This booklet is produced by the
Jazz Smugglers band, of Chichester
with the sole intention of helping organisers to promote their events.
Sorry it is so long, 2500 words, but hopefully it covers most things. If you have any tricks up your sleeve we have missed, we’d love to hear of them please.
NETWORK MARKETING
– over 100 ways to promote your event or gig
Why not send this on to all your friends who may be interested?
We have two Jazz Events we can offer you.
The new one is called Jazz Smugglers play GERSHWIN AND FRIENDS
Otherwise you can have the show we played at all the major Sussex Festivals last year.
Cool Jazz NOSTALGIA Jazz Smugglers play cool swinging jazz songs of the 50's and 60's.
Or, for background music you can listen to the Jazz Smugglers small bands playing the liquid smooth eloquent, exquisite sounds of cool, swinging jazz - from a trio upwards.
For your private party, wedding, perhaps? We will charge you just local rates - London rates are double
07533 529379 or email Here are the current events for the band Sound clips from the CD
NETWORK MARKETING
– over 100 ways to promote your event or gig
Some of these techniques of event promotion are very old – theatre and gig managements since the Middle Ages have followed these principles. Since then we have just become more sophisticated.
Most event promoters and venues have established successful routines for bringing in the crowds to a gig. All successful events have one outstanding individual who enthuses everyone else. Our advice is to spot this individual, give them all the backing they need, say yes to what they want to do, and hang on to them before they are stolen by rivals. Don't crunch them into submission with committees.
I’ve based this advice on smaller events staged somewhere such as in a Village Hall serving a community, but it could as easily be a Golf club, or a small local theatre group. Please cherry pick from these techniques, and modify to suit.
This is just a list of techniques as a guide for event promotion. None of these is difficult to do. If in any doubt, then you can contact me by email and I will try and help. This was me in the old days, My own email address is
BROAD APPROACH
1Target those groups, such as clubs, who can send several people to your event
2Use the pub to sell tickets for your event, or a committee member, or the local shop.
3Events do much better when they are part of a sequence of similar events, run often
4Everywhere they look people should see your promotion, with road signs everywhere
5 Give preference to performers who can promote to their own market and followers
PRICING These schemes start with the pricing structure for your event. Don’t price it too low. If you think you can sell all your tickets easily then you may be pricing your event too low. Your pricing should allow room for some small commissions per ticket
Never be afraid of setting higher prices, if there is quality being offered. Events are not so price sensitive as people imagine.
GETTING OTHERS TO SELL YOUR EVENT TICKETS FOR YOU
Suppose you use a standard Ticket price of £10. You then offer a “special” price, not advertised, of say, £9; a Concession price of £8 for groups of 4 or more. You advertise only the main price, and the group price.
You can then give a local sports club, or a charity, or social clubs that use your hall £1 off every ticket their members buy. They need to email or notify their members about your event. Charities will put this £1 into their funds. As an incentive, they can also offer their members a “special” price of £1 off the Ticket price, so their members and families actually buy them for £9 each. The net result to you will therefore be £8
It may be worthwhile your reducing the money you receive per ticket to £8 but only so long as they will produce bulk ticket sales which you would otherwise not get. Groups which might be interested in this could include. These groups could keep a small margin per ticket.
Sports clubs, all kinds
Schools
Churches
Hospitals
Women’s Institutes
Rotarians
Business
Social clubs
Larger employers
Pubs
Leisure centres
Residential home staff
THE PUB/THE LOCAL SHOP/CAFEYou can adapt this idea in several ways. The local pub can offer special price tickets to its customers after putting an event promotion poster on the wall. You collect all the names from them, and the people can pay at your venue by having their names ticked off the list.
BOOK PERFORMERS WHO CAN HELP YOUR TICKET SALES
Many performers, such as our own Jazz Smugglers band have their own loyal followers, and can reach them through their own websites, Facebook and mailing list. Give preference to these performers so long as they agree to help your promotion.
SELLING TICKETS AND DOOR TO DOOR DROPS
You can advertise that advance tickets can be bought from someone, (a local shop, café, committee member) and you give your seller £1 per ticket sold. The right person selling your tickets might be willing to do door-to-door leafleting, getting the enquiries back to themselves and they then get £1 for every ticket they sell. This way your Event and Gig promotion will be effective.
VOUCHERS for repeat business. You could give everyone in the audience a £1/£2 Voucher for the next event.
FREE ONLINE TICKET SALES AGENCIES.
