Drive Up Attendance During Festival Season with SMS Messaging – Part 1
People love live music. Ticket sales worldwide are expected to reach $20.5 Billion (~£14.2B). The UK alone has around 900 festivals each year. There just aren’t enough headliners to go around. What else can you do to draw people to your event (whether you have a headliner or not)? The answer: Make your event an experience rather than just a destination.
In an article on Music Business Journal, Harvey Goldsmith, a prominent British concert promoter, conveyed that “The market is now oversaturated at a time when artists are not developed by their labels as they used to be.”
Along the same lines, Dan Kunkel, CEO of BeachGlow (a festival in New Jersey), commented in an interview with EventBrite, “For some time now, live music performance has been an important part of the business. As such, many markets are saturated with live performance options — creating steeper competition.”
He goes on to say, “What differentiates a basic event from an experience-based event? Getting down to what the customers want — genuine interaction — whether it be from staff, volunteers, interactive displays, activities, or friends.”
Festivals are going beyond just the music to interact with attendees in many different ways, from adding other creative outlets like artist classes to social media blitzes. Another powerful, personal, and engaging way to connect with attendees is via SMS messaging. Let’s take a look at how it might work.
Start before they even show up
Hopefully you have a list of last year’s attendees – perhaps their emails or addresses. You can use both email and post to reach out to them asking them to sign up for your SMS marketing. You could call it your VIP program, Fan Fun program, In-the-Know program – or whatever works with your festival and demographics. By engaging with last year’s list this way, you can build your new SMS list when they opt in, and increase the probability that they will return for this year’s event.
If you already have an official (meaning everyone’s opted in) SMS marketing list, you’re ahead of the game and can get started right away. But if you can cross-reference it with your full list and reach out to those who didn’t sign up last year you could still grow your list using the above method.
Another way to grow your list is to include an advert for signing up when you send out the tickets or wristbands – even the fancy RFID bands many festivals have begun using. A simple printed form with instructions on signing up and the benefits they’ll receive will encourage attendees to opt in.
Once they’ve opted in, what sorts of messages can you send them?
Build excitement for the event – Share short sneak peeks of the festival, vendors, and other attractions. Will attendees get special deals from a vendor on activation? Did you install new sound or lighting to improve the show? Are there other new facilities they’ll want to know about? Send anything related to the event you know will pump up excitement. For longer content like festival blog posts or news announcements, send links to mobile friendly webpages.
Backstage teases – In the days leading up to the festival, snap some images, video, or sounds of your acts getting ready. You’re probably sharing these over social media, but save some good ones for your exclusive SMS marketing list. You can send a quick message saying your headliner act is on stage rehearsing and instruct them to click on the link to see or hear it on your website. These types of messages will get them so excited they’ll be screaming “I can’t wait!”
Available tickets – If for some reason you still have tickets available, send out a message to your list letting them know. It’s likely they’ll have friends or family that may want to come along too. Sometimes people just wait until the last minute and they’ll be so happy to know they can still buy additional tickets.
You’ll probably be able to think of dozens of other types of content you can send via SMS to keep your attendees engaged even before they arrive. But you should keep in mind you’ll need to be smart about when and how often you send messages. Come back for part 2 of this series to learn how to do that, plus see some options of how to use SMS during and after the festival.
Related Articles
Event Promotion : Use SMS Marketing to Fill Empty Seats
If you run paying events - music, drama, sport or even fine dining, training courses or workshops, you'll know the hardest seats to fill are the last few and they are also the most profitable if you can sell them. SMS is an immediate and compelling means of event promotion that can shift those last few places.
Drive Up Attendance During Festival Season with SMS Messaging Part 2
Festival season is upon us! Experienced festival organisers predict that to be successful you need more than just music. You’ll need to offer an experience to your attendees. In the last blog I covered some of the reasons for that, and ideas on how to start building your SMS marketing list before your festival begins. In part 2, we’ll take a look at how to use SMS to create engaging experiences for attendees while they are at your festival, and even after they leave.
7 SMS Marketing Ideas for the May Bank Holiday
8 Key Reasons SMS Marketing is So Effective
You might not have run an SMS marketing campaign yourself, but you are likely to have received some form of SMS communication from a business. Whether that's a commercial brand running a competition or a healthcare provider, such as your GP or dental practice, sending you an appointment reminder. If you have run an SMS marketing campaign before, you're likely to already be aware of the effectiveness of the platform for communicating with customers, but might need help justifying your use of SMS messaging to other people or departments in your business. Here, we've listed out the key reasons SMS marketing is so effective.
What Can You Do with MMS Messaging?
Did you know you can send more than text in an SMS message? Well, technically it isn’t an SMS message if it isn’t text. Instead, the multimedia messaging service, or MMS for short, is an extension of the SMS core functionality. It allows you to send short videos (40 seconds or less), images or audio over mobile networks just like an SMS message.
6 SMS Marketing Ideas for Events Planners
Why SMS Marketing is Perfect for the Automotive Industry
Most car dealerships and garages already have almost everything in place to start an effective SMS marketing campaign. When customers go into a car garage to have a service or a MOT done, they almost always give the dealership their mobile phone number. The reason for this is simple: if a customer is bringing their car in to get checked and they don't want to wait around for any work to be carried out, they'll simply head into town or run a few errands, until the garage gives them a call on their mobile to let them know the work has been done. That means most garages will have a healthy amount of mobile numbers already in their database, but quite often a garage will overlook the potential that their database of contacts presents.
Why SMS Marketing is Like Facebook Marketing, But Better
Facebook is a popular place. According to Statista, they had 1.44 billion active users in the first quarter of 2015. It’s no wonder then that businesses are flocking to advertise there. But big isn’t always better. SMS marketing is similar in many respects to Facebook advertising, and for some uses it is actually better. Let me explain and see if you agree.
How to Use SMS Messaging to Keep Your Club Members Healthy
In a report released last week by Nielsen, it turns out people want more than just to see a lower number on the scale. In their study, 75% of people worldwide plan to lose weight by changing their diet. And another 72% plan to exercise – that’s where your health club and SMS comes in.
What Political Parties Can Teach Us About Great SMS Campaigns
SMS marketing has come to be a crucial element of most businesses’ marketing strategies, and there is plenty of received wisdom within the marketing world as to how to get the most out of your SMS messages. So it might seem like there is not a lot that the world of politics can teach the world of business about SMS. But then again, there probably is.