If you want to attract a crowd to your concert, you must promote it. Whether you’re working as an event organizer or you work for a venue, church, PR firm, band, speaker, or performer, there are things you can do to promote your concert. The following concert promotion tips will help you attract larger audiences and sell more tickets.
Concert Promotion Tips for Venue Owners
Venue owners can do many things to enjoy a better turnout for each of their events, so the event is a success and artists and event planners will be more likely to use their facilities again in the future. Here are just a few ideas to get you started:
Strategic Scheduling
One of the first issues you should address is scheduling, because all of your promotional efforts depend on strategic scheduling. Consider any competing events that are taking place in your area on any given date as well as holidays that could negatively affect turn out for your event.
For example, if you’re booking a popular rock band, don’t schedule your event on the same night that an even more popular band is performing nearby. In general, the bigger the act, the further in advance the date is scheduled, so you’ll have plenty of warning if big name acts will be in town that could prevent your concert from being a success.
Press Releases
Always send out press releases to local media well in advance of the concert date, and be sure to include free publications! Most cities have free weekly newspapers, monthly magazines, and websites that many people read for entertainment news. They’re looking for events, so your concert should be included.
In addition to event calendars, local papers, magazines, and websites often publish interviews and stories about local concerts, so reach out to each one by phone and email to ask to be included in an upcoming article.
Your Venue Website
Your venue website should look professional to build trust with visitors. With that in mind, make sure the design and visuals are high quality. Your website should also be easy to navigate, so visitors can see what’s scheduled.
In addition to a calendar, include descriptions about performers and links to performers’ websites, Facebook Pages, and/or YouTube channels to help visitors who aren’t familiar with artists to learn more. This is a great way to increase ticket sales for performers who aren’t widely known.
Social Media Marketing
Use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to promote concerts that are being held at your venue. The key is to remind your social media followers about upcoming performances often.
Some people buy concert tickets far in advance, but others wait until the last minute. You don’t want them to forget! Just be sure to share content from the artists and your followers and engage in conversations so your social media timelines aren’t just filled with promotional messages. No one wants to follow or engage with a series of ads!
Concert Promotion Tips for Performers
Today, musicians, comedians, and other talent must be very proactive about promoting their concerts. Venue owners will, hopefully, do their part in publicizing your event, but the bulk of the responsibility often lies with the artist.
Think of it this way. If you’re an artist, your goal is to have a successful concert, but you also have a bigger goal to attract more fans, build your brand, sell more of your music, and hold more concerts in the future. Here are some ways you can promote your concert so you can reach those goals:
Press Releases and CDs
Even if the venue is sending out press releases, you should send them to the media in the city where you’ll be performing, too. You should also send out sample CDs to music reviewers and local DJs. The goal here is to increase local radio airplay of your music and even land an interview before your concert. This is a great way to boost ticket sales and sales of your music!
If your concert coincides with an album release, it’s critical that you send previews of your album to the media and local radio stations, so you can get press coverage and airtime for your music leading up to and after the concert.
Your Band’s Website
A great band website can help you reach out to more potential fans. While it’s very important to have social media profiles and pages on sites like YouTube, Facebook, and SoundCloud where you post your music, you should have your own website, too. The reason is simple. This is your space online that you control. No matter how YouTube, Facebook, and so on change their rules in the future, the content on your website and the visitors that come to your site are 100% yours!
The content on your website should include videos, photos, your story, and of course, your upcoming concert dates. Your website should give people another way to experience your music and develop a relationship with you and your brand that leads to loyalty.
Social Media and Email
Your website should include an easy way for fans to provide their email addresses to get on your subscriber list. You can also collect email addresses at your live events. It’s important to stay in touch with your fans, and email is a great way to do it. Send a weekly or biweekly newsletter that shares what you’re working on as well as upcoming concert dates.
Social media is another great way to spread the word about your concerts and maintain a relationship with your fans that increases their loyalty to you and your music. Be active on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram at a minimum. Share your own videos, photos, and updates, and don’t forget to engage with your fans. There is a reason why the word “social” is in the term “social media.” It needs to be a two-way conversation to be most effective.
