Featured artists

Alan James Brown

Alan James Brown,
Edale

Artful-Badger

Artful-Badger,
Bakewell

Jennifer Blant

Jennifer Blant,
Ashbourne

Chris Rozynska, Draycott

Festivals Toolkit: Marketing

Marketing is not just about telling people that your event is taking place and hoping they will come.

Festivals Image Good marketing is a more strategic activity that will enable you to communicate with people who are interested in what you are doing, with a view to building a long term relationship with them. Marketing is a two way process which means you listen to your audience as well as try to influence them to come to your event. Developing a closer relationship with your customers should help to get more people be enthused by your festival activity. This will allow them to feel confident in your festival activity and take part again and again.

Festivals need audiences, and ideally new audiences, in order to satisfy their artistic, social and financial objectives and targets. If you want more people to take part in your festival, then the evidence from the sector is that you need to be systematic, methodical and clear in your objectives – you need to develop a marketing plan. Your marketing plan needs to be central to what you do and a key part of your overall business planning.

Planned promotional activity over a period of time (weeks, months or years) is usually called a marketing campaign. Marketing campaigns need to have an objective, something that you are trying to achieve through Festivals Image spending time and money on the marketing activity. As with your strategic planning your objectives should be SMART (strategic, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-limited). Common examples of marketing campaigns include their use in creating awareness, generating a response (i.e. getting people to come to a performance), getting new members to sign up or take part, attracting donations/patrons, recruiting new volunteers or changing how people think about your organisation.