Until you can consistently pack out every venue you play at, the audience size is a major point of concern for any artist. I’ve already written about making your shows stand out so people enjoy them more and want to come back, and you still need to take that approach. But no matter how much you’ve rehearsed and prepared for the actual performance, it won’t matter if only the staff and crickets are there to hear you. You cannot focus only on the stage performance but must also focus on convincing people to come see you. This is why gig promotion for your shows is as important, if not more important, than the musical preparation for the shows. After all, a bar hosting a “Ladies Night” won’t help if no one hears about it beforehand.
Plan Your Promotions In Advance
One of the first things you should be doing immediately after booking a gig is getting everyone together and planning how and when you’re going to do certain things to promote. Simply relying on everyone to remember what needs to be done and to take care of doing it on his or her own is a recipe for failure. This approach pretty much ensures that something will not get done due to laziness or forgetfulness. Another benefit of planning ahead of time is that you can create a standardized approach for promoting your gigs.
Get Your Materials Together
Even if you don’t make plans on how to promote and when to do it, you still need to have certain things like flyers made. With both online printing shops and places like OfficeMax offering in-store printing services, you have no excuse not to have posters and flyers for your shows. Even if you are not artistic and don’t know anyone who is, typically you can check with art students at a local college who would be glad for the work. Not only will they do the work cheaper than the professional services, some may do the work for free so they can have it in their portfolio.
There’s no golden rule for the size of the posters and flyers, but my preference is for 11″ by 17″ full color on the posters. This is not too big that a venue will have a hard time finding a suitable place to put it, but it’s also not too small to go unnoticed. Use full color with a high quality gloss paper stock to make it look cleaner. One thing to consider is most print shops can’t do what is called “full bleed” printing. This is where the print is done edge to edge with no margins. You pretty much won’t find any personal grade printers with that option. So check with the print shop first to see if they can do a “full bleed” print, and if they can’t then take that into consideration when creating the poster design.
For flyers, I lean more towards the smaller leaflet-sized approached. It’s easier to carry a stack of them, easier to be pocketed by anyone you hand them to, and you can make a very large quantity for relatively cheap. The way I’ve always done it was to create a standard 8.5″ by 11″ grayscale version of the full color poster design with the allowance for the margins on the page edges. I then take the design (which I always create in Photoshop), and shrink the flattened image to 1/4 normal size. After that it is a simple matter of copy and paste to create four copies in the space where the original one was. If that is too tough for you to do, then ask your designer to do that as well. In some cases, you can get the print shop to do it for you. Taking this approach let’s you use the standard 8.5″ by 11″ non-gloss paper and get four copies per page. You just have to get the white margins cut off and cut the pages into fourths afterward, but that’s trivial when you’re getting 400 copies from 100 pages.
In college towns go to the college’s community center. There are usually bulletin boards there you can post your posters and flyers to.
Make sure you don’t hand these flyers out anywhere that has “No Solicitation” signs, since handing a flyer to someone is considered an act of solicitation. You also should be careful about putting flyers on car windshields. Even if you don’t have to worry about the solicitation aspect, if too many people discard the flyers then you (or the lot owner) will likely to get fined for littering. Best practice is to ask the business owner first.
Get Some Recruits
If you have already been performing and have some fans already, see if any of them would be willing to help spread the word about your show. Any friends or family that you have in that area should certainly be willing to help promote the show on their social media profiles and such. Take the band Vampire Weekend for example. One member discovered he was distantly related to Steve Buscemi, they tweeted about it, and now Steve Buscemi is helping them with their efforts in promotion and other things. Talk about getting help from a family member! Don’t forget that Steve Buscemi has his own musical background as well; remember the movie Airheads?
Get Online With Your Show
While posters and flyers are more of an “old school,” they’re still effective. We can’t forget about online promotion through sites like Facebook and Twitter though. You should be putting your shows up on Facebook Events, Eventful, and others. Some services like ArtistData help you to simultaneously post to multiple event sites at the same time. Use Google to search for any websites or blogs that feature local events and send them the information. You could even see if the venue would be willing to sponsor a post on Facebook for increased exposure. Hit up your fans on the mailing list if you have one already.
Another online site that is usually forgotten about is Craigslist. Yes, most people go to Craigslist looking to buy, sell, or trade something. Remember though that Craigslist is simply online classifieds. So hit up the Community section for the gig area and post in the relevant subsections: activities, events, and musicians.
Get Interviewed
Depending on the venue, they may have a promotional relationship with a local radio station or newspaper. All you have to do is ask if they do. They may be willing to give you the contact information you need or may even help set something up. Many newspapers have “lifestyle” sections they might list your event in, but getting a small article written about your band is even better. Doing an on-air radio interview the day of during the 5:00pm rush hour traffic is a good way to get your show out there. Sometimes you won’t be able to get an interview just because you’re playing at the venue. You might need to offer an incentive, and this is where you can give free shirts to the DJs or offer the first 10 people to arrive free CDs. If you are an all-original band, then ask nicely and you may be able to get someone from the station to do a live feed from the gig. Remember it never hurts to ask.
Find A Local Business Partner/Sponsor
Depending on the style of music you play, you might be able to find a local business willing to help promote your show or provide some kind of service at your show. A band I use to play in enlisted local pizza establishments a few times for shows we were paying to host. The pizza shops brought in and sold pizza on site with us receiving a small percentage of the sales.
While not technically getting a “sponsor,” you can check out any local music stores and see if they’ll let you post your gig posters up inside their shop or have a bulletin board you can post on.