Videos
Videos are one of the best promotional tools for musicians, so start recording them right now! You can create music videos, footage from prior gigs, interviews, and even behind the scenes videos of you rehearsing, writing, traveling, and more. You can turn sound files into videos, too. Your fans love seeing how you create!
Remember, the quality shouldn’t be awful, but it doesn’t have to be perfect either. Footage from a show where audience members are dancing and having a great time is a powerful ad for future concerts. People love to share videos on social media, which means they’re a great form of word-of-mouth marketing, too.
Posters and Flyers
Posters and flyers aren’t dead! They’re still an effective strategy for promoting concerts held in downtown areas with a lot of foot traffic. The best posters and flyers are artistic and eye-catching but also consistent with your brand as an artist. In other words, they should reflect the experience people will have at your concert, or people will buy tickets expecting something that they won’t receive. That can do more harm than good to your brand in terms of generating negative word-of -mouth marketing, particularly on social media.
Of course, your posters and flyers should include the concert venue and date, but don’t forget to add your website so people who want to learn more about you before they commit to buying tickets can find you easily online. Don’t worry if you’re not a graphic designer. Using a tool like Canva.com, you can create professional-looking posters and flyers. Another affordable option is to hire a freelance designer through a site like Fiverr.com.
Promote at the Concert
Don’t neglect the concert, itself, as a chance to do more promoting. Yes, it’s too late to promote for your current show, but you can use this as an opportunity to connect with new fans who might buy your albums after the show. It’s also a perfect time to excite people about future concerts.
Make sure you have an area set aside to sell albums and promotional materials like T-shirts and bumper stickers. These items are great for word-of-mouth marketing after the concert. In fact, when you use a ticketing company like AttendStar, you can even sell merchandise with tickets!
Concert Promotion Tips for Event Organizers
In addition to all of the concert promotion tips discussed above, there are many event marketing opportunities you’re probably missing. Here are a few tactics you can use to increase ticket sales to the concerts you organize:
Facebook Marketing
The majority of people on the planet use Facebook (1.18 billion per day), so you can be certain that people who want to see your concert are on Facebook. What better place to connect with them?
Start by creating a Facebook Page for your concert and getting people to like your Facebook Page. Next, publish relevant content, share other people’s content, and work to increase engagement on your Facebook Page. Finally, invest in Facebook advertising and try these 10 Facebook marketing ideas to increase your concert ticket sales.
Email Marketing
Research has shown again and again in recent years that email marketing is incredibly effective. In fact, it’s more effective for acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter marketing! Don’t underestimate the importance of building your own list, segmenting it to reach people who are most likely to be interested in the concert you’re promoting, and motivating them to buy tickets by sending them the right messages at the right times.
But what do you email to your list other than an announcement that the concert is coming? Check out this list of 10 event marketing email messages that skyrocket ticket sales. Not everyone is ready to buy tickets to a concert the first time they hear about it, so it’s essential that you stay in touch with them and keep the concert top-of-mind.
Advertising
Of course, local advertising offline is extremely important, and radio advertising is particularly effective for concert promotion, but make sure you reserve a percentage of your advertising budget for online ads.
Facebook advertising and Google AdWords work very well if they’re highly targeted, but a form of advertising that many event organizers overlook is retargeting. Since 80% of people who visit your concert’s ticket sales page won’t buy the first time they visit (based on research), it’s important that you don’t lose them forever! Retargeting enables you to show ads to those visitors who didn’t buy on other sites that they visit after leaving yours. Develop retargeting campaigns that are strategic and well-planned, and you’ll see your ticket sales climb.
Don’t forget to get free advertising whenever you can! For example, invest some time into listing your concert on event calendar websites.
Your Next Steps
Whether you’re working for a venue, as an event organizer, or you’re an artist, these concert promotion tips can help ensure your event’s success. Promoting a concert today is a challenging task that requires a combination of online and offline marketing tactics, but if you use the strategies explained above, you’ll attract a larger crowd to your next concert and sell more tickets so you can hold even more concerts in the future!
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