Concert crowdfunding is a great way to finance and promote your own shows, without having to wait to get booked – you plan out your campaign, calculate the budget and create promo materials, and then invite fans to preorder tickets (automatically refundable if the show does not raise enough money to be produced). And while it’s vital to make the campaign description as exciting and enticing as possible, the promotional campaign around your crowdfunded show is what is likely going to make or break your event.
Here at Show4me, we have helped numerous musicians launch their concert crowdfunding campaigns. Having analyzed both our successes and mistakes, we’ve come up with a set of recommendations that are bound to make any concert crowdfunding campaign promotional much more successful. Here they are.
Prepare to flood your social media with messages about your upcoming show and your crowdfunding campaign. Don’t launch a new EP or release new music or videos unrelated to your upcoming show. Everything on your social media should tell your fans, supporters, occasional visitors what you are up to and how important the concert crowdfunding campaign is to you.
Plan out interesting activities throughout your crowdfunding campaign, like giveaways, contests, polls, quests, and other tools of ‘gamifying’ the process of ticket presale.
Use hashtags and geotags when posting to social media to make it easy for locals to stumble upon your promo materials and find out about your upcoming events. Local music lovers will also appreciate posters and flyers you disseminate in the area. Pro tip: ask if you can leave a few flyers of your upcoming show at the venue where you plan to perform so that the visitors who want to come back for more could learn about your show. Include a QR code to your crowdfunding page.
You will get much higher response rate if you address your followers, fans, friends, acquaintances, and potential audience personally. Host live streams, record fun personal video adresses explaining how your show is going to be fun and exciting, email and call people personally to invite to your show, DM and message friends and followers.
This is a fashionable way of saying several people can reach a much wider audience than just you. Your band mates, your venue, other acts in your show, your friends and family, influencers and media – can all become your show ambassadors, spreading the information about your event far and wide. Ask them to share your promo materials and to invite their social circles to your event.
If you are playing a side gig, invite the audience to support your concert crowdfunding campaign. People love rooting for the underdog, so if you ask an audience at a bigger show (who loved your performance and where you were just a supporting act) to support your crowdfunding campaign for a solo concert, chances are, they would like to do that.
One of the more out there ways to promote your concert crowdfunding campaign is guerilla marketing – unconventional, sometimes essentric and unexpected, promo events. One of them is busking. Choose a location relatively close to where your show is scheduled to take place and have someone hand out flyers to the passers-by as you play your music. You can also opt for other creative (but compliant with local legislation) ways to draw attention to your upcoming concert.
These are the key strategies you can use to help promote your concert crowdfunding campaigns effectively. We’ve also created a blog post to help musicians and their teams launching their concert crowdfunding campaigns on Show4me specifically to promote their campaigns, you can check it out here. If you want to learn more about concert crowdfunding on Show4me, check this page.