How to promote a music festival

So you’re thinking about how to promote a music festival? Here we’ve put together some top tips on how to get your festival going and shout about it in the right way.

Social media

All forms of social media are useful for promoting your music festival and each can be used in different ways. Event pages can be started on Facebook to spark conversation between attendees and those interested. Instagram can highlight behind the scenes to generate excitement and Twitter can be a way to directly engage with people.

You don’t need to pay hundreds of influencers like a certain Fyre Festival, when used correctly and in an engaging way, social media can really help people buy into the experience that you’re creating.

Utilise your artists

When you have booked your artists, they are one of the biggest selling points of your festival. It’s likely that they will have a fanbase already so encouraging them to share your event on their social media platforms is incredibly useful. You can even go further and see if they would be interested in being interviewed ahead of your event.

Any kind of content from interviews to playlists curated by your artists can help drive traffic to your website and help to sell tickets as a result.

Be eye-catching

A poster for your event is essential, it needs to grab the attention of the consumer and the art must be intriguing. This is what you can put on event pages to really stand out. Putting your posters up in the local area is important too and making your event noticeable will capture people’s interest.

Make purchasing tickets easy

Nobody wants to get onto a ticketing site that is hard to read, has limited information and is unreliable. You need to give customers easy, quick and informative options that make the whole process of buying a ticket easy. Putting event descriptions on is a must, with information such as artists, location, dates and more.

This makes it so much more likely the customer will trust you to run an event when all the information around it is up to such a high standard.

Utilising press

Utilising the press is a key way to get your event heard about. Writing a well-presented press release and sending it out to media, particularly in the local area can help to improve the visibility of your festival. The more people see your event, the more likely they are to go.

Putting yourself on gig listing sites or even paying for advertisement space in a magazine or local paper that speaks to your desired demographic can do wonders for getting your voice heard.

Find your demographic

Whether putting on a festival full of DJs or rock bands, it is crucial that you cater towards your demographic. Once you’ve figured out your target market, you can use analytics to see what kinds of promotion are more likely to catch their attention and how to cater your event more towards them.

Build a mobile app

To make your event accessible it is important to utilise a mobile app, this is an opportunity to give festival-goers a single location where they can find all the relevant information on your festival before and during the event. You can have a dedicated section about stage splits and timings, the weather, a map and much more which makes the festival experience a lot more convenient.

A well-made app can make your festival memorable and entice people in if it looks professional.

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About Skiddle

Skiddle is currently the UK’s biggest What’s On guide, providing a free facility for event promoters across the UK to list their events online and sell tickets through our independent ticketing service. We currently work with over 35,000 UK and European promoters, at over 30,000 venues. We specialise in helping events through that critical growing phase by providing the marketing and technology support that you need. Start listing your events today!