How To Advertise A Student Concert
So why should you advertise a student concert? I’ll tell you, it’s more than just advertising.
When we first started doing our concerts, I had no little to no budget, wasn’t allowed to mass email to our clients and most of our teachers wouldn’t share the information with their networks.
Lots of obvious things stood against getting the job done.
So how do you do it with everything stacked against you?
Well, I compared and copied other businesses and came up with ideas I could do for free!
What Is The Goal Of Advertising A Student Concert
If you’d say the goal of advertising a student concert was to let the public know about your event, then you’re about half right.
But It’s simply not just about that. It’s about getting your name mentioned and logo seen by as many people as possible to develop top of mind awareness of your brand.
If you get your name mentioned over and over consistently, when people are ready to take lessons, they’ll hopefully think about your music school and come to you instead of your competition.
How Do You Advertise A Student Concert
Remember, at first your goal is to get your name mentioned and logo seen, it’s not about the audience or ticket sales. That will come later. Your brand or name recognition is simply more important at first.
Here are some ideas to help advertise a student concert event. All should include your logo and business name.
- 11×17 Posters
- Event listings
- Press release
- Social Media
- Boosted Posts
- Radio (Jock talk or Ad’s)
- TV (Local News)
- Interviews
- Word of mouth
11x 17 Posters
I love being creative but I had no idea on how to create my first poster. I needed a template to follow so I had a professional graphic artist create the artwork for our first poster. Then I designed every other poster based on his initial design in Corel Print House (a photoshop type program).
Again, posters should have your logo and logos of any sponsors for the show. (I’ll come back to Sponsors a bit later)
We get 250 posters made so we can give one poster to every student in the show and hang the rest around our city.
Shortly after I starting promoting the concerts as a community event, I found out about a local poster hanging service. The service employed physically or mentally challenged young adults who hung 60+ posters around our city as a part of their “job” or weekly activity. For the cost of 5 tickets to see our show, this was the best deal. If I were to hang the posters myself, I’d spend a tank of gas. If you think about how much your time is worth as well, this was a fantastic deal!
How To Use 11×17 Posters To Advertise A Student Concert
As soon as you have a concert date, time, price per ticket and poster, you can put your event on any event listings in your city and beyond.
- Online News sources
- Local Newspaper
- Local TV Station
- Coffee house flyers
The goal here again is not necessarily getting people out to see your show. It’s more about getting your name mentioned, logo shown and showing you are the music school of choice in your city for providing opportunities for music students.
Each event listing should talk a briefly about the event and mention your businesses name and logo (if possible).
Just imagine how many parents get up on a Saturday morning wondering what’s going on in the city that they can take their kids to. many parents go to the event listings and start scrolling for an activity. Even if they don’t come and see your show, they’re going to see your logo or your business name and relate it to music lessons if you mention that briefly in your event description.
Using A Press Release To Advertise A Student Concert
Press releases are a great way to advertise your student concert. If you’re not familiar with doing these, you’re basically taking on the role as a reporter for the event and writing an article that will be printed as is (or as close as possible without much editing).
Start with Who, What , When, Where and Why and write an article talking about your show while mentioning your business name in the process.
If you don’t know how to get started or need a template to follow, there is a lot of information online for how to get started. How to write an event press release https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-write-press-release-event
Another alternative would be hiring someone on Fiverr https://www.fiverr.com . They have a lot of options for press release writers at very reasonable prices.
As an important note, we donate all out proceeds from our concerts to help sick children at our local Hospital’s children’s ward. This gave us some leverage with the media and our sponsors (more on that later).
Print
Newspapers
Even though this form of media isn’t as popular as it once was, you’d be surprised how many people read it and will comment. “Hey, I saw your article in the paper!”
Send a press release or your “article” to the news paper!
As a rule of thumb, send a press release out 30 days before your event and then again a week before. If all your proceeds go go towards helping someone oran organization, you may have enough of an angle to end up in the news!
Coffee Shop News
Some coffee shops have a weekly one page flyer with things people can do around town. Businesses that do this will likely have a maximum number of words in an article or event listing and will include an email of where to send the information to.
It’s not much but will get your name mentioned and contribute to your top of mind awareness campaign.
Magazines
When we first started our concert series, there wasn’t too much press. But later, we started getting lots of coverage including Magazine articles and full page spreads.
