How to Promote a Music Festival

Music Festival

If you’re thinking of putting on a festival this year, it’s vital that you get organised and start putting together a plan to start selling tickets and spreading the word about your exciting music festival.

Successful festivals can potentially make a lot of money for the organisers or sponsors involved, but only if you sell all your tickets and make sure it has been well promoted.

Read on for our top tips on how to connect with the right target market and build on existing online platforms to bring in the crowds.

Evvnt’s Top Tips for Promoting a Festival Online

1. Find the target audience for your festival
Decide what types of people might attend your festival and think about what things they will enjoy. Pick entertainment, food, music and a venue that will appeal to them. Once the event is set up for your target market, consider how these people might want to get their news. Would they prefer to see flyers, check-in on Facebook or sign-up to receive your newsletter?

2. Run events throughout the year
The easiest way to keep your music festival in the news throughout the year is to run small, regular events that show people that you’re not a one-tricky pony. A series of events will also introduce your festival to a new crowd, who might not otherwise consider buying a ticket, but have really enjoyed a past event from your brand.

3. Promote on social networks
Facebook and Twitter are very versatile platforms on which to promote your festival. Organizers can create dedicated landing pages to update their fans about the latest line-up announcements on run a competition to win tickets to the event.

Twitter can be used to spread the world about your event to an even greater number of people. Using #hashtags that reflect the location, music or genre of your festival can help you target the right audience.

On Twitter, you’re also able to connect with some of the artists directly and ask them to promote the festival to all. Their followers on your behalf.

Social media can also help people connect with each other when the festival is actually happening. Set up a hashtag for your festival (e.g. #glasto) that users can add to their tweets to spread the latest news or share top tips about some of the different acts that people should go and see.

4. Set a timetable and stick to it
Organising a festival is stressful and time-consuming, so make sure your team creates a planning schedule of tasks, milestones, resources, and funding targets to keep everything on track. It’s easy for time to run away from you with so many different things to organise at once, but prioritising your tasks will help keep everything in check. Your non-digital assets will probably need the most planning, so if you’re ordering any flyers or merchandise, this should be finalised a few months in advance.

5. Use email
Use your email newsletter to send special ticket offers and the latest event news. Email is a great way to display all the different things that might be happening at your festival and to reach a targeted audience. If you don’t have an email list yet, then using social media or getting people to sign-up at other events could be a clever way to help you build a list of interested people. It’s even worth asking the live acts involved to send out an eflyer or ticket link to their fan base on your behalf.

6. Build a mobile app
One of the best technological advances in recent years, that directly benefit festivals, is the rise of the smartphone. While for many people, mobile apps are just a good way to pass time on a boring early morning commute. For festival organizers they represent a new way to communicate with their audiences.

In previous years, the only way for festival-goers to find out who’s playing when and where was using a festival program, and unpredictable weather conditions often made these unreadable after the first 24 hours. Now, it’s possible to carry around the whole line-up, a map and all the latest festival news on your mobile phone. More traditional mobile marketing techniques such as SMS or MMS can also be used to update music fans about a secret gig somewhere on the festival site.

7. Use Video
Video content is a brilliant way to generate interest in an upcoming festival. The ability to see clips of your acts performing live will give ticket holders a teaser of the main event. Many popular UK festivals upload clips to their YouTube channel. But if video isn’t you kind of things, then perhaps consider running a regular podcast.

8. Get feedback
No matter how successful your festival is this year, there will always be room for improvement and the best way to find out how to create a better festival experience for music fans is to ask them! Festival organisers can collect some feedback automatically by monitoring social networks for reactions to the acts of the whole atmosphere. It’s also worth running a follow-up competition that’s open to all attendees. They fill in a feedback form to help you plan for next year’s event.