A Toolkit for Marketing
a Festival or Event

Combining plenty of festival marketing experience and success, learnings from working with global agencies, and findings from marketing science (on how marketing actually works), comes a toolkit that covers every aspect of festival marketing.

£295 Lifetime Access

Also available to purchase is a:
- Zoom call induction to the guide.
- Bespoke half-day workshop using the guide to solve problems specific to your festival.

Please email for further info.

Is this guide going to be for you?

If you can relate to any of the below, then you’re gonna need it.

Your festival team is stretched, with in-house marketing skills and knowledge somewhat limited, putting you on the back foot.

Limited internal resource

A saturated and very competitive marketplace, coupled with more discerning customers has placed an even greater emphasis on the need to up your marketing game.

Getting harder to sell tickets

Marketing has always felt complex and overcomplicated, leaving you confused, overwhelmed, and unable to confidently take action.

Confused and stuck

You know the importance of having a strong brand for festival success, but aren’t sure on what you need to do to improve yours, in order to reap the rewards.

Brand Troubles

Traditional marketing agencies can cost the earth and results can be mixed. You want access to the latest agency thinking and ways of working, but in a more accessible kinda way.

Expensive External Agencies

You’re not clear on what you should be communicating, and to whom, and want to know how to do this effectively to achieve sustained success.

Unclear offering

£295 Lifetime Access

"An Incredibly Valuable Resource That Every Festival Needs"

Deborah Shilling
Black Deer Festival Co-Founder.

How does the guide work?

It’s made up of quite a few parts, but there are three main sections:

Section 1: Strategy

Working out the right action to take for your festival

Firstly, you’ll discover a simple way to understand and approach strategy, once and for all.
Tidying up all of that mess that was there before.

After we’ve laid down the game-changing groundwork, we’ll then get building; building your Brand Strategy and Comms Strategy. We’ll do so by taking a step-by-step approach, and by using a real festival as an example.
Both of these things combined, will help make putting together your festival strategy a piece of cake.

Section 2: Activation

This part of the guide will show you how best to actually do the work.
Whether it be what to include on the homepage of your website; the performance pillars for paid social media; how to approach content creation; or how to measure success.

This section leaves no stone unturned in giving you clear instructions for what you need to do.

Taking action

Section 3: Process

From how best to work with partners such as web developers, sponsors, and ticketing partners; the best ways to create content; templates for things such brand guidelines, briefs, and of course a full marketing plan; and how to measure success. You’ll get processes and ways of working, along with an extensive collection of templates that have been honed through experience, and what will make life a hell of a lot easier for you, and your festival team.

Worth the entry fee alone.

Ways of working

£295 Lifetime Access

What does it actually contain?

Whether strategy is what you’re buying this guide for, or you just want to jump straight down to the activation section so you can make changes immediately - this one-of-a-kind guide has got something for everyone.

Here’s the running order…

    • Why this guide was created (the problems it’ll help you solve).

    • An introduction to the main parts of this guide, and how to use it.

    • What business strategy really is, and how to approach it.

    • What marketing actually is these days, and how best to view it.

    • The 4P’s and how to make sure you’re not neglecting Product, Price, and Place.

    • What branding really is.

    • Building your distinctive brand assets.

    • What is brand positioning?

    • How to get your brand positioning down on paper.

    • Introduction to the approach we’ll be taking when creating a comms plan.

  • Helping you set the scene for your comms strategy, by showing you how to undertake research on your:

    • Business

    • Competitors

    • Audience

    • Proven Targeting Strategies. Discover what one of the biggest contributions of marketing science is, in this need to know section.

    • There are reasons why tightly targeted audiences make sense. In this section we’ll identify the four main reasons why.

    • Discover a case study that shows two ways of targeting. It’s a simple approach that could work well for many festivals.

    • Using the purchase wheel framework, along with what we’d have learn’t from the setting the scene section - you’ll be able to map out the buyer journey showing where the opportunities and challenges lie. And given it’s an example from a real festival, you can use this buyer journey (with a few tweaks) for your own festival.

  • Here we’re summarising the priority tasks that need to be addressed by your comms.

    You’ll also find a comms framework that as well as showing the comms jobs also includes the principles to follow for when delivering each of them.

    • There’s a fair amount of media options out there available for you to use. Here’s how to group them into three main categories to make them more manageable.

