How to engage and retain your festival’s most loyal fans

Engage the eye with UGC

UGC, short for User Generated Content, can help you get people through the gates.

It’s authentic, cost-effective and free from glossy, overproduced imagery. You’re putting someone right in the mind’s eye of the crowd.

If your festival has been running for a while, chances are you’ll have access to footage uploaded by fans from previous events that could be repurposed and used in your current marketing efforts. You could even go one better and put a call out to your fans via your social media channels to upload some of their best memories at your events from previous years.

Offering an incentive to upload UGC with hashtags relevant to your festival, such as free merch or free tickets to the event, for example, can also help increase awareness of your event and engage potential customers, whilst building brand loyalty among the fans who choose to upload their UGC.

If you’re a newcomer on the scene and without a stock of imagery to use, you could repurpose, for example, video footage of your headliner live in action and republish this to your own page or platform. It’s important to always obtain credit from the person who captured and/or owns the content in question.

Once you find the footage, make sure to create an enticing hook. A popular one is ‘POV: You’re in the crowd’, but you don’t have to stick to that. If you can come up with something that grabs interest, that’s great.

Use Paid Media’s targeting capabilities

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer huge potential for festival promoters, not just because of their massive reach, but thanks to their powerful targeting tools.

With Meta’s ad platform, you can get hyper-specific with your audience. Target by age, gender, location, interests, and even place of work. This lets you focus your budget on people who are most likely to engage – like fans of certain genres, past attendees, or those living near your site.

When you combine this targeting with strong creative, like artist reveals, behind-the-scenes clips, or post-event highlights, you create engaging content that connects emotionally with your audience. It’s not just about catching their eye, it’s about starting a relationship.

That connection is key to retention. Once someone interacts with your ads, you can retarget them later with early bird offers, ticket reminders, or VIP upgrades. This keeps your festival top-of-mind and encourages repeat attendance.

In a crowded market, paid media plays a vital role in both driving sales and strengthening your festival’s brand. With the right strategy, platforms like Facebook and Instagram can help you build lasting connections, turning first-time attendees into loyal fans who return year after year.

Offer discounts as a goodwill gesture

Everyone loves a discount.

Better yet, you can offer them at any time.

Let’s use the example of a festival in its second year. You had some high praise from attendees; they loved the line-up, the sound was great, and the customer service was swift. These are the people you want to retain.

So, why not offer them a discount? You can generate discount codes in the Promotion Centre, use your first-party data and send a bespoke email with the details. Retention is about building up the positive experiences someone has with your brand, and a personalised discount saves your customer money while making them feel valued. It’s a solid retention tactic.

Generate some hype via social media, too. Tell your followers to keep an eye on their inbox at a specific time, as you’ll be handing out discount codes to a select number of customers.

Alternatively, you could create a form, ask customers who attended last year to fill it in, provide proof of purchase and check that data with your own.

To learn how to create and apply your own unique discounts, watch our ‘How-to’ tutorial on discount codes below.

Offer ticket buying flexibility with a Payment Plan

The cost-of-living crisis (urgh). A phrase we’d hoped would have been forgotten about by now.

Household finances are still being stretched as the price of fuel, energy, and food remains volatile due to ongoing global uncertainties, ultimately impacting the amount of disposable income consumers have to spend. And yet, despite the rising cost of essentials, the appetite for live events has never been higher.

So, how can you lighten the financial load of your customers whilst ensuring they can still attend your attend? And, all at the same time, prevent them from looking elsewhere for a more wallet or purse-friendly experience? By offering a split payment method, of course.

Help make the cost of a pricey festival ticket more manageable with a Payment Plan. Retain your most loyal fans and build trust among new ones by giving eventgoers the flexibility to pay for their tickets in instalment’s over a fixed period of time.

We also offer PayPal Pay in 3 at checkout – particularly enticing to those last-minute. on-the-fence festivalgoers. Like our Payment Plan feature, PayPal Pay in 3 allows your customers to break down the cost of their ticket into three more affordable payments. The best thing? You get the entirety of the funds upfront.

To learn how to set up a Payment Plan, watch our “How-to” video tutorial below.

Create community and exclusivity around your festival

Why not create a community around your festival?

Groups can be created through messaging services the likes of WhatsApp whilst HUGE communities can be created online via social media platforms, depending on the demographic of your audience, such as Facebook and Instagram. Once you’ve created your group and invited people in, you can use it to offer discounts and deals on tickets, merch and drinks tokens, whilst gathering important customer feedback and data.

Consider how you might use a group to drive engagement and retention. Think of your group as a sort of secret or exclusive group, for example, to market to your faithful fans. Customers love it when you make them feel special. Throw in a one off deal or a competition for some freebies and watch their loyalty to your festival brand grow. And, while all this is going on, create a sense of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) among those yet to be invited into your secret/exclusive group.

If your festival is catered to a niche interest, even better.

You can then use the group to encourage interaction between like-minded people, the festival becoming a meet-up point for kindred spirits.

Lots of brands treat their customers like numbers. However, these are the people who help you expand and bring the atmosphere to your site. So, connecting those people through their interests and a degree of exclusivity will go a long way to encouraging loyalty, engagement and retention.

Be informative, responsive and nail your operations

When the details of your festival and the context around who is playing are easy to find, you’ll find it easier to engage and retain customers.

The same goes for helping attendees with any problems they might have before, during and after the festival. If someone has a complaint or a question, you want to solve it quickly. Think about what’s most important to include on your festivals landing page – from detailed instructions on how to get to and from your event, to how customers can get in touch should they have a problem.

It’s something that’ll help you in the long run. The customer you helped out efficiently when they had a problem? They’ll remember that, and it’ll go a long way to building trust in your brand, which plays a big part in engaging and retaining your festival’s most loyal fans.

You can offer all the deals in the world and have the best marketing. However, if your festival doesn’t get the basics right? You won’t get anywhere.

It’s about making your event the best part of an attendee’s summer. Booking the right acts will help you, but you need to ensure that sound quality, production, customer service and medical services are all top-notch.

Delivering the highest quality service will make an impression on your attendees, ultimately bringing them back year on year.