We got tickets Very good ethical ticket sales agency. Free for promoters, charges 10% extra to customers
Ticketmaster THe biggest online agency. They charge 12 ½ % to customers
Take care with other ticket sale sites. There are many scammers out there.
FREE EVENTS
Offering events free is a bad idea only because they become tainted with the idea of no value, or poor quality. Just use it for offers such as “Buy 5, the 6th comes free”. For our band guests we usually try and offer 2 for 1 - very easy to administer but expensive.
THE BIGGEST PULLER OF ALL IS TO HAVE MANY DISPLAY SIGNS ON THE ROADS.
Put them up for two weeks, make them very simple, eye catching, and take them down the day after the event. Very simple design, placard typeface, very few. One sign on the village board is ok, but not enough. Try every display board you can find – doctors/pubs/shops
Remember that cars drive both directions, so your signs needs to be double sided, or V shaped and very simple, fewest possible words. Just give just price, location, date. Don't use colour on colour. Light yellow on black is ok, (slightly better than white on black actually)
LAST MINUTE
The last week before the event is very important. Have a plan in mind to get the word out again to everyone in the last week. People make up their minds late – they need a reminder. Using text messages on the mobile phone, Facebook, and your own email list is excellent for this. You may sell the majority of tickets like this, on the second round of publicity. If the event has not sold well you can advertise that you have a few last minute concession tickets left.
TIE IN YOUR EVENT WITH A BIG NATIONAL EVENT
For example, Guy Fawkes night, Valentine's night.
Here is a list of National dates for 2012
JAN 25 WED BURNS NIGHT
FEB 21 TUES SHROVE TUES
MAR 4TH TUES VALENTINE'S DAY
MAR 17 SAT ST PATRICKS DAY
MAR 18 SUN MOTHERING SUNDAY
MAR 25 SUN BRITISH SUMMER TIME BEGINS
APL 1 SUN ALL FOOLS DAY
APL 5 THURS END OF UK TAX YEAR! Good one for celebrating?
APL 6 GOOD FRIDAY
APL 9 EASTER MONDAY
APL 23 MON ST GEORGE’S DAY
MAY 7 MON MAY BANK HOLIDAY
JUN 4 MON SPRING BANK HOLIDAY
JUN 5 TUES QUEENS DIAMOND JUBILEE We haven ‘t got a gig lined up for this yet.
JUN 17 SUN FATHERS DAY
JULY 27 - AUG 12 OLYMPICS an idea?Childrens Olympics party on the Green
AUG 27 MON MIDSUMMER BANK HOLIDAY
OCT 31 WED HALLOWEEN
NOV 13 SUN REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY
2 other IDEAS
How about tying in with COMIC RELIEF perhaps
Or how about something for CHILDREN IN NEED next November
BEST INTERNET LINKS for YOUR FUTURE EVENTS
JAN 25 WED BURNS NIGHT
FEB 21 TUES SHROVE TUES
MAR 4TH TUES VALENTINE'S DAY
MAR 17 SAT ST PATRICKS DAY
MAR 18 SUN MOTHERING SUNDAY
MAR 25 SUN BRITISH SUMMER TIME BEGINS
APL 1 SUN ALL FOOLS DAY
APL 5 THURS END OF UK TAX YEAR! Good one for celebrating?
APL 6 GOOD FRIDAY
APL 9 EASTER MONDAY
APL 23 MON ST GEORGE’S DAY
MAY 7 MON MAY BANK HOLIDAY
JUN 4 MON SPRING BANK HOLIDAY
JUN 5 TUES QUEENS DIAMOND JUBILEE We haven ‘t got a gig lined up for this yet.
JUN 17 SUN FATHERS DAY
JULY 27 - AUG 12 OLYMPICS an idea?Childrens Olympics party on the Green, Jazz smugglers in the background?
AUG 27 MON MIDSUMMER BANK HOLIDAY
OCT 31 WED HALLOWEEN
NOV 13 SUN REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY
2 other IDEAS
How about tieing in with COMIC RELIEF perhaps
Or how about something for CHILDREN IN NEED next November
WEBSITES
YOURLOCAL WEBSITE
Put the event on your high traffic index page, not just on your events page. Link from your index page to the inside Event page. A week before the Event, blast it all over the index page. People come to your website to look for your event.
