Finding the perfect strategy to launch your festival

The festive season has officially been and gone; hasn’t that gone quickly? 

If you organised a New Year’s Eve event, we hope you got the ticket sales you wanted and all of your attendees had a great time. Now, the focus turns to 2024. While it seems a long way off, festival season will come around in a flash. We’re here to help you find the perfect date to launch.  

January can be a strange month. Understandably, people are less likely to go out over this period. They’re recovering from the festive indulgence, making their December pay last or taking part in schemes like Dry January. 

However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t looking and it doesn’t mean you can’t tempt them with news of your festival. The key here? Balance. Launch too early and people might not have enough money to buy tickets, launch too late and your efforts are at risk of getting lost in the shuffle. 

So, ensure that you’ve got your listing, assets and sign-up links ready to go so you can begin your launch. You could start in the first week of January. At this point, you aren’t selling any tickets; you’re whetting the appetite and getting your festival in the minds of potential attendees rather than asking them to part with cash. 

If you’ve got a teaser video, now is the time to use it. Sunny skies, crowd shots and striking music are the play here, giving potential attendees an escape from the drab January skies. 

This could also be a good time to drop your pre-sale link. Pre-sale link sign-ups can work as a call to action at the end of your teaser video, giving people something extra to get excited about on top of the video. 

But it’s entirely up to you. You may want to juice your teaser video for a few days, repurposing it across various platforms, with the sign-up link coming a few days later. 

Or, you could run a competition for tickets to your festival, asking people on social media to share your post, follow and tag their mates underneath the post. This can help get more eyes on your launch, leading to more sign-ups and opening-day sales when tickets go live. 

Payday is at the end of the month for most people. So, keep promoting each week. When the end of the month comes around, drop the ticket link so people can buy. To make the initial launch easier on customers’ pursestrings, you could make use of our Payment Plan feature. It lets you set up a deposit and monthly instalments so customers can pay monthly rather than in one go. Find out more below. 

With this strategy, you’ll be selling tickets just as people have money in their account and you’ve got a head start thanks to the promotion you’ve been doing in the weeks running up to the full launch.