Promotion is the way in a business makes its products known to the customers, both current and potential.
(Marketing: Introduction to Promotion (GCSE) | tutor2u, n.d.)
Creating your own live performance, with different acts, lighting, great sound and a well-suited venue, is great. But, you need people to actually come down to see all of this and everything you’ve been working on. Without this, you’ll be playing to an empty venue and that is never a good time for a performer as it can feel like nobody wants to come and see you. However, a lot of the time, it’s probably because you haven’t promoted the performance enough and in a good light that makes people click on the ‘buy tickets’ button. The most simple definition of promotion is making sure a group of people know about your event or product, at the very least. The two ways of promoting are:
Above The Line- Where promotion is paid for; usually, TV adverts, being in newspapers, paying for social media promotions etc. This is usually done to reach a new, wider audience.
Below The Line- Promotion where you don’t need to spend money, and is usually directed at pre-existing audiences. This might be ticket offers, mailing lists or using direct messages to inform.
Why Is Promoting Important
The main reason for promotion is simple; it increases customer traffic. However, this isn’t just traffic for your event, but also engagement with social media too. The more followers and likes you get, the more your account is pushed out onto explore pages, meaning new people will be seeing your work. More people seeing your work gives you a much better chance to get ticket sales, and they are likely to follow you on social media and become a fan of the event.
Promoting doesn’t just help people come to your event or increase social media engagement, it also helps you create a brand that people will recognise in the future. If someone sees a poster outside or a social media post and ignores it, they aren’t likely to come back to find the poster or account again. However, if you create your own brand that people will recognise when seeing your banners around the city centre or posts on social media, they are more likely to become interested in what your event is. This also means you need to make sure that you are posting frequently and your posters are prominent around the area so more people will see your brand and more often. Eventually, they will give in and see what your event is.
Promoting an event can also relay the most relevant information very quickly to any potential customers instead of having them look for information somewhere that’s not been promoted much. If you don’t promote information, this will make them feel like the event is unorganised, and they don’t care enough to announce important information to a possible audience. You won’t make ticket sales through this as nobody will know what day and time the event is on, where it is, what acts are playing and more. Nobody wants to go to an event if they don’t know exactly what the plan is!
Creating a fanbase helps to identify your audience and gain analytics about who your event and brand are appealing to. It might be that your audience is extremely broad, very niche, that they are all from around the same area, they are a range of different ages or more interesting insights. You can then use this information for promotions later down the line; you can target your adverts to a similar audience, or different if you are wanting to expand and reach a more broad customer range. For example, if your audience is older, you could put adverts in newspapers, or if they are young, use social media adverts to your advantage, and vice versa.
Ways To Promote
In these days where events and bands are putting on their shows all around you, in the same local area and on the same day, you have to compete to get a potential audience’s attention by persuading them that your show will be great. Seeking out your competition is a great way to make sure your event will come out on top, as harsh as that seems. This means a great way of promoting your event is directly communicating to your potential audience and making them feel important, almost like it wouldn’t be the same if they didn’t turn up.
Advertising is one of the most popular ways to promote something, no matter what that ‘something’ is. This might involve putting up posters, doing interviews, making television or radio adverts or using adverts on social media, all to make people look at your brand and want to get involved. For events, this is a huge part of promoting as you will reach wider audiences from outside of your local area or scene., this creating more ticket sales and publicity.
Sponsors are massive for music events, as the industry is so large and everyone is willing to support each other. Sponsors go hand in hand with support acts, where a headline act will bring other acts to play before they come on, in the hopes they bring their own fans too, therefore increasing the ticket sales and turnout, and giving the headline more publicity. Your event might sponsor another field in the music industry in the hopes the right audience will see it and buy tickets.