How to promote a music festival

Get on social media

Social media is a no-brainer when you’re thinking of how to promote a music festival. 

Platforms like Instagram open us up to millions of people who are looking to attend their next music festival. 

To start with, think about your goals. Do you want to use social media to sell tickets? Drive brand awareness? Achieve engagement from your audience? Ideally, you’ll be looking to do all of them, but focusing on one will help you create clear messaging. 

Once you’ve decided on your goals, you can begin to create content. The feed is your oyster here. You could post entertaining videos, interviews with headliners, footage of previous events to give people a feel for what your festival is like and run competitions for tickets. 

Send an E-Flyer

Skiddle can help you when you’re looking at how to promote a festival. After all, gigs, club nights and festivals are our bread and butter, and we’ve been helping promoters up and down the country for over 20 years. 

Our E-Flyers feature can help you attract new attendees. They are targeted emails sent to Skiddle users who live within a 20-mile radius of the festival location and have attended events where the acts appearing at your festival have performed. 

Sending an E-Flyer is a great way to go directly to people who could be interested in your event. Don’t get us wrong: social media is crucial, but sometimes posts can get lost in the noise. 

You pick a date and provide the artwork, and we handle the rest. All you need to do is drop an email to our Account Support team requesting this, and they will organise a quote.   

Utilise Reps to promote your festival

Our Reps feature can help you when thinking about how to promote a festival, too. 

It’s a feature in our Promotion Centre that lets customers sign up to be dedicated ticket sellers for your event. In return, reps can receive cash or ‘money can’t buy’ rewards for their ticket-selling efforts. 

Better yet, you can control all of this from one place. The Reps dashboard shows you how many sales your reps have made, how many ticket links they’ve shared and lets you manage the rewards for your reps. 

You can use the feature to tap into new markets. In 2021-22, over a million undergraduate students enrolled in universities across UK towns and cities. That’s a lot of people. With each rep, you can reach a new set of people who might not have heard of your event. If your event is a success, that’ll get people talking. You’ll have a natural feedback loop from the people your reps have sold to. 

Click the button below to find out more about Reps.

Promote a festival by offering tiered tickets

When you’re thinking about how to market a music festival, offering tiered tickets is a must.

For example, you might set up an early bird ticket, which goes on sale with a low price and low allocation. This incentivises people to buy earlier and rewards them for doing so, hence the cheaper ticket. 

Then, as you go through each ticket tier, the prices go up in increments, with the final tier being the most expensive. It will help with your marketing, too. 

You can create social media posts around your early bird tickets, encouraging people to buy early and creating urgency by gently reminding your audience that the tickets won’t be around for long. 

Use the media

Relevant media channels can help you when you’re thinking about how to promote a music festival. 

You’ll need to write a well-crafted press release, which you can then send to local and national outlets. 

Getting press coverage in the local area can help drum up interest and excitement from people who live near your festival, and national titles can help you generate excitement from people up and down the country. 

Even specialised websites with a dedicated following can help, too. These outlets often write articles that recommend events to their readers. 

Advertising space is something to consider, too. Try to find a couple of magazines that align with the vibe of your festival and create an eye-catching ad to go inside.