We know marketing budgets aren’t limitless. So how do you maximize your music festival promotion dollars to reach new attendees and turn social media followers into paying customers?
Our answer — strategic festival marketing.
Eighty percent of your festival audience has likely never attended your music festival. So you need to think about how you prove your event is a worthy investment.
At Eventbrite, we’re all about event marketing, from experiential promotion ideas to email drip campaigns and data-driven A/B split testing on social media ads. When it comes to event marketing, we’re the go-to for more than 800k event organizers worldwide.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use the strongest music festival marketing strategies to attract new fans and turn them into recurring attendees.
Building a music festival marketing plan: 10 essential strategies
The secret to great event marketing is intentionality.
It’s all about pinpointing your audience’s desires and linking them to unique elements of your event brand.
Need more guidance on how to build your own music festival marketing plan? Here are our top 10 festival marketing strategies.
1. Find your attendee’s ‘ideal identity’
As Chip R. Bell, the world-renowned customer loyalty and service expert, explains in his book, Inside Your Customer’s Imagination, customers’ needs constantly evolve, and most of the time, they don’t know what they want.
So rather than focusing on what attendees think they need, try to understand who they want to be, and target that person instead. That’s what big brands like Apple and Nike tap into.
Do a ‘deep dive’ research session on your existing follower list. During your research, analyze each profile with the understanding that their posts aren’t just ‘random snapshots’ — they’re deliberate choices. After all, we all know that the gap between self-disclosure (the ‘real you’) and self-construction (the ‘ideal you’) on social media is wide.
Ask yourself questions like:
- How do they present themselves through elements like clothing or lighting choices?
- What accounts do they follow, and how do they engage with them?
- What type of language do they use when commenting on posts?
The next step? Position your festival as the ‘gateway’ into their ‘ideal life.’
2. Let your branding be the portal to who attendees want to be
Look at the unique aspects of your event brand that resonate with their ‘ideal identity’, and use those insights to make strategic branding decisions to attract the right audience to your brand.
For example, you could incorporate:
- Strong color choices to create a psychological pull toward your brand. For instance, a rock music festival could use the color black to evoke feelings of rebellion and lust.
- Photo filters that showcase your brand personality. For instance, an indie-rock festival might use a soft ‘peach hue’ filter to give their photos a 70’s vibe.
DeathFest nails this concept. They’ve branded themselves as the festival for death metal music lovers through gritty photo filters, intimate underground venues, and close-up live event shots that make you feel like you’re in a sweaty moshpit.
Everything in their branding conveys one message to potential attendees: Only those who’re truly ‘ready to rock’ can handle DeathFest — if you’re one of us, buy a ticket to our event.
💡Pro tip: We recommend creating a Pinterest board and filling it with photos of events, clothing, quotes, colors — anything at all. It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to capture ‘the vibe.’
3. Use hard-sell social media marketing sparingly
Promoting your event on every one of your social media posts hurts your chances of turning your followers into paying customers.
Why? Because this is hard-sell marketing that only focuses on pushing your own agenda.
Instead, focus on building your social media presence around providing valuable content (that’s either informative or entertaining) first, without asking for something in return. Then, incorporate hard-sell tactics in the weeks before your festival to ‘bring it all home.’
For example, most of Nonsense Atlanta’s Instagram content includes mainly crazy snapshots from previous events. And when they do run a music festival ad, it’s not aggressive; it’s highly ‘shareable’ posts that keep their target audience in mind.
To take Nonsense Atlanta’s approach, here’s what you do:
- Make sure 40–60% of your content is organic, such as live-event photos
- Create poppy videos to promote your festival rather than just sharing a lineup or event details
- Use inclusive language that makes your attendees feel like they’re part of the family, such as ‘come join us’
💡Pro tip: With Eventbrite, you can use A/B split testing to see which ads resonate with your target audience, and use our behavior reports to conduct precise audience targeting. Plus you can create unique tracking links to find out exactly what platform your ticket sales come from.
4. Livestream this year to sell out next year
We know that hardcore “festies” are prepared to travel for their favorite shows. But how do you convince “normal” audiences that your festival is worth scheduling a cross-country trip for? One word: Livestream.
