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Concert Promotion Tips

Concert Promotion Tips

If you want to attract a crowd to your concert, you must promote it. How to promote an event on social mediaWhether 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!

Want more concert promotion tips? Subscribe to our Concert Promotion Tips newsletter and keep learning!

How to promote an event on social media

How to promote an event on social media

How to promote an event on social media. With several platforms to leverage, you can get the word out to various segments of your audience where they live online.

To maximize your social media event marketing efforts, however, it pays to put some strategy behind your posts. After all, it’s not enough for your followers to see your updates – you want to engage and convert them.

Here are 12 essential steps to take to promote your event on social media and drive ticket sales.

Step 1: Choose your social networks

Depending on your industry and target audience, some social platforms may be more effective than others. Typically, if you can do some promotion on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you should be well covered. Here’s a quick overview:

  • Facebook – You can share event updates, engage followers, and create event pages. You can also target your messaging to specific groups using paid promotion.
  • Instagram – Brands get the most engagement on this image-laden social platform.
  • LinkedIn – Great for B2B and industry networking, this professional social media platform is a good choice for company news and event announcements.
  • Twitter – Use posts and an event hashtag to build excitement before and during your event.
  • Snapchat — Appeal to young audiences by building a presence on Snapchat.

Use this quick quiz to figure out which social platforms you should use for event promotion.

Step 2: Choose your event hashtag

Come up with a hashtag that’s short, unique, and easy-to-understand. Once you land on an idea, stick with it! Consistency is key.

If you post anything relevant to your upcoming event, include your hashtag. Add it to all of your social account bios as well. And don’t stop there — promote your hashtag on all your other communication channels. These include your event website, promotional emails, print materials, and more.

During the event, make sure your hashtag is visible at your event so your guests know to use it. Include it in handouts and display it on screens throughout your venue. Better yet? Give people incentive to use your hashtag and share your event on social. This could mean setting up a photo booth branded with your hashtag, or creating a photo competition where the best photo using your hashtag wins a prize.

Step 3: Upgrade your social profiles

Before you embark on event social media campaigns you’ll want to update your social profile pages. Create sleek headers and thorough company descriptions, and update any existing pages to include your upcoming event. Some quick tips:

  • Add your event hashtag and/or logo to your headers. Be consistent in your look, but be sure to follow image size requirements for each network.
  • Optimize your social media “about us” sections. Include a thorough, engaging description of your company. Use keywords that will help prospective attendees find your page, and include a mention of your event as well.
  • Interlink all of your social media pages. On Facebook, include your Twitter handle, and so on.

Step 4: Create (and sell tickets through) your Facebook Event

500 million people use Facebook Events each month. But with more than 47 million public Facebook events created last year alone, you need to make your event stand out.

When creating your Facebook Event, be sure to:

  • Choose a 1920×1080 cover photo that looks good at any size
  • Be specific about location, time, and category so Facebook can help promote your event
  • Craft a compelling event description
  • Put your ticketing link front and center

If you use Eventbrite, you can sell tickets directly on Facebook. By allowing people to purchase tickets through Facebook’s new end-to-end checkout, you can drastically boost your bottom line. In fact, events that sell tickets directly on Facebook drive 2X more sales and free registrations on average than events that redirect to a ticketing page.

Step 5: Craft your content carefully

Engagement with your posts determines how many potential event-goers see your promotions, so you need to make every post count.

For maximum engagement, you’ll want to include images in your posts, and space out your ticket sale posts with more general industry news or lifestyle content. Make the content engaging, conversational, and not overly “salesy.” Also to keep in mind:

  • Tailor content for each social network. You want to keep in mind the different styles and audiences on each platform. On Twitter, it’s short, sweet, and sometimes quirky, whereas on LinkedIn, you should steer toward a more professional tone.
  • Incorporate images in your post. Image and video-driven posts are more engaging than plain copy. If you’ve had past events, include photos of happy attendees having a great time. Or, if you have well-known speakers, partners, or vendors for your upcoming event, you can share photos of those people to build excitement. You can even create fun memes or add animated gifs for some lightheartedness.

Download 10 Ways to Write Copy That Sells Tickets to learn how to write posts that get noticed.