    • Here we’re identifying how media will deliver the comms jobs. There’s also another handy table in here to present this. And it is made clear how a media strategy, is not a golden formula.

    • The ‘Paid Media Plan on a Page’ - making it easy for everyone to see what is happening where, for how long, and for how much.

  • For each comms job you need a ‘messaging approach’ and then ‘messaging pillars’ - presented in a simple to use framework. Here’s how to do it.

    • Introduction to measurement.

    • Difference between effectiveness and efficiency.

    • Why last click attribution is not the answer.

    • A privacy focussed future

    • Objectives and what to measure.

    • Why measurement is a journey.

    • All the strategic work we’ve done is now pulled into a marketing plan. And because you’ve gone through each stage, you’ll know the marketing plan inside-out.

    • You’ll find a marketing plan template that you just need to populate to help make life even easier for you.

    • Now you’ve laid the right groundwork and know what you need to do, it’s time to take action!

    • Here you’ll discover why when taking action, you need to start at the purchase stage and work backwards.

    • Website providers

    • Content and structure of your site

    • The tech to make sure you have set up on your site

    • Using AI

    • Importance of first party data

    • A mobile first approach

    • Web development.

    • Along with a few other useful bits.

    • Putting organic social media into perspective

    • Pinned Posts

    • Prioritising video content

    • Your social media bio

    • Low-fi quality

    • Stories Highlights

    • Behind the scenes

    • Leveraging your network to increase reach

    • Research what your competitors are posting

    • Group and event pages

    • Hashtags

    • User generated content

    • Along with some more other useful bits.

    • Two speed approach to email marketing

    • How often and when to send

    • Segmentation

    • Subscriber Forms

    • Pop-ups

    • Automation

    • Along with some other useful bits.

    • The role of your festival app

    • Checklist of what your festival app should include

    • Recommended app providers.

    • How to approach PR

    • Media partners

    • Brand partners and affiliates

    • Influencers

    • Reps (word of mouth)

    • Paid placements

    • The press release

    • The PR brief.

    • The role of advertising / how it really works

    • Introduction to paid media and where festivals often fail.

    • How much should I be spending on advertising?

  • Paid social media: The channels best to use, how best to use them, and why most festivals aren’t using them as they should be.

  • Why using video is so important.

    YouTube:
    - Why it might be a good channel to use
    - Things to consider when using it
    - Creative best practice
    - Measurement

  • Here we’ll take a look at two audio channels you might want to consider (radio and Spotify), with some benefits and best practices for each.

  • The importance of outdoor advertising for your festival, and how best to approach it.

    • Super Early Birds

    • Pre-sale

    • Line-up Announcement

    • Ticket Tiers

  • An introduction of what to expect from this, which is all about how to improve your ways of working; with partners, internal processes, and the templates that’ll help you with this.

  • Simply, the principles and best practice for producing your creative output, and the key pieces to create.

    • Overall approach for creating effective content, efficiently

    • Creating video content

    • Creating photographic content

    • Creating and sharing content during the festival weekend.

    • Ticket Agencies

    • Agencies & Freelancers

    • Website Developers

    • Freelancers

    • Brand Partners/Sponsors

    • Market research on the UK festival industry

    • Brand Guidelines template

    • Setting the scene template

    • Buyer Journey template

    • Messaging Framework template

    • Media Framework template

    • Media & Messaging Schematic template

    • Website (Landing page and sitemap) templates

    • Video Production Brief template

    • Photography Brief template

    • PR Brief template

    • Measurement Dashboard template

    • Sponsorship Proposal examples

    • Marketing Plan template

    • The paid plan on a page template

    • Useful websites, books, and articles.

  • A thank you from me, along with how else I can help you with your festival marketing.

Lifetime Access and additional support.

The beauty of having this as an online toolkit, is that it’s something that will evolve and continually improve over time based on your feedback, and as a result of the ever-changing marketing world.

Therefore if there is something you don’t see in here that you’d like covered, please just drop me a note.

Also, to make things even easier, there is the opportunity for me to walk you through the guide and answer any questions you may have during a Zoom call induction.

Or I can work with you even closer by running a workshop during which the guide will be used to solve specific problems that you and your festival face.

I’m excited to be able to help your festival and the whole festival community, with an approach to marketing it desperately needs.

£295 Lifetime Access

Also available to purchase is a:
- Zoom call induction to the guide.
- Bespoke half-day workshop using the guide to solve problems specific to your festival.

Please email for further info.