How to keep your event growing in the off-season

Leave attendees wanting more

What happens at the end of a meal at a high-end restaurant? Usually they give you some kind of parting gift – a sweet treat to send you away with positive feelings about the experience. It’s a simple psychological trick and one you can apply to your own event.

Platforms such as CM.com make it easy to send opted-in attendees a post-event perk. If you run a music event or festival, consider sending an exclusive playlist curated by the headliner, an NFT of the setlist, or special edition merch (which you can sell through your CM.com ticket shop) themed around the gig. If you’ve hosted a workshop, send attendees away with audio from the event or a breakdown of the key takeaways.
On social media, publish wrap-up reels or image galleries that will be engaged with and shared. You want to induce positive memories in the people that did attend – and a feeling of FOMO among those that didn’t.

Find other ways to engage

As an event organiser, it pays to build a year-round relationship with your fans – so that when you do have something to promote you’re not starting from scratch.

As boring as it might sound, this starts with having a good handle on data. With CM.com, you take complete ownership of your data and are free to segment it as you wish. This makes it easy to build automated welcome flows, birthday emails and regular newsletters – which can help you keep up momentum in fallow periods. And unlike many other ticketing platforms, you can import opted-in email addresses from elsewhere – your website, for example.

Content remains king but make sure to tailor it to your audience. Using analytics from the platform and survey data, get a feel for their preferences. What topics most interest them? Where do they hang out online? How often do they want to hear from you?

Then, look to build an always-on, cross-channel content plan with a few repeatable formats (monthly playlists, behind-the-scenes reels, artist Q&As) that takes all that into account. This could be as light-touch as sharing the odd meme related to specific topics on Instagram, or as involved as curating a weekly email newsletter series that features original interviews with artists your fans are likely to be interested in.

If you’re struggling to find or create compelling content from elsewhere, don’t be afraid to take them behind the curtain into your experiences as an event creator. In 2024, event brands or venues that are able to connect with their fans on a deeper level tend to win out. You don’t need slick, stylised content to compete.

Get ahead of the onsale

In the lifecycle of an event, there are two crucial stages – the moment tickets go on-sale and the week leading up to the event. Most promoters make the latter count, it’s those that are able to master the on-sale that really get ahead.

What makes a good on-sale? Clearly, you need to create as big a splash as possible and generate an initial surge of ticket sales and interest. The more people that know about your event early on, the more exponential growth you will see as they tell their friends and so on. This doesn’t happen by accident – so use any downtime you have to build momentum.

Create presale content that evokes feelings of scarcity, intrigue or a combination of the two. Scarcity marketing works because it creates a sense of urgency in the mind of the consumer. You might achieve this by communicating well before the launch that there will be a limited set of early-bird tickets available, or by including merch with each of the first x number of tickets sold.

Intrigue your audience with cryptic Tik-Toks or emails that tease the event’s content or line-up. Embed countdowns into your posts and stories. If it feels right for your event, use guerrilla marketing tactics to get people talking.

And be creative. Because while you don’t have the instant gratification of ticket sales in the off-season, what you do have is the space to figure out how you’re going to do things bigger and better next time.