How to Promote a Music Festival With Gleam

If you're running a music festival then there's no doubt that you've got a whole lot on your plate.

Between organising musical acts, a venue, stage equipment, food and beverage outlets and a wide selection of other factors it can be hard to find enough time to focus on one of the most important components of organising a festival: promotion.

Luckily for you, Gleam has a suite of apps which can help you promote and grow your music festival in a more effective and less time-consuming way.

Let's take a look at some of the ways Gleam can take your promotional efforts to the next level:

• Run a Contest and Give Away Some Tickets
• Reward People for Buying Tickets
• Create a Pre-Sale Ballot
• Use Capture to Grow Your Mailing List
• Create a Photo Gallery for Your Festival

Contests and giveaways are one of the most effective ways to generate awareness and drive real user action.

With Gleam’s Competitions app, you can easily run a contest to promote your music festival and grow your audience. Offering free festival tickets as a prize will attract engaged users who already have an interest in your event.

Your contest can encourage users to join your mailing list, follow your festival on social media, visit your website, or share the giveaway, all awesome ways of expanding your reach and driving ticket sales.

Best of all, many entrants who don’t win will still be primed to buy tickets, helping boost sales while growing your festival’s audience.

As you continue to promote your festival you may find that a lot of users who have a genuine interest in your event may still be hesitant to purchase a ticket. In many cases these users will want to get a ticket, they just might need a little extra motivation.

You can use Gleam's Rewards app to incentivise purchases through Eventbrite with our 'Attend An Event' action.

Rewarding users for purchasing a ticket isn't the only way you can use Rewards to aid your promotional efforts. You can also try offering discounted tickets as a reward for users who complete designated actions to encourage purchases amongst users who need a little extra incentive.

If you're running a festival with a lot of interest and limited availability then it's a good idea to create a ticket ballot system where users enter a draw and a designated number of entrants are given the opportunity to purchase pre-release tickets before they go on sale to the general public.

Even if you're not expecting to run out of tickets, pre-sale ballots are still a terrific way to raise awareness, generate hype, insight some FOMO and ultimately drive ticket sales.

You can also allow users to enter using a wide range of powerful actions, with more entries being awarded to users who complete more actions.

Email marketing remains one of the most powerful promotional tools you have at your disposal. It allows you to keep potential attendees informed about music, food, art, and entertainment, building excitement and driving ticket sales.

However, for this approach to be effective you need to have a sizeable mailing list, and there's no better way to get one than with Gleam's Capture app.

With Capture you can build a perfectly tailored email opt-in form which you can embed in your website and display to visitors at the perfect moment.

You may want to collect emails from visitors as soon as they reach your page or wait until they've already done some research and then ask them to sign up to stay up-to-date. Whatever approach you want to take Capture has got you covered.

An incredibly important component of promoting a music festival is making sure that people know what your festival is, and what they can expect from it. If you're festival has already had its debut then the best way to do this is by harnessing the power of user-generated content and showcasing images from your festival which highlight just how awesome it is.

With Gleam's Galleries app you can create and curate beautiful photo galleries which can pull in hashtagged images from a wide variety of sources including Facebook and a file uploads.

This is perfect if you have a festival hashtag, as you'll be able to easily create a gallery filled with user images from your previous festivals which will serve as excellent promotional material for your upcoming event.

Just take a look at this gallery which pulls in Instagram pictures adorned with #rainbowserpent. The gallery puts the music festival on full display and highlights the event to prospective attendees.

If you need help growing your gallery you can simply ask past festival-goers to upload their images or you can incentivise photo submissions by including the Submit Media action as a part of your Competition or Reward campaign.

Another terrific way to display hashtagged images is by activating Carousel Mode in your Gallery and showcasing photos from your festival in a scrollable carousel. This is a highly effective way to stylishly and unobtrusively show off high-value user content on your website.

Promoting a music festival is just as important as booking the acts or setting up the stage.

With the right digital tools and a clear plan, you can build awareness, keep audiences engaged, and ensure your event reaches the people most likely to attend.

Using strategies like contests, pre-sale ballots, and curated photo galleries will help create the kind of buzz that turns one-time visitors into loyal festivalgoers.