Marketing for Cultural Events
Marketing for cultural events is just like any other form of advertising the objective is to be memorable, so in this post, I’ve included a few key areas to focus on that may help achieve this goal. My first example is this FREEDOM Festival banner, for someone who knows nothing about what the festival is or what it’s about, something like this is just intriguing enough and bright enough to draw attention. It doesn’t say a lot but sometimes all you need is that initial intrigue to get your foot in the door of someone’s mind to get them interested in knowing more about your event. This is complemented further by the “IS COMING” part as it gives a slight sense of urgency and potentially even instils FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) into the viewer, solidifying the message they need to know more about the event and how to get involved.
Branding
When it comes to Marketing one of the biggest parts is branding, forcing businesses to consider what the brand should stand for, look like and be associated with when thought of by the customer. Marketing for a cultural event like the Freedom Festival is no different they need an identity, something that when people think about it, your brand is the first thing to come up. For example the Green Man Festival as seen here is very recognisable by its artstyle, it also capitalises on this by merchandising selling clothes, temporary tattoos, posters and more. This works as both creating walking promotions and also creates a revenue source for the festival.
Brand Experience
Maintaining a Brand experience also plays a huge part in event marketing, the event itself isn’t the only experience festivals need to think about. To understand this put yourself in the shoes of the target customer looking for an event to go to, they need to experience your online/ promotional material first to introduce themselves to the brand before they even consider coming to the festival itself. therefore maintaining a consistent brand identity that is engaging in some way to the customer can greatly increase the chances of success for an event. One way this can be achieved is with animated Gifs which are far more engaging than just static image posts. One such example is this post by Google promoting a mini golf event with a small animation, its simple yet incredibly effective when put to use in marketing especially when it comes to events.
Multi-Channel Marketing
Moving on to Multi-channel marketing its a similar concept the brand uses its identity and applies it to multiple channels where customers can find and interact with them the idea is that across all channels the brand identity remains consistent so wherever the customer reaches first their experience should be the same. Looking at this used for the Freedom Festival you can see that they retain the same brand image across all platforms. As you can see here the Festival keeps the same colour scheme, imagery and sometimes even the same posts so everyone gets the same first impression/ experience of the event. This also helps promote inclusion as all people can reach and engage with the event no matter what medium they have access to, as all the platforms they’re on are responsive to most device sizes and accessible for use with screen readers.
Engagement
Another important factor in marketing an event is user engagement, as mentioned earlier interactivity can vastly increase how active and engaged a userbase can be towards an event. For example allowing people to give feedback on your event, such as the Freedom Festival which has a survey questioning your experience with the brand/event and asking how they can improve. This can help people feel more involved with the event itself, especially if their feedback leads to actual changes, creating an emotional connection to the event itself. Festivals like these also make use of local businesses working with them and building a sense of community around the event. Using this marketing strategy can positively change the perspective of the community towards the event, increasing local engagement, and promoting the positive impacts on the community it has.
Targeted Advertising
Another example of how the Freedom Festival keeps people engaged is by producing a newsletter, this is a proven way of keeping people interested in your event as you can target those who are interested and inform them on the latest interesting news and information about the event to keep them engaged. This is done by offering visitors to the website the chance to subscribe to the newsletter on the website, essentially filtering out all those who may not be interested as they just won’t subscribe to the newsletter. It’s a great marketing tool to keep the people interested in your event engaged until the event takes place.
Cultural Events like these may also employ different marketing strategies on different platforms due to the fact different demographics tend to use different mediums to get their information. For example, physical ads or ads on Facebook may be tailored towards a more mature audience whereas the brand may employ more vibrant illustrations and animations on a platform like TikTok to attract its majority younger audience, targeting those with interests in art/design for example rather than the whole platform in order to achieve a better CTR (Click Through Rate). This is a term widely used in online advertisements, referring to the number of clicks received divided by the impressions (views) the advertisement got.
Citations
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Freedom Festival Homepage (no date) Freedom Festival Arts Trust. Available at: https://www.freedomfestival.co.uk/ (Accessed: 04 November 2023).
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Collections page (no date) Green Man Festival. Available at: https://green-man-festival.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage (Accessed: 04 November 2023).