Live-streaming acts as a ‘proof of concept’ for attendees on the fence about your event. It’s a low-cost, low-commitment ‘test run’ that allows potential attendees to experience what your event has to offer before they spend hundreds of dollars on plane tickets and accommodation.
You can live-stream for two reasons:
1. Drive ticket sales
2. Increase awareness about your event
First, give remote attendees a taste of what they’re missing by strategically placing the camera in the heart of the crowd. This allows you to capture close-up shots of attendees’ genuine reactions to your event.
Facebook Live automatically records your videos, so you can turn your livestream into short-form videos and re-distribute them on future social media posts for promotional material.
For example, you can create:
- YouTube shorts
- Instagram reels
- Snapchat stories
- TikTok videos
💡Pro tip: After your event, use a post-event survey to determine which performers were most popular with attendees, and then use snippets of these musicians in your livestream shorts to help boost engagement.
5. Ask event sponsors and artists to spread the word
The great thing about hosting a music festival is that you expand your network. If you’ve chosen your headline acts and event sponsors wisely (which we know you have), then you already know their audience shares the same interests and values as yours.
Ask your headliners to create social media posts reminding their fans where to catch them in person: at your upcoming festival.
To keep expectations clear, you can add a clause to the contracts you have with each partner, specifying the number of social media posts they’re required to make and what type of posts they should be.
You can facilitate this by:
- Preparing a list of high-volume hashtags for your partners to use on their posts
- Encouraging linking and tagging across platforms to boost engagement and awareness
- Asking your collaborators to embed a checkout page onto their Instagram and Facebook page
- Giving top headliners and sponsors discount codes
💡Pro tip: Engage with your collaborators’ fans by commenting on their posts, liking people’s comments, and retweeting event photos. For example, DJ Swurve interacted with attendees and tagged Shipwreck Event to demonstrate the close contact that the event offers.
6. Develop strategic email marketing campaigns (that start early)
Email marketing is still number one for building trust and intimacy with first-time or recurring attendees. In fact, on average, for every $1 spent, you make $36.
And yet, it’s the aspect of festival marketing that event organizers often get wrong.
To run a successful email campaign that drives ticket sales, use personalized and direct communication in your email marketing campaigns.
Use each email to weave together a narrative that ends with attendees buying tickets to your show.
- Month one: Send one to two emails a week that build anticipation. One of the emails could hint that ‘something big is coming,’ and the other should contain valuable content, like a newsletter showcasing highlights from your previous events.
- Month two: Send two to three emails weekly that offer attendees a sneak peek into your behind-the-scenes preparation for the ‘mystery event,’ and share exclusive interviews with some headline artists.
Month three: Send three to four emails weekly that include the ‘big reveal’ for your upcoming music event and early-bird ticket access, your event agenda, lineup, and the festival lineup. - Month four: Send daily emails in the last week leading up to your event to create a sense of urgency and FOMO before the event, and offer attendees exclusive ‘last-minute’ discount codes to the event.
💡Pro tip: You can use Eventbrite to help you write emails that lead to higher conversion rates, in half the time. For instance, with Eventbrite’s help, Duck Club managed to achieve a very impressive 60% open rate.
How does Eventbrite help? By giving you access to:
- AI writing tools that help you write engaging email copy in minutes
- Intelligence audience targeting that uses previous email marketing data to determine what’s driving the most ticket sales
- An unlimited number of contacts and the ability to send 10,000 emails a day
- Highly functional app integrations, such as MailChimp, help streamline your email marketing workflow
Start writing better email campaigns
7. Utilize SMS blast marketing to reach more potential attendees
SMS marketing is making a comeback in the event marketing space.
Don’t believe us? 64% of US event organizers believe using SMS marketing to engage and communicate with event-goers is important. In fact, Matt Orlove (from ORLOVE) told us that he knows “… a lot of event producers that have been using text blasting that’s been super effective for them.”
The beauty of SMS marketing is that it drives immediate action. When users receive a notification, they’re more likely to stop what they’re doing to check it—that’s why SMS messages have a 98% open rate.
But that’s not all. With SMS you can craft highly personalized messages, and play with tone by including specks of humor and sprinkling in emojis without worrying about ‘algorithm restrictions.’
