If you’re planning a music festival, you probably have a lot on your plate already. From booking the venue to approaching the right performers, you need to make sure everything goes perfectly. But unfortunately, none of this is enough to make your event a success unless you have the key component.
An effective promotion strategy.
The way you market your event is integral in determining whether your festival will be a hit. To sell tickets, you need to create enough hype to get your audience excited. But how do you go about generating excitement for upcoming events?
These days, nothing gets the word out better than social media. Whether your target audience is focused mainly on teenagers or adults, every age group makes use of a certain social media platform.
Here are 5 foolproof social media strategies to help you generate buzz for your music fest.
1. Keep musicians in the loop
The first thing you need to do is leverage the support of all the well-known musicians who are participating in your event. Especially those who will be performing at the festival. Why? Because you want as much traction as you can get. And including your musicians in all of your social media posts through tags, hashtags, photos, and more will help direct their fanbase toward your event page. Anyone who is a huge fan of the musicians performing at your event would love to stay in the loop about any performances they have with you.
Alternatively, if the musicians participating at your event are relatively new and do not have a very large fanbase, your followers can get to know about them through your posts and familiarize themselves with their work.
So make sure your social media strategy makes effective use of the popularity of the musicians you’re working with. Post about them across social media platforms and tag them on posts and stories relating to your event. For more traction, get them to share your posts on their social media as well or even share your own event website. A good event website will give all the information needed for people understand what the event experience will be like.
2. Create intrigue through your posts
When sharing information and visuals for your upcoming event on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, make sure you’re giving your followers the right amount of information. Don’t give out too many details all at once. Generate curiosity and excitement for your music event by creating intrigue and leaving your audience guessing.
Don’t announce your full lineup altogether in the very beginning. Use your first social media post to make your followers guess who will be performing. Then keep the excitement up by dedicating a separate post to each performer who will be at your music fest.
Get creative with your social media posts and keep your audience excited for what’s to come.
Here are some ideas for social media posts to inspire you:
-
Introduce every performing artist through a dedicated artist profile post.
-
Show teasers of practice performances on your Instagram and Facebook stories.
-
Have your artists give you a shoutout on their Instagram feed and share the posts on
your own story.
3. Share memories of past events
Not all the content you create for social media has to be completely new. If you’ve conducted music events in the past, bring them back to trigger memories within your audience and evoke a sense of nostalgia-induced excitement.
Create an Instagram highlight of all of the videos and photos you have of past events. Share these clips on your story. Tag the musicians and industry professionals who attended your event in the past and create a fun, engaging set of memories to excite your prospective attendees.
To make your content more engaging, use the “Ask a Question” feature on Instagram Stories to have your followers tell you their favorite parts from previous events, as well as what they’re looking forward to this year.
4. Engage your audience through stunning visuals
An aesthetically pleasing social media feed is integral to effective online promotion. Your followers want to be intrigued with your content. Create engaging graphics for your feed to provide your audience with the correct information about your event and get them excited for what’s to come.
You don’t need to be a professional designer to create an aesthetic social media feed. With online design tools like PosterMyWall, you can get easy access to a wide and vibrant range of music festival posters to share with your audience.
The ideal music poster should have enough information for your audience to make a decision to attend. Include the date and time for your event along with the ticket price. If you have any other important information to share with your audience, add that to the poster but don't leave too much white space. Add your logo (if any) right on top and the name of your festival in a bold, noticeable font in the center of your poster. Include an image or two of action shots from past events to keep the excitement alive.
You can make several iterations of your poster to share at different times before the event. In the beginning, put up a teaser poster with just the logo and timings to create intrigue. Once you’ve made most of your announcements, post a final poster with the final lineup of musicians and other exciting details for your audience.
5. Partner up with local influencers
Influencer marketing is a fabulous way to jazz up your online marketing campaign. If an influencer is a fan of a certain musician performing at your event, odds are they’ll bring some of their own fan base along with them.
Partner up with local micro-influencers who may be interested in attending your event and offer to collaborate with them. Make sure the influencers you reach out to are relevant to your cause. Going for several micro-influencers will allow you to bring in more diverse groups of fans and reach a wider audience.
Offer them free tickets and backstage passes to the show in exchange for constant social media coverage of your event. Have them provide information about the event through their social media accounts and add in some benefits to get their followers to respond. For instance, you can allot a discount code for 5% off of online ticket purchases to the influencer, and have them share it with their followers.
Final thoughts
When you’re organizing a festival, there is so much you need to keep in mind. From planning and organizing to figuring out the logistics, you have to see that everything runs smoothly. But while you figure out the other technicalities of your event, it is integral to keep in mind that your promotion strategy is the factor that determines if your event sells out.
Use these 5 social media hacks to generate hype for your music festival and get your audience excited for the event of the year.
