite hitting the mark. Even better, make a few tweaks and hopefully your future reviews will be glowing!
3) Diversify
We mention this one often, because it’s such a great way to increase your bookings. What can you do to appeal to a wider or different market?
If you’re a singer, could you appeal to the wedding market? Could you also perform as a vintage singer or a tribute singer? Can you pair up with a musician to create a duo or appear with a band?
If you’re a magician, could you also be a kids’ magician, a wedding magician or a street magician? Could you train to do some hypnosis or mentalism? Can you team up with another performer to create a longer/more diverse show?
Once you’ve found a way to diversify, you will need to update your promotional photos with a relevant image of you and create a new video or audio to show what you can do in this new area. And don’t forget to add yourself to all the categories for your act in our directory – you can now add yourself to up to 9 categories as part of your active membership.
4) Appeal to Higher Quality Bookings
If you haven’t already done this, then consider what you can do to attract more high-value, high quality bookings – such as large corporate bookings and TV shows.
A good place to start with this is to apply for awards, so that you can add ‘award-wining’ or ‘nominated for’ to your act description and even as a badge on your promotional materials.
You should also add any memberships, such as ‘The Magic Circle’ to your act description and of course, if you have made a TV appearance, ‘As seen on TV’.
Another good way to appeal to higher quality bookings, is with high quality promotional materials – the value of these in getting you the best possible, best-paid bookings should never be under-estimated.
5) Review your Prices
You should regularly review your prices to ensure that you aren’t aiming too high and putting off potential bookers, or so low that you are earning less than you’re worth.
A good way to check if you have pitched your prices correctly is to compare yourself to similar acts, with a similar levels of experience. Search in our directory for other acts like yours and check out their minimum fee. Are yours similar, higher or lower? Also, have you had any feedback from your clients about your fees?
6) Update Your Publicity & Socials
Once you’ve watched your act, checked your reviews, thought about how you can diversify, thought about what awards etc you can add and reviewed your prices…it’s time to go live with your refreshed, renewed and updated offering.
You can take new photos, or get your current photos edited to reflect your new offering, update, add to or edit your video and add them to your Entertainers Worldwide profile, your website if you have one and your social media pages. You can also write posts about what you’ve changed and how it has improved your act/what you love about performing your new act.
7) Enjoy the Changes & the Rewards
Did you know that we all get a hit of dopamine (the happy hormone) when we learn something new? So you can expect to feel really good while you make these changes and refresh your act – it’s the reverse of allowing your performance to get stale, it will bring it back to life, keep you at the cutting edge of your profession and help you really enjoy what you’re doing.
Not only that, but the positive changes you’ve made will also lead to more bookings, better reviews and more repeat bookings – it’s an all-round win/win!
We hope you enjoy your Refresh and Renew this January and we can’t wait to see your new, updated profiles!