The Basics
When it comes to promoting your show it can seem like there is an endless amount of things that you can do, but where should you start? We have found that artists struggle with that question and end up putting off the promotion for their show until later on. Well here at Afton we love the idea of a giveaway for your fans. I mean who doesn’t love getting something for free? So in this article we will be going over some great tips that can help you with your show promotion!
‘Free To You’ Giveaway
Starting out we always mention the items that are free to the artist that they can give away. This just means that they will not cost the artist anything to get them to the fans or at least not any physical amount of money. A lot of times you hear people say that you shoudl not give away your music for free, but we do not think that is true. Especially if you are an artist that is just starting out sometimes you have to give away a little something for free to gain a true fan.
You can implement this by offering your music to fans through social media. So maybe each week leading up to the show you could offer fans an incentive where when they share your post about their upcoming show and tag your account then they get a free song. This is a trifecta because:
- You are getting other people to help promote your show,
- You are giving away a song which could be a single that you are trying to push (which means you will get extra promotion for that).
- And lastly if they do not end up being interested in your show at least your account might be getting more attention and you have a potential new follower.
You can also change the prize to be anything. Instead of a song you could giveaway an album. Instead of an Album you could give away a sneak peak at a new music video. Or you could even give a way a chance to for a fan to be in your music video! Really, the possibilities are endless with this and best of all what does it cost you? In most of these cases it will not cost you anything, it makes fans feel import and you will likely get more people in attendance for your show!
‘Little Cost’ Giveaway
Once you have gone through the free options and you are looking for a little something else to help promote your show you can start offering fans something that might cost you a little. For instance you could give away a concert ticket. Depending on the price of your show this could cost $5, $10 or even $15, but in the end that is not a lot for what you will get.
For instance if you were to have a giveaway for a fan that gets 10 other people to RSVP for your event via Facebook you could get them a free ticket. Again this will cast you a little bit, but the return would be huge as most (maybe not all of them) that RSVP’d would turn into sales.
Another option would be a song lyric challenge. You could post “Fill in those lyrics” contest. Where you did a video of you singing/rapping part of your song and then you asked fans to fill in the blank. Then it would be a race for fans to get to the comments of the video to take their guess. The winner could get a concert ticket but as a requirement for the tickets you could ask them to post a shout out to you about the show.
The Perfect Mix
For you show you could use any of the above methods or a mix of both free to you and little cost to you methods. Over our many years of booking artists for shows we have gotten a ton of feedback from aritsts about what works and what does not work. And at the end of the day any promotion is good promotion, so the worst thing you could do is be the artist that puts off promoting until too close to the show date. Then you are left with a smaller crowd when you could have had a big one with little to no cost to you!
We hope that you will be able to use these tips for your next Local or LiveStream show! And if you have any tips for artist please leave them in the comments!
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