Inside your Industry: Marketing Tips for Music Promoters

This is part of a series of Inside Your Industry blog posts that aims to look at online marketing in different creative industries. This week we tackle the Live Music industry.

With so many music fans going online to share and promote music, digital marketing is the clearly the best way to promote your live music events. It comes at a far lower cost than offline techniques like canvassing with flyers and posters. It’s proven that people are much more likely to vote with their wallet when using online media sites and social networking, as opposed to direct advertising.

Bullseyehub’s guide to promoting live music will reveal how to mix old and new marketing techniques to help promote your event online:

1. Use social networking the right way

Post your events and invite people the first opportunity you can on Facebook and find fans on Twitter who might retweet your posts or even promote a hashtag with the name of the band. Over the last couple of years trending Twitter hashtags have made the front page of Google, so mastering Twitter can (temporarily) boost your SEO massively. While most of your Facebook work should be done well in advance, Twitter has a very different timescale, and is best used just before or even on the day of a live music event; see our Guide to Using Twitter at Events.

2. Customise your Facebook page

If you haven’t heard of Static FBML yet, now is the time to learn. Static FBML is a Facebook application that allows you to add basic HTML to your Facebook page, making it look that bit more professional. With Static FBML you can create an attractive landing page, insert a from to collect email addresses for a newsletter connected to a competition and have a link back to your main website to generate some traffic. To find out more about Static FBML and making your Facebook page ‘pop’ see our guide: How to Create a Facebook Landing Page.

3. Use email to stay in touch

A good mailing list can prove crucial for live music. People might want to come to your events but just miss that they were on. Email is more targeted than anything else.The best way to get people to sign up is with some sort of competition, this can just be for future free gig tickets if you haven’t got any merch or other prizes you can offer. For a quick set of FAQs see our blogs on Email Marketing.

4. Get your event listed

At least three weeks before let the listings magazines and broadcast sites know about your event. These should be editorial sites like Time Out and Spoonfed, as well as automated services like Gumtree. Send them a good snappy description of the event, a list of the artists that are playing and a thumbnail image for the event. Keep it relevant by only emailing websites that fit the remit for your events, a hiphop site is unlikely to list your Norwegian black metal gig, although I do agree it’s a big coup that you’ve managed to book Gorgoroth. For more on this see our Guide to Getting your Event Listed.

5. Use mobile marketing

Location-based Mobile Apps like Foursquare can attract passing trade by helping promote your event to people who might be in the area on the evening of the event. Many broadcast sites like Spoonfed and Time Out now have GPS mobile software so make sure they know your event is happening. Conventional mobile marketing is also a growing market and you should treat it in much the same way to email marketing campaigns. This means collecting peoples’ mobile numbers at events and with forms on your website. When you have these, be flexible with how you market to them, feel free to experiment and take note of what does and doesn’t work, remembering not to spam people who don’t want to know.

6. Be original in your description

If you were talking to someone who’d never heard of any of the bands at your event, how would you describe them? Try to be accurate and current – I’m pretty sure your band don’t sound like ‘Led Zeppelin at their amazing peak’ and even if they do, find a better way to say it.

7. Keep it reasonable

In a big city like London there are loads of events all over the city, so don’t price yourself out of the market. More people will turn up if they think it’s affordable, remember a lot of your audience will be taking a risk on a band they’ve never heard before so make it worth their while. You might have to take a hit early on while you make a name for yourself.

8. Sell tickets in advance

Sure, lots of people say they’ll come, but those who already have a ticket definitely will. As you get nearer to the event apply some pressure by explaining that the number of tickets is going down (even if this is not strictly true). There are a couple of approaches to this, there are various specialised ticket selling websites around. If you’re serious about promoting live music events, learn how they work and build a working relationship.

9. Find your audience

Track them down online and (carefully) let them know that you’re putting on a show. Don’t be afraid of getting into a conversation, there are online communities for live music in every major city so get to know them.

For more help with marketing live music events please Become A Fan of Bullseyehub on Facebook or Follow Bullseyehub on Twitter. Got some good tips for promoting live events? Please leave a comment below and share it with us.