How to engage and retain your festival’s most loyal fans

It’s a fact. Competition within the festival industry is fiercer than ever. The rising popularity of these cultural extravaganzas, driven by a seemingly unquenchable thirst for memorable experiences among consumers, in the wake of the pandemic, attracts not only enthusiastic attendees but also event organisers eager to carve their niche in the scene.

With 2024 poised to host an unprecedented number of festivals across the UK, the industry is buzzing with positivity. However, for festivals and their teams, the challenge lies in holding on to their fan base amid said intensifying competition. The question is “How can festival organisers effectively engage and, more importantly, retain their most devoted fans?”

It’s helpful to break this question down into two parts. 

The first? Engagement. You might be a first-time festival promoter starting from the ground up. So, your marketing techniques will revolve around engaging potential fans and customers, piquing their interest with content to help get them through the gates. 

The second? Retention. Post-festival, you’ll be busy analysing data and looking at ways to improve your event in time for next year. One way you can achieve retention is by turning those first-time attendees into die-hard fans. 

Established festival promoters might find engagement pretty straightforward. The festival has a good reputation, more resources at hand, and they can secure big-name acts. They’ve settled into a groove when it comes to running a festival. 

Whether you’re new to the game or a seasoned veteran, all promoters can benefit from retention. 

When you retain fans, you open the door to many benefits. A loyal fan of your festival can help you create a core fanbase and promote your festival via word of mouth, which in turn helps to boost ticket sales. If you’re expanding your festival or bringing something new in, those core fans will follow you through thick and thin. 

So, to help you get way ahead of the 2024 festival season, we’re going to look at a few ways you can engage festival revellers and retain fans, new and old, in the days, weeks and months after your event.

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Engage the eye with UGC

UGC, short for User Generated Content, can help you get people through the gates. 

It’s authentic, cost-effective and free from glossy, overproduced imagery. You’re putting someone right in the mind’s eye of the crowd.

If your festival has been running for a while, chances are you’ll have access to footage uploaded by fans from previous events that could be repurposed and used in your current marketing efforts. You could even go one better and put a call out to your fans via your social media channels to upload some of their best memories at your events from previous years.

Offering an incentive to upload UGC with hashtags relevant to your festival, such as free merch or free tickets to the event, for example, can also help increase awareness of your event and engage potential customers, whilst building brand loyalty among the fans who choose to upload their UGC.

If you’re a newcomer on the scene and without a stock of imagery to use, you could repurpose, for example, video footage of your headliner live in action and republish this to your own page or platform. It’s important to always obtain credit from the person who captured and/or owns the content in question. 

Once you find the footage, make sure to create an enticing hook. A popular one is ‘POV: You’re in the crowd’, but you don’t have to stick to that. If you can come up with something that grabs interest, that’s great. 

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Use Paid Media’s targeting capabilities

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are brimming with potential due to the sheer number of people that use them. 

Facebook, for example, has 44.84 million users in the U.K. alone. Instagram isn’t far behind, boasting a user base of around 35 million people as of February 2023. 

Both platforms offer specialised targeting, meaning you can use things like age, gender, location and even the user’s place of work to target. If you nail the targeting, you’ll get in-depth results. 

Combine that with some clever creative, and you’ll be on the way to engaging customers. Hopefully, you can retain them later on down the line, too. 

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Offer discounts as a goodwill gesture

Everyone loves a discount. 

Better yet, you can offer them at any time. 

Let’s use the example of a festival in its second year. You had some high praise from attendees; they loved the line-up, the sound was great, and the customer service was swift. These are the people you want to retain. 

So, why not offer them a discount? You can generate discount codes in the Promotion Centre, use your first-party data and send a bespoke email with the details. Retention is about building up the positive experiences someone has with your brand, and a personalised discount saves your customer money while making them feel valued. It’s a solid retention tactic.

Generate some hype via social media, too. Tell your followers to keep an eye on their inbox at a specific time, as you’ll be handing out discount codes to a select number of customers. 

Alternatively, you could create a form, ask customers who attended last year to fill it in, provide proof of purchase and check that data with your own. 

To learn how to create and apply your own unique discounts, watch our ‘How-to’ tutorial on discount codes below.

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Offer ticket buying flexibility with a Payment Plan

A phrase we all hoped would be left behind in 2023, the cost-of-living crisis (urgh) shows no signs of letting up in 2024.

Household finances will be stretched further during the course of the year as the price of fuel, energy and food remains volatile, ultimately impacting the amount of disposable income consumers will have to spend. And yet, despite the rising cost of essentials, the appetite for live events has never been higher.  

Data made available by Barclaycard in the summer of last year outlined a rise in consumer spending on the entertainment sector by a remarkable 15.8%, year-on-year.

So, how can you lighten the financial load of your customers whilst ensuring they can still attend your attend? And, all at the same time, prevent them from looking elsewhere for a more wallet or purse-friendly experience? By using our free-to-use Payment Plan feature, of course. 

Retain your most loyal fans and build trust among new ones by giving eventgoers the flexibility to pay for their tickets in manageable instalment’s over a fixed period of time. 

To learn how to set up a Payment Plan, watch our “How-to” video tutorial below. 

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Create community and exclusivity around your festival

Why not create a community around your festival?

Groups can be created through messaging services the likes of WhatsApp whilst HUGE communities can be created online via social media platforms, depending on the demographic of your audience, such as Facebook and Instagram. Once you’ve created your group and invited people in, you can use it to offer discounts and deals on tickets, merch and drinks tokens, whilst gathering important customer feedback and data.

Consider how you might use a group to drive engagement and retention. Think of your group as a sort of secret or exclusive group, for example, to market to your faithful fans. Customers love it when you make them feel special. Throw in a one off deal or a competition for some freebies and watch their loyalty to your festival brand grow. And, while all this is going on, create a sense of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) among those yet to be invited into your secret/exclusive group.

If your festival is catered to a niche interest, even better.

You can then use the group to encourage interaction between like-minded people, the festival becoming a meet-up point for kindred spirits. 

Lots of brands treat their customers like numbers. However, these are the people who help you expand and bring the atmosphere to your site. So, connecting those people through their interests and a degree of exclusivity will go a long way to encouraging loyalty, engagement and retention.

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Be informative, responsive and nail your operations

When the details of your festival and the context around who is playing are easy to find, you’ll find it easier to engage and retain customers. 

The same goes for helping attendees with any problems they might have before, during and after the festival. If someone has a complaint or a question, you want to solve it quickly. Think about what’s most important to include on your festivals landing page – from detailed instructions on how to get to and from your event, to how customers can get in touch should they have a problem.

It’s something that’ll help you in the long run. The customer you helped out efficiently when they had a problem? They’ll remember that, and it’ll go a long way to building trust in your brand, which plays a big part in engaging and retaining your festival’s most loyal fans. 

You can offer all the deals in the world and have the best marketing. However, if your festival doesn’t get the basics right? You won’t get anywhere. 

It’s about making your event the best part of an attendee’s summer. Booking the right acts will help you, but you need to ensure that sound quality, production, customer service and medical services are all top-notch. 

Delivering the highest quality service will make an impression on your attendees, ultimately bringing them back year on year.