The gig-going experience involves so many components working together, whether it is the right imagery, the promotion to increase anticipation, as well as the music itself, and if you are running a music venue, you’ve got to get the balance right. Let’s show you some methods to ensure that you are promoting a music venue to the best of your abilities so you are covering three critical areas: appeasing the musicians, appealing to the fans, and also promoting yourselves as a top-tier music venue.
Determine Your Objectives
Strategies do not just inform what you will do in the near future, but they can help you promote your venue over a number of years. Big-picture thinking is so essential, and the greatest oversight many small music venues make is purely thinking about having to cover their immediate overheads. There’s a lot of small music venues that are struggling because people are not able to afford to come to gigs in the current environment so when it comes to marketing, you’ve got to work with a number of different elements of a strategy. These could include:
- The types of people you want to attract.
- Your objectives to attract them.
- How you will measure the success to inform future decisions.
Many digital marketing companies can give you a breakdown of how to fine-tune your strategy, but once you determine what you are going to do to achieve your objectives, you have to make sure that each element of the strategy will be understood by the bar staff, the events team, and everyone in between to ensure that you are all on the same page.
You could argue that the bar staff doesn’t give two hoots about what it takes to promote your venue, but when you are looking at the bigger picture in terms of what you’d like to achieve in the next few years, putting long-term strategies that focus on where everyone would like to be can provide a greater sense of cohesiveness.
Understand Your Budget
It sounds so simple but music venues can easily price themselves out if they’re trying to increase the caliber of artists. Accommodating entertainers is something that can, over time, chip away at your budget. If you are in an inner-city location, you have a competitive advantage, and you might think you’ve got a greater chance of appealing to a wide variety of artists, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you can earn more money in the long term.
Having an inner-city location means that you will be paying a greater premium for that location to the local authorities, which is why you’ve got to remember that your earning potential will vary because of the different types of acts you’re promoting, the size of the venue, or how many shows you can realistically put on.
When you look at the overall costs, this can have a major bearing on how little you may be able to put toward your marketing, which is why you’ve got to be more creative and focus on quality.
Determining Where You Should Promote
Understanding your marketing budget means that you then have to either become more creative with your promotional materials or you can start to focus on two or three smaller tools that you know will give you a greater return on investment. This is why anyone could benefit from the reliance on free advertising, in other words, word of mouth. For example, if you are promoting a local music festival, you may have a very minimal budget for your social media posts, and depending on your audience, you may already have a greater level of engagement, but this is where word of mouth can expand to something such as local radio. Local radio is an amazing way to gain interest in your events.
You could also look at promoting yourself using print media. Posters are a very simple thing and you can benefit from using print media with other local music venues. You might be a small-scale venue that is in direct competition with other local establishments, however, if you are promoting certain artists, you can make it more mutually beneficial to these other venues.
Small-scale music festivals can be a fantastic boon here, not just for the venues, but for the location itself. There’s been a number of great examples of inner-city festivals that showcase a number of artists around multiple venues and the audience pays for one ticket for access to all venues.
This approach will mean there’s going to be more money put behind the bar, but it is also an amazing way to increase tourism amongst music fans. In the UK, there are some fantastic examples, such as the 6 Music Festival, spearheaded by the BBC, but also smaller scale ones such as the Swn Festival that takes place in Cardiff, South Wales.
Spearheading a Local Talent Initiative
One of the biggest problems in promoting a music venue is thinking that local talent is not necessarily worth the effort. There’s a number of ways that you can promote local talent while also making sure that you keep your marketing costs low. Open mic nights are a very good example because the profit you will get come from selling drinks (or food, depending on your venue’s license).
Open mic nights are also easy to put on because they require minimal equipment and the musician will usually bring their own instruments. But beyond putting some money behind the bar, open mic nights foster a greater interest in local talent because it ensures people have the outlets and the opportunities to work their way up the ladder. Great small music venues get the balance right between nurturing local or low-level talent and the big names. This can transfer to gigs with bigger artists.
Having local talent open up for bigger names is a very simple method that gives them greater exposure, while also reinforcing that local grassroots approach to music. You should also listen to the community and what they want. You may have a long-term vision of positioning yourself as a club that will attract musicians from far and wide but this all begins with listening to your local community.
You need to look at the sales data from previous events to see which tickets sold best and why. Looking for attendance according to the artist but also the timings of the events, for example, major holidays, can help you to understand which events will be more popular. However, you don’t want to be focused completely on the money side of things. The whole point of running a grassroots or local music venue is about ensuring people have access to local talent or listen to things that they wouldn’t have potentially considered before.
This is where the balance between popular and alternative continues. Smaller music venues are home to those artists that work their way up the ladder but there are also many artists who come back to those venues as a wave paying it forward. These artists can be a great boon for local businesses and it helps them to reconnect with the embryonic stages of their careers.
Increasing engagement before, during, and after.
Using Social Media Correctly
Social media is pivotal to overall engagement, and if you are looking to increase sales you can start by using things like Instagram as a way to provide that interest but you can also use hashtags during the run-up to the event. A lot of music venues pride themselves on a simple approach to marketing because they believe that is just about the artist, and yes, it is primarily about the artist as this will stimulate audiences but you can implement social media with a greater purpose in the long run.
For example, you could utilize behind-the-scenes videos in the run-up to the event which can make for a greater level of engagement. Streaming is something that could be a benefit to your business if you are looking to promote your efforts more. Social media is an invaluable tool for a number of reasons, but if you want to start to bring a diverse audience you do need to think beyond purely your Instagram or Facebook. This is the bread and butter for many music venues, but it is also a good idea to think beyond the basic promotional tactics.
We’ve already touched upon word-of-mouth marketing but we also need to dig deep into the demographics of those who come to certain gigs and think about how we can bring more people in. Club nights are a very good example, but club nights can be alienating to certain demographics which is why you need to start diversifying your music nights. From pop to rock to jazz and everything in between, you can create a far more satisfying music venue. Music can be very precious to some people because it’s where they went clubbing in their 20s, but the modern music venue has to work on diversification on a greater level.