Easing Promoter’s Workloads with Event Promotion Tools

How Can an Event Promotion Tool be Useful?

As a promoter, your life is likely never dull. Working with agents, venues, and artists to make sure everything is just right for the show keeps you busy with endless tasks. The right event promotion tool could help, easing the pains of coordinating, time management, and budgeting, among others.

Compared with other productivity tools, there aren’t many built specifically for the music industry to streamline the process.  Many promoters do the best they can with a disorganized system, forging through countless emails, texts, phone calls, spreadsheets, and calendars. These require manual, separate efforts that consume significant amounts of time. 

Luckily, technology allows for the integration of several functionalities in just one system. An industry-focused tool can help you with many of these activities:

• Negotiations: Bookings, meeting coordination.
• Budgeting: Data entry, holds, real-time projections, deposit, and expense tracking.
• Calendaring: Booking shows, managing holds, and detailed calendar management
• Collaboration: Integrating tasks and deadlines from several different parties into one platform.

No matter the type or size of the show you are promoting. Technology can bring efficiencies for you and your team, enhance your productivity, and increase event success. 

Overcoming Challenges to Increase Competitiveness

The live music industry is not immune to the challenges occurring across the marketplace. The pandemic only increased the amount and types of issues promoters face every day.

Now that many venues can start reopening to a certain degree, national concert organizers have their ears to the ground and their eyes on local venues and promoters. This can make the independent players a little nervous, particularly if they feel they cannot compete. But technology, specifically an all-in-one event promotion tool, could level the field for some, giving them a fighting chance to go head to head with the big guys. 

For example, Eventbrite recommends, “Your ticketing platform should be able to sell tickets wherever you promote your shows — without forcing fans to a separate ticketing page. You can compete with the significant national ticketing concerns if you not only promote your events on the sites and apps where your fans spend their time but also allow smooth, direct ticket sales there.

“The convenience and ease of buying tickets directly on Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, and Bandsintown will help fans find your shows. But — more importantly — letting fans buy on these apps can double your sales.” 

How else could you do this other than with technology?

Event promotion tools should also be able to solve any productivity challenges. The more time you spend on manual tasks, the more time you will lose building relationships with artists, agents, and influencers.

The key is to find an app that lets you automate as many of the event promotion tasks as possible. Use a solution with real-time data to eliminate redundancies that can lead to mistakes.

State-of-the-art solutions will accurately connect the various systems you use in promoting a live event so they “talk” to each other, share data, and present you with a comprehensive view of what’s going on at any given time.

Related: 3 Top Tips on How to Promote an Event

Don’t let Budgeting be Your Downfall

Improper budgeting is a frequent event promoter mistake. You may work tirelessly to promote a show but are you taking enough time to create and monitor a comprehensive budget before the event? The goal isn’t to break even; the goal is to make a profit. If the budget is off, or if you can’t say no to your artists or agents, you’re going to be in trouble.

IDMMAG.com suggests the following when focusing on your financials:

• Work with a forecast field (what you expect to pay) and an actual space where you can put the final amount paid per cost of each expense.
• Get written quotes for everything.
• Constantly revisit your budget and adjust for unexpected expenses (there always are).
• Add at least 10% of your total budget as an ancillary cost to give yourself a little leeway.

An event promotion tool that integrates the financial piece of your business can be a lifesaver when it comes to creating and tracking budgets. This functionality may enable you to create templates, so you don’t have to start from scratch with each event. 

By building detailed budgets and linking them to your ticketing platform, you can see sales in real-time. You should also be able to track your expenses and reconcile ticket sales, giving you instant visibility into show status with breakeven, marketing return on investment (ROI), and net sales calculated automatically without the need of a spreadsheet. Your team members could also see this information from their mobile devices at the same time. 

With all of the financial data in one place and automatically updated in just a few seconds, you won’t have to worry about the hassles of manual budgets, sales, or reconciliation. The data is right there in front of you any time you want it.

Related: Marketing Budgets – How Much to Spend and Where

What Other Features do Event Promotion Tools Include?

You may have tried some event promotion tools, but the best one will have the following characteristics:

• Device flexibility – You can access it from a desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. After all, you are rarely sitting at a desk all day. You need your solution to be as mobile as you are, giving you the ability to communicate, schedule, negotiate, and book a venue with a few taps on your mobile phone.
• Useful for venue owners – A premium solution will include capabilities for you, the promoter, and the venue owners, even enabling you to work collaboratively from the same platform. 
• All-in-one approach – Integrated functionalities will avoid you having to go in and out of different apps to complete tasks. Leading event promotion tools include:
  • Calendar management to manage holds
  • Offer management to keep track of offers
  • Collaboration tools to keep track of all of your communications between team members and stakeholders in one place, with a built-in approval system for confirmations, challenges, and other issues that may come up.

All of these additional features will enable you to see everything from one source so you can bring all of the pieces together to do more in less time.

The Good News for Independent Promoters

If you’re working independently, don’t be discouraged. According to Berklee, “The concert-promotion industry is dominated by corporate behemoths like Live Nation and AEG Presents, but small, independent promoters—often operating regionally—have managed to carve out a niche (…) Success as a concert promoter means having the connections and clout to book bigger acts in nicer venues. The best concert promoters have a solid reputation for creating well-attended, talked-about, and financially successful events.” 

This means that, with the right tools and skills, you could be able to survive and thrive. Some strategies, pointed out by Billboard, are producing festivals or allying with artists and smaller venues in large markets.

Even more so now, with changing travel restrictions and the willingness to support upcoming talent, there’s something about keeping events more local. Those relationships require constant nurturing. As a promoter, you can’t afford to miss or lose a message from a venue. You can’t take too long to book a show. You have to work hard and fast for your artists and agents, and the only way they can do that well is with technology.
Promoters who use an integrated event promotion tool like Prism can do so much more in their day and enjoy their work while doing it. Instead of being tied to a computer, they can plan their shows with the confidence they will complete their tasks without missing something important. Signing up for Prism could be a giant leap for your promoting career too. Schedule your demo now.