I always considered the press to be a bonus. I never expected anyone to do a story on us. However, once the stories started coming in, it was like a snowball going down a hill. Talk to as many people as you can about your vision or dream and try to help those who can’t.
How To Advertise A Student Concert On Social Media
When doing social media posts advertising your concert you should try:
- Keep it fun and exciting
- Vary the pictures and text you use
- Ask questions
- Repeat what your goal is for the show
- Talk about what the show will do for your community
Post twice a month 3 months in advance and increase frequency to once/twice a week for the final 5 weeks. Increase to once a day the week before the event.
If you post too much, people will tune it out and you may loose “friends” in the process.
You can try boosted posts as well to reach more people.
Remember to mention any sponsors you have as well as what your cause is.
Oh, keep track of any posts you make mentioning your name and sponsors names and any likes or shares. This will come in handy when you have to do reports on the events you do.
How To Create A Partnership With A Radio Station
To be honest, this was a work in progress and highly relationship driven.
We started working with a Radio station the second show we did.
We paid for 2 weeks of ad’s hoping it would help drive ticket sales… I’m not sure it did, but I know we got our name mentioned. This campaign included jock talk a few times a day mentioning our business name.
As a note, this was shortly before we donated the proceeds from our concerts to charity.
After a year, we changed Radio stations who would to take us on as a sponsorship role. They provided Ad’s for the show and a Radio celebrity MC for a month, but they did not provide a script before airing the Ad on the radio!
They forgot to add in our main sponsor and got me in trouble! The station blamed me (for them forgetting) saying “Well, you should have asked for a script!”. From that moment on, I always asked for an AD script if they didn’t provide one!
Pro tip: Remember to ask for a script before any Ad’s get aired. You need to know what they are saying or if they left anyone out that needed to be there.
The next year we changed radio stations again. We’ve been with them now since 2009. The music they played aligned with our concert themes perfectly (classic rock).
Because we do our shows twice a year, we became more than business partners. We would invite the DJ’s over for dinner and brought them cookies and treats during visits. This led to us being able to call them up and ask if we could talk on the air or share anything else exciting we’d have going on..
The mind boggling thing is they have given us over $20,000 in Ad’s every year all by mentioning their name and showing the community they care (as of 2021, this is over $250,000 in advertising). Meanwhile the radio station has helped increase the importance of our brand name by attaching our name to theirs.
After a few years later we started advertising on their radio station as well to show support to their business and the contributions they’ve made to our growth.
Using Community Interest Stories On TV As Marketing
As a part of our Event listing strategy, I would post our event on our Local Cable TV’s event listing page. A couple of times the station came out and did a story on us. This is 3 minutes of advertising and getting your name mentioned for free.
Don’t forget to put your event in the TV stations community calendar to get on their radar.
Using Interviews To Advertise A Student Concert
Sometimes I would send out a press release and the Media would call me back because it sounded like an interesting community story that they could share. This happened quite regularly at first but as cutbacks started kicking in, the interviews got less frequent. I still get them once a year or once every second year though. Everything is a bonus. I never depend on someone else to share the news. Remember, it’s all about our name and logo getting seen.
One of Wentworth Music’s Amazing Sold Out Student Concerts
Using Word Of Mouth To Advertise A Student Concert
This will happen organically if you do all the above for the event. Parents see their kids excited and then share the excitement with others at parties, get togethers or with friends who ask “Do you know of a place that give music lessons?”
Parents respond with “YOU SHOULD SEE WHAT MY KDIS ARE DOING!” not “yeah my kids take lessons at _______”
Keep in mind though. Once you create a huge about of word of mouth advertising , you have to keep doing it. You efforts will start fading in about 12-16 months if you do nothing.
Build The Excitement!
Look, excitement is contagious. Provide an above and beyond experience for your students and the word will spread.
If you want to advertise a student concert you’ll need to provide information to your students and parents sparingly to build anticipation for the event.
If students ask what the next concert will be be respond with “I can’t tell you, but it’s going to be AWESOME!”
I’ll be writing another Blog post on Anticipation and excitement shortly. Stay tuned!
Contact Noel Wentworth
Noel Wentworth is the former Vice President of Education of the multi award winning Wentworth Music Education and is available available for consultation. You can reach him below.
