Venues and promoters often approach TSE Entertainment with their need to do entertainment event marketing for a concert or festival. To help those involved with putting on entertainment events, TSE has compiled a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) for those needing a better understanding of entertainment event marketing. This is the first of a number of posts we will provide on this subject of frequently asked questions for entertainment event marketing.
How Does Entertainment Event Marketing Differ from Other Types of Marketing?
First, understand the event marketing has two meanings in the marketing arena. The first is using events to market a product or brands. Event marketing examples might include a podcast, webinar, or demonstration. The second is marketing an event such as a concert, festival, conference, etc.
Illicit Emotion: Entertainment event marketing has a few distinctions from other event marketing campaigns. They are more emotionally targeted. Campaigns are designed to engage with the target audience on an emotional level. They create excitement and anticipation for a music concert or festival. Connecting on this level drives attendance, ticket sales, fan loyalty and the sharing of their experience with their network.
Experiential: Entertainment Events are by nature experiential. There is no existing product that can be viewed ahead of time. It is a one-time experience that will take place in the future. Marketing campaigns focus on giving the target audience a taste of the upcoming event and the experience they will have attending it.
Limited Time Period: Concerts or festivals take place on specific dates. The campaigns are not ongoing but must focus on getting the audience to take action during a limited time period. That requires creating a sense of urgency and fear of missing out (FOMO) and using lots of promotions and a multi-channel approach to marketing.
What are Costs Involved with Marketing an Entertainment Event?
The industry standard for one-off concerts or festivals is a budget of 15 to 20 percent of the total income if all tickets are sold. This figure can be comfortably reduced to 7.5 to 10 percent for venues that regularly host entertainment events. This figure may also be impacted by whether the marketing of an event is outsourced or done in-house. The costs are for the design and execution of a entertainment event marketing campaign and for the paid media or advertising utilized for the event.
What Marketing Channels Should Be Considered for Entertainment Events?
The answer seems simple enough. The ones on which your target audience or its segments would see and engage with your marketing messages. Your goal is to select the best channels to reach large numbers of your target audience with the largest return on expenditures (ROI). You will take advantage of owned, earned, and paid media channels to reach the people you want at your event. It’s also important to remember that your event website and campaign channels have consistent color scheme and brand imagery.
What Are The Owned Media Channels for Entertainment Event Marketing?
Owned Media: Owned Media are the channels that are owned and controlled by the venue itself and includes self-generated content, including:
- Event Website: Your event website is the primary landing page and primary touchpoint where potential attendees will learn about your event. It should have all the key details they will need to decide to attend the event. At a minimum it should include:
- Event name and tagline (if used)
- Date and time of the event
- Location
- Promotional copy, including video content to entice action
- Costs to Attend
- Call to Action (CTA) link to online box office
- FAQs
It’s the best practice to build the ticketing process into your event website using a widget or plugin so people can skip the box office landing page. This seamless approach makes it simpler and easier for people to purchase tickets to the event.
- Content Marketing: Search engine optimization (SEO) is another crucial element of any event marketing online strategy. By optimizing content such as webpage content, blogs, case studies, white papers, videos, graphics, etc. for keywords that describe your event, you can drive traffic to your event website by making it easy to find in search engines.
- Organic Social Media Marketing: Effective social media marketing is one of the major pillars today to market an entertainment event. Your social media efforts should be geared to the social media platforms that your target audience uses. Organic posts are free promotion but understand that algorithms used by such platforms limit the reach of organic social media.
Consistent posting of engaging content is important. You want to utilize a posting schedule that keeps your event in front of potential attendees and provides new details and reasons to want to attend your event. Your goal is to engage people with the kind of interactive media that excites them. Use video and graphics to get your message across.
Don’t forget to use a hashtag specific to your event so that all those involved with attending or promoting your event can tag their posts and reference your event with ease. You can also use related hashtags your target market is interested in to reach a greater audience to market your event. Remember that it’s also important to react when people comment, share, or like your posts. Do respond to comments to your posts, and don’t forget to follow new people or pages that like your social media posts.
- Email Communications: Email is still an important channel for event promotion and marketing. Don’t overuse this channel and personalize it communications as much as possible. While you want to keep your event in front of your target audience, you do not want to become a nuisance and have people treat your email as spam.
Email marketing works better if it’s specifically targeted to your segments of your target audience based on relevant interests, locations, industries, or other demographics and content is created geared toward that segment.
- Event App Content: In recent years. mobile event apps have become a must have component in the event marketing strategy mix. They complement event websites while providing additional capabilities to engage attendees and promote events in greater detail.
As part of your communication strategy, you can use your event app to connect with attendees as soon as they buy tickets for your event and download the app. An event app promotion strategy includes sending them push notifications when new performers, sponsors, merch, or other stuff are added to the concert or festival to boost their excitement and get them sharing your event details with their social networks.
What Are The Earned Medial Channels for Event Marketing?
Earned Media is when others spread information about your events or venue. Example include:
- Press Releases:
A timely press release can be an effective way to get the word out quickly. When composing your press release, remember to work on effective messaging. Depict the value proposition of the event, cite who the intended audience is, mention the date and time of the event, and highlight any sponsors/speakers worth mentioning.
Be sure to send it to the entertainment editors of publications in the drawing area of your event. Of course, don’t forget to link the write-up directly to your landing page so that you can drive referral traffic.
- Reviews: Reviews from critics, attendees, and celebrities can significantly influence the success of one way or the other of getting people to attend an event.
- User Generated Content: Audience reactions and comments on social media can be a major factor in event promotion. Marketers can leverage and encourage user generated content and testimonials to amplify in a big way their own marketing efforts.
- Shared articles or social media posts: The more people that share or repost your own social media posts, articles, or blog posts the more your entertainment event marketing program expands to reach more people. Marketers always want marketing content to go viral.
- Posting on Event Listing Websites: It’s a simple tactic that many forget. Make sure your event is listed on the event listing websites that serve your market. Bandsintown.com and songkick.com are examples of such sites. There are many other events listing websites. Take advantage of these listing sites. Many people use them to find entertainment events happening in their areas.
In the next article on Frequently Asked Questions about Entertainment Event Marketing I will address questions dealing with paid media for event promotion and well as other frequent questions we get at TSE Entertainment.
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