To build an SMS blast campaign:
1. Segment your audience based on demographics, interests, or past engagement with your event brand
2. Write a short, attention-grabbing message no longer than 160 characters
3. Schedule your messages to be sent during optimal texting hours (10am and 8pm)
4. Embed a clickable link to your event registration page at the end of the text message so attendees can buy tickets directly without being redirected to Chrome or Safari.
💡Pro tip: Many US states have spamming laws that require consent before sending attendees text messages, so include an opt-in box on website forms and ticket check-outs, and only send SMSs to individuals who’ve ‘opted-in.’
8. Drive engagement on community platforms
There’s no denying that community-driven platforms have experienced a massive boom.
Now that channels like Discord receive 868 million monthly visits, some event organizers are shifting their focus from more impersonal social media channels, like Facebook, to smaller, more exclusive community pages like Discord, Reddit, and Twitch, where they can build a loyal following around their event.
A great example of this is the Fred Again Discord group. During his recent tour, Fred Again hosted ‘secret pop-up shows’ that were announced at a minute’s notice. Fans would use his group to guess where the next performance would be, let each other know which ‘secret gigs’ were popping up, and where they could buy tickets.
This marketing strategy was so successful that it created an almost cult-like following, with attendees waiting online for hours to try to secure a ticket for his next event.
To borrow from Fred’s strategy, start by creating a Reddit, Discord, or Twitch account.
From here, you can:
- Invite your performers to join the chat and interact with their fans
- Share previous event photos or videos to get members talking about your upcoming event
- Offer exclusive discounts on festival merch and tickets to lean into the exclusivity and make your members feel special
💡Pro tip: Establish the ground rules for appropriate behavior and include important information, such as event details or updates, but otherwise, step aside and let the conversation flow.
9. Partner with nano and micro-influencers
Use nano and micro-influencer marketing before, during, and after your event to build hype around your festival and drive ticket sales.
Why? Because unlike influencers with larger followings, like mid- or mega-influencers (500,000–1 million followers), nano and micro-influencers have built a small (under 100,000) but concentrated community who value and trust their opinion.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to influencer marketing content. You can ask influencers to promote your event in the weeks leading up to it by sharing sponsored posts, creating a ‘stitch’ reacting to your event lineup, or recommending your event to their followers on a ‘top music festivals’ list.
The trick is finding the right influencer — one who aligns with your event’s vibe and target audience.
We recommend looking for an influencer who:
- Posts content regularly
- Has a significant number of comments on their Instagram posts to show authentic engagement and avoid fake followers
- Has collaborated with other event organizers or brands in the past
💡Pro tip: Sometimes, ‘the one’ might fall outside of the music niche—and that’s absolutely fine. As long as they share the same values and interests as your community, their influence can still be impactful. For instance, Green Light Events partnered with drknlvely, a lifestyle blogger, to help promote their Soul Flower Music Festival.
Want to dive deeper?
10. Invest in music festival ads on event discovery platforms
Listing your event on a discovery platform with a 90-million+ audience reach can help you connect with new attendees who are interested in the kind of events you host.
But here’s the catch.
While event platforms generate ticket sales, they’re also incredibly competitive. There are usually pages and pages of events that fit one event description and hundreds of events fighting for a spot on the first page results.
Thankfully, Eventbrite Ads can help.
On Eventbrite, you can create event ads that appear in the top search results for keywords associated with your music event and in ‘category browse pages.’
Create a festival ad on Eventbrite by:
1. Setting a daily budget and duration for the ad campaign
2. Picking a campaign objective to focus on, such as increasing awareness or driving more clicks to your registration page
3. Measuring your ad campaign results in Eventbrite’s dashboard to find out how your ads are performing
💡Pro tip: VIP events grew by 18% on Eventbrite in 2023 for PMD and friends. Offer reduced-priced VIP and early-bird tickets to increase your sales. For instance their Spring Swing Music Festival has already sold out of early-bird tickets.
Sell more tickets with impactful festival marketing
Music festival advertising is an opportunity to merge the creative and strategic side of your event mind. Take time to understand your target audience, and always be intentional with your strategy — everything from your ad spend to your social media campaign should have one purpose: engage and convert potential customers.
Remember: The most effective music festival marketing channel will only reveal itself if you’re paying attention. So track everything using Eventbrite and learn what works — and what’s not worth your precious marketing dollars.
