It doesn’t matter whether you are playing home or out of town, if you want a packed crowd at your gigs you’re going to need to effectively promote them.  Here is a checklist of seven things you need to do to effectively promote your events:

Give Yourself Plenty Of Time For Promotion

Don’t expect to put on a gig in two weeks time and have it sell out.  People need to see if their friends are coming, they might need to save money for the event and they might need to sort travel or other logistics.  Give yourself a good amount of time for all that to happen, ideally months rather than weeks.

The more time you have, the more effective your marketing can be.

Prepare Your Promotional Assets

These could be physical (posters, flyers) or digital (jpgs for use online, short video messages for social platforms).  Make sure the artwork and layout has a good, clear striking design.  Resize digital artwork for effectiveness of different platforms (letterbox on Twitter, square for Facebook/Instagram etc).

Make sure you resize your promotional materials for each platform.

Inform Your Fans Using All Your Channels

List the event on your website, your newsletter, Facebook events (and services such as Bandsintown), social media posts etc.

Make sure you get the word out through all your channels.

Research Local Media

Research approach appropriate channels who are likely to list or feature your event. This could be local radio stations, local newspapers, local fanzines, local music blogs. Prepare a good press release and send it to those people.  If you’re sending information electronically, also link to a short Soundcloud playlist and your best YouTube video.

Research everyone who should know about your gig.

Contact Other Bands

Invite bands local to the area and offer them guest list places (and say you’ll give them a free beer or two!). Ask them to help spread the word about the event.  The idea is that you are getting get the word out to THEIR audience.

Invite local musicians to attend for maximum publicity.

Remind Your Fans Leading Up To The Gig

Remind people intermittently through your newsletters and social media.  Do it regularly but don’t get too spammy.  Make sure you change the text of your social media tweets and change up the images so it still feels fresh saying the same message.

Have A Marketing Budget

Give yourself a promotional budget.  This will most likely be printing costs for posters or flyers or paid for Facebook promotion.    Find more about paid for Facebook promotion here.

Allocate some money to help promote the show.

Do you do anything else which you find effective?  Let me know!

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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