- These simple tips means that you'll sell out
any gig that you play.
"No one comes to gigs anymore,
"everyone's stuck in this bubble of being on social media."
That's what we hear daily.
But it's just not true.
The reason you're not selling out your gigs,
the reason that you might be playing to empty rooms
is because you're not promoting it well enough.
So in this video,
I'm going to give you some simple tips
which will mean your next gig is guaranteed to sell out.
Let's start with a super simple tip
which is making a Facebook event.
You're probably doing this one already,
well I hope you are, but a lot of artists
are creating a Facebook event page
but not doing it correctly.
This event page is most probably the first thing
that people are going to see.
Because you're going to invite all your friends,
you're going to invite all your family,
you're going to invite anyone who follows your artist page.
So if you're inviting them,
they're gonna get a notification
and they're immediately going to look.
But if this event page is pretty blank,
there's no images, there's no information,
they're gonna click straight off
and they're never gonna be interested in that gig again.
So this is your first shot
and sometimes your last shot
with selling a ticket to someone.
So you need to have images,
you need to have the time of the gig,
the venue, a link to where the tickets are available.
But the most important part is the description
'cause this is the bit that people are going to read.
This is the bit where you can really persuade someone
to give up their whole evening
to come and see you live.
That first line is really important
because there's a few lines of text
and they have to click Read More.
There's no point putting really cool information
about you as an artist
at the bottom of that description.
Put it in that first line.
You need to start with, "As featured on",
"As heard on", "Supported in the past".
So major names that people recognize
so they're more likely to read the rest of the description
and potentially buy tickets.
You can also allow a music preview.
And this is important
because although you're going to be inviting people,
they've probably heard the music already.
But your friends and family might invite other people
and they may have not heard the music yet.
So you've got that Facebook event page,
now you need to get your existing audience down to the gig.
You need to get everyone that follows you on Instagram,
everyone that follows you on Twitter,
listens to your music,
down to that gig buying tickets.
You need to announce it to your audience.
You need to create either a tour poster
or just an announcement graphic
which proves to these people
that it's going to be a good night.
So it obviously needs the really important information
such as the venue, the time, where they can get tickets
but make sure there's a picture that really intrigues them.
Once you've done that, you can also have a video running.
If you have a video on all your socials
of you playing live,
it shows your audience what to expect
if they buy tickets.
You can edit a short 30-second video,
post it all over your socials
and have the ticket link above it.
If you're doing this, people know what to expect
and it'll be a lot more exciting
than just posting a gig poster repeatedly.
And if you have time, there's one last thing you can do
to get your already-existing fan base down to that gig.
So what you're gonna do
is you're gonna go through all of your followers
and you're going to DM them.
And you're gonna start the message
with, "Really appreciate your support so far."
And then you can say their name
or you can say something personal about their profile
to prove it's not a copy and paste.
And then you're going to say,
"We've got a gig coming up and we'd love to see you there.
"If you get chance to get tickets, send us a screenshot
"and we'll come and see you at the merch stand afterwards
"to thank you personally."
The DMing feature on Instagram, on Twitter
is absolutely amazing.
So start taking advantage of it
and you will find people replying to you.
And even if they can't come to that gig,
they'll know that you actually care about them
and wanna see them at your gig
so will potentially come to your next one.
You've done all of those tips.
You've already got your existing audience to buy tickets.
But how do you get an audience
that don't know you yet to buy tickets?
And yes, it is doable.
We've done it.
We've run full social media ad campaigns
which have sold out gigs within a matter of days.
And yep, that's the tip.
Social media ads.
How you're going to do this
is you're going to create a short promo video.
So you need to make sure you have some live footage.
If you don't have this
or you haven't even played your debut gig yet,
you can literally play in your basement or in your garage
and get someone to film something.
But it obviously is a lot better
if you have it in a venue
because then you can get some crowd shots.
This video needs to be no longer than 40 seconds
and it basically needs to be enticing.
It needs to show how good you are live.
So this could be crowd shots of the crowd going wild.
It could be you doing a guitar solo.
Whatever it is, make sure it's exciting.
And then you're going to put text over the top.
This text depends entirely on who you're targeting.
So the first thing you can do
is target people in the area where the venue is.
So say you're playing a gig in Cambridge,
you could put the first text saying,
"Are you from Cambridge?"
And then the next thing can say,
"Come to our gig at" whatever the venue is
and then you'll have all the information.
The next thing you can do
is target people in that area that like a certain artist
that's similar to you.
So say you sound similar to Jade Bird.
You'd put at the beginning of the video,
"Fan of Jade Bird?"
And they're already intrigued
because if they're a fan of that musician,
they're thinking, "What's this about?"
You can run these ads on Facebook and Instagram,
and on Instagram it can click through
to where the tickets are selling,
and on Facebook it can click through to the event page.
It's important that the Facebook promo video
is clicking through to the event page
because Facebook doesn't like it
when you take them off the platform.
So if you keep them on the platform
by pushing them towards the event page,
Facebook will favor this
and push out your video to more people.
I've got one more bonus tip for you.
This is one thing that I've honestly heard no one mentioning
and we think it's an amazing idea.
And this tip is getting influencers to come to your gig.
Influencers are basically people
on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
that have a large following.
They have an engaged audience.
So if you get them to come to your gig,
that engaged audience will sort of be at the gig as well.
What we'd suggest doing is going on Instagram
and going on the location part
and searching the location of where the venue is
that you're going to be playing.
And then you're going to DM
as many of these influencers as you can,
saying, "I noticed that you're from"
wherever the location is,
"I'm playing a gig there in a few weeks
"and I'd love to see you come down.
"I was wondering what your price is
"to run a few Instagram Stories
"or Instagram posts before the gig
"and how much it would cost to get you to come down."
Some of these influencers aren't that expensive
if you just pay for someone with 20k followers.
And what you can get them to do
is a week or so before the gig,
is to post either the tour poster or talk to the camera
about how they're excited to come to a gig.
And then on the day of the gig,
you get them to do Stories at the gig,
they do live videos, they even come backstage with you.
And if they're tagging you in all that,
that's going to be super exciting for their audience.
And their audience are gonna be super intrigued.
The reason they need to start posting things beforehand
is because if they plug it enough,
some of their audience might want
to come to the gig as well.
So those are our tips for selling out your next gig.
If you've found this useful at all,
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or any other tips you think we've missed,
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(upbeat music)