Step 6: Invest in tools to streamline your process

If you’re not strategic, developing and scaling a strong social media strategy can be a drain on your resources.

With so many social media tools at your disposal, it’s hard to know what to choose and how to measure ROI. Here are two ways the right social media tools can help you save time and make your social media management less manual and more effective:

  • Plan and schedule more efficiently. You can’t be online twenty-four hours a day, so use tools that can help you plan, organize, and schedule your posts.
  • Create and curate diverse content. Content curation platforms help you find interesting content. Bookmark a blog post or a video that relates to your topic.

Find the right social media tools for your event in The Best Social Media Tools for Sophisticated Event Marketers.

Step 7: Run a social media contest

Wish your followers shared your posts more? Make it happen with social media contests.

Social media is vital for event promotion, but you can’t just rely on your own accounts to spread the word — you have to get event-goers to share it as well. Contests are the perfect way to motivate word-of-mouth promotion without a huge investment.

But not every social media contest is as successful as it could be — and if you don’t plan ahead, contests could even land you in legal trouble. You need a strategy that will yield the most engagement, without risking your event’s brand in the process.

Use this blog post to learn how to use contests to up-level your social media strategy.

Step 8: Work with influencers

Nearly 85% of marketers have plans to use some type of influencer marketing in 2017. Building relationships with key people in your industry who can talk up your event can help influence prospective attendees to register.

But influencer marketing can be an intimidating and nebulous, so it can be challenging to develop a strategy. Get the basics you need to know to employ a social influencer campaign that drives attendance at your event in this blog post.

Step 9: Launch paid social media ads

On average, only about 2-6% of your Facebook followers will see posts you make on your event page.

“If you want to get your content in front of the right people, it’s a pay-to-play environment,” says Ali Shakeri, CMO and co-founder of ToneDen. That means supplementing organic posts with paid social ads.

To craft an engaging social media advertisement, be sure to include:

  • An eye-catching image or video
  • Short and sweet post text
  • An even shorter headline — that’s still engaging
  • A direct call to action (i.e., “Buy Tickets”)
  • An accurate link description (i.e., “Click here to buy tickets”)

Learn more about launching and measuring social media ad campaigns in The Event Organizer’s Guide to Paid Social Media Advertising.

Step 10: Create a Snapchat geofilter

Don’t believe the rumors: Snapchat is far from dead. In fact, with more than 150 million people using Snapchat every day, event organizers can no longer afford to ignore the platform.

The easiest way to use Snapchat for events? Make a Snapchat geofilter for your attendees. By investing only an hour of time and less than $100 of budget, you can engage attendees and spread the word to new ticket-buyers.

Get step-by-step directions on how to make a Snapchat geofilter in this post.

Step 11: Use live video on event day

You don’t have to livestream your entire event to make a splash with live video. Instead, use short, live clips from your event — like behind the scenes peeks or interviews with performers — to engage viewers.

This light effort can pay off seriously down the road. Here are a few reasons why, from Amber van Moessner of Livestream:

  • Live video is extremely engaging. According to Facebook Live, users spend more than 3x more time and comment 10x more when the video is live.
  • Live video grows attendance. 30% of people who watch a livestream of an event will attend the same event the following year.
  • Live video is cost effective. It’s a common misconception that live video is costly, but thanks to tools like Facebook Live, anyone can leverage the technology and see a positive return on investment.

Not sure where to host your livestream? Consider Facebook Live or YouTube.

Step 12: Measure your social media activity

As you get better with social media, you’ll want to get a sense of what’s working and resonating with your followers. That way, you can tweak your strategy accordingly, and hopefully, drive more ticket and registration sales.

Key metrics to measure include:

  • Engagement rate. Are your followers engaging with the content you post? Look for trends and re-post your top content to improve your engagement rate and show up in more feeds.
  • Clicks. How many social media users are clicking on the links to your ticketing page?
  • Sales. If you use Eventbrite, you can see how many sales each social media channel has driven in your event reports.
  • Return on investment. If you’re using paid advertisements, be sure to monitor your ROI (return on investment) to make sure your spend is paying off.

To learn more about how to promote your event on social media, check out The Essential Guide: Social Media for Events.

First major runway show of London Fashion Week

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