20 EVENT WEBSITES you can use to list your venue and to promote your gig
Gig guide Good site
Ent24 Good site
All gigs Good site
West Sussex info Very popular site
Where can we go
All about going out
Wozzon
VISIT BRITAIN websites. They might not let you on without a small fee,
Visit Brighton
Visit chichester
Visit sussex
Visit midhurst
Visit selsey
Visit petworth
OTHER SITES
Chichester web responsive
Chichester event site council website
East magazine
For national artists
Jazz Services Only for jazz gigs
OUR JAZZ SMUGGLERS BAND SITES
We publish all our gigs on this one, which is the biggest, most visited jazz website in the whole of the South
This is our small blog site
jazzsmugglerssussex.blogspot.com
BUILDING YOUR EVENT MAILING LISTS
Your most responsive market will always be the people who have come to your events before. With their permission you need to maintain a mailing list of them, an email list, a Facebook list, a mobile phone list (for text messages
LETTERS
Older people prefer to receive letters, these have more authority. Mailings cost £50 per 100 so they must be targeted to people who can influence a lot of business, Chief executives, Local Authority chiefs, high level Professionals by name. Emails don’t carry authority, but they can be friendlier.
EMAIL LISTS
To build your email lists just Google all the clubs in the areas around you. Websites of local communities close by will usually list their clubs and societies, with links to their websites. You can also use Google search to find the club websites. Frequently they will publish the name of their Secretary or Chief Executive. The websites will usually have a general email address or link.
You can often use the web Directories of, say, Golf Clubs to find the email addresses of each club secretary all on one page.
You will find that 20% of the email links on the websites will be wrong, and reject your email, 50% will not reply, but the rest will help. Don't expect a high rate of return. Direct mail specialists expect a response rate of about 2%, and they expect to convert half of them to Asale. So you need a big list as you can see.
WHAT TO SAY
Ask them to help you by passing on the information to others they know. Put in your email the benefits to them of your event. Give them good reasons to come to it and bring friends. Our own band appeal is to an older market which loves to remember the beautiful songs of the past.
OTHER WAYS TO PROMOTE YOUR EVENT
40% of people already have a Facebook account, and a third of these are avid users. You will be amazed at the reception you will get if you open a Facebook account of your own. It will increase the hits on your website, you can specifically advertise your events on it to your “Friends” you can invite their Friends to become Friends of yours, and you can end up with a big following with active response for you in the long run. We have not found Twitter to be of much use except where the event has a national reputation or celebrities are involved.
SPONSORSHIP
Approach the Chief Executives/Owners of the local businesses but you need to see it from their point of view. They will be saying to themselves, but not to you, “What is my organisation getting out of this apart from a nice warm feeling?” Can he/she bring his customers, can he/she put up a display, are the people attending in his/her own market, will the company name go into the title of the event?
Think small, too. Will the local butcher chip in some money, if he supplies the hog roast? Look at your suppliers to your organisation. Make a list of them, even the plumbers, decorators, stationary suppliers, and approach them to help in return for publicity. Thanks at the event would be nice too, plus a display board with their name.
A good idea for a big event such as a Music Festival, for example, is to invite the Advertising department of the local paper to run a special feature half page, with editorial about your forthcoming event. They will sell the advertising to your suppliers and the contacts you give them. That gets you free large scale publicity and your sponsors get publicity too.
REACHING OPINION FORMERS
It is very valuable to establish connections with important Opinion Formers in the area. An invitation as a personal guest is very useful - they’ll pay for any friends.
The long term advantage is that they will spread the news by word of mouth and your reputation grows.
Councillors, officers
County, District and Parish councils
Business owners
Chief Executives
Professionals
Accountants
Solicitors
Architects
Church leaders
Journalists
BROADCAST MEDIA
PUBLIC RELATIONS FOR GIGS Look at the local press for the page which Lists the local events each week. It will have a specialist person hired to do it (from home). Ask the paper for their name and contact number and they will be delighted to hear from you. They want to publish all your events and they need your information. People read them.
CELEBRITIES Local ones are good for press, television and radio, just ask them to help. Go and meet them.
LIST THE JOURNALISTS covering your area and send them an advance press release. This itself will generally not appear in advance, but if you follow it up with a photograph and news report afterwards then it will usually go in. This builds your reputation for the long term, and they get used to receiving information from you.
If you have an unusual photo idea related to the event then send it to the picture editor. It might go in before your event happens.
RADIO This works well for unusual human interest stories involving people. Just ring the radio station with the story and they will respond often with a phone interview.
TELEVISION, WHY NOT? They want unusual local stories with a strong visual moving element. Just telephone their editorial department.
Happy eventing
John Winkler
07533 529379 or email Here are the current events for the band Sound clips from the CD