Experiencing your favorite artist, band, or DJ in a live music event can be a life-altering moment. It’s one thing to enjoy your favorite playlists at a house party but quite the other when you’re experiencing it at a music festival. The unified frequency of live music that grips the crowd will be etched in their memories forever.
For an event manager, planning a memorable music festival, whether big or small, starts by getting the basics right.
Here’s how you can go about planning a successful music festival without catching fyre.
1. Know Your Target Audience
Know your apples from oranges. One of the most quintessential steps in planning any music festival is understanding attendee personas for your event. Don’t organize an EDM festival in a town where most of the audience would rather attend a rock concert.
Once you’ve successfully identified your target audience, you can plan your budget and then start allocating expenses accordingly. We’ve witnessed the most successful music festivals where event organizers knew their audience’s expectations.
2. Figure Out Your Venue
Your venue and location can make or break your reputation. The logistics for an indoor event will differ from that of an outdoor one. A trance festival venue will be that of an airy beach where waves crash along with the thumping bass lines whereas a jazz festival will be in a cozy lounge where people can take in the smoothness of the wine and music. In any case, mapping out the event venue will help you arrange the entry, seating, standing, dining, and exit points.
Ask for a venue chart from the venue owner which will help you assign different price points for different sections. Plan your section by keeping this in mind – your music festival needs breathing space for people to move around freely.
3. Artist Outreach
Once you’ve figured out the audience, you might have a set of artists in your mind that you want as headliners and supporting acts. During your artist outreach phase, keep track of your artist budget which should be evenly spread out to bring in big names as well as local talent.
If you’re bringing in new talent, you could host a city tour that effectively markets your upcoming festival. Space out your festival acts across different genres to avoid monotony.
4. Sponsor Outreach
Organizing a large-scale event like a music festival requires big pockets that can be stretched when required. It’s normal for an event organizer to offset this load to a few sponsors which work in favor of everyone. Attendees in your music festival need to fuel themselves with hearty food that can be washed down with a pint or two.
Onboarding a few F&B joints to cater to your audiences will bring in more revenue and create a brand recall for you and your sponsors. A win-win.
5. Production and Equipment
The firepower for your events needs to be top-notch. We’ve noticed events not performing as it should have due to faulty equipment that doesn’t match up to the acoustics of the venue. Your production team should handle everything related to – sound, lighting, staging, video, backline, equipment, and power. Once you have these in order, you can start setting up the stage for that larger-than-life experience.
6. Use Yapsody’s Event Ticketing Features
After the first few phases of your planning are sorted, you need to put them into action. An event ticketing system that handles event creation, promotion, and revenue collection from online ticket sales should be your best bet. We’ve been one of the best event ticketing platforms in the USA catering to event presenters all over the world.
On our platform, you can:
- Create multiple events
- Create & price multiple ticket types
- Integrate branding marketing,
- Collect revenue through multiple payment gateways
- Track your ticket sales
7. Summarize Your Event
Those who make their event details crystal clear, tend to attract more ticket buyers than average. Whether you prefer creating an Online Ticket Store or resort to event branding for reaching a wider audience, make sure you summarize your event properly. Event name, description, location/venue, ticket prices, artist line-up, artist set timings need to be clearly defined for the attendee’s convenience.
Pro-Tip: Don’t leave anything to their imagination. Keep pushing out important updates or ticket price drop alerts that create a sense of urgency.
8. Customize Festival Packages
With decades of experience in helping hospitality enterprises elevate their guest experiences, we’ve realized that event attendees prefer the complete package rather than going à la carte. A festival is a communal gathering of people for a couple of days. Create event packages that fit the bill for different requirements.
Few might prefer an all-inclusive deal when it comes to food and accommodation while few might prefer merchandise with their tickets. Why not ask the right questions with our pre-event Questionnaires feature to gauge their requirements?
9. Insight-Driven Event Marketing
Event marketing begins months before the D-Day. The key to boosting ticket sales is by implanting your upcoming event in their minds. Social media has proven to be the best tool for event marketers to reach a wider audience through powerful visual storytelling.
Event presenters using Yapsody follow insight-driven event marketing that gives them a definitive edge. Figure out which CTA-driven post made them land on your event page and you’ll discover a pattern that can be used for your future events.
10. Streamline Check-In Process
This is where we see many event attendees lose their cool. Nobody wants to wait for hours just because you didn’t create multiple check-in points. Make sure security checks are handled before anything else. Once they’re in the clear, validate their tickets through a QR Code scanner. An attendee might turn up late but it’s your job to not make them wait any longer. You can leverage Yapsody’s suite of multiple check-in apps, YapTickets and QuickScan, for instance to make the check-in process at your next event super smooth!
We hope our 10-step guide helps you in planning a successful music festival. We’ve recently launched dedicated ticketing solutions for live music events and concerts, check them out today! Additionally, don’t forget to start with Yapsody if you’re an event presenter looking for an end-to-end event ticketing platform.
