I went from doing about 30 concerts a year and providing basic marketing supporting 60+ sporting events to providing full marketing support for 150+ events a year. After the first year of 191 ticketed events, I learned really quickly that I needed a system to divide up my time and efforts between the shows that need the most help and ones that would be able to sell if you let your marketing strategy do its job. In comes the Red, Yellow, and Green Event Marketing Strategy.
The Red, Yellow, and Green Event Marketing Strategy will save you time so you can focus on the shows that really need help selling tickets.
“Red events need extra help, yellow events require monitoring, and green events practically sell themselves.”
How to use the event marketing checklist and apply it to the Red, Yellow, and Green Event Marketing Strategy.
Red – show that you know you are going to need help “crossing the finish line” be it you have to explain it, there’s a lot of competition going on in the market that day/week, or what have you.
Yellow – show that you are not sure how it will do, so you need to keep an eye on it.
Green – show that you are fairly certain will sell out quickly or that you just need to let the marketing strategy run its course.
What sections of the Event Marketing Checklist to include in each version of the Red, Yellow, and Green Event Marketing Strategy.
Red
- All of the sections of the event marketing checklist should be completed. Where you will really expand on and will be very different from the yellow and green events will be the promo section.
- Stay tuned for a How-To-Create A Promotion One Sheet guide. I would plan on setting up some general ticket offers with your Box Office, flyering in your community, doing ticket giveaways, and potentially hosting a pre-hype event to raise awareness about your show.
- I also suggest planning to send an eblast for a month away from the show and a week away from the show to help increase ticket sales.
- Work with your media partners to drum up some publicity for your show. This could be in the form of interviews with the artist, you going on air and promoting the show, sending out a new press release about the event, and media drops to stations.
My go-to media drop is to have cookies made for the show with the show date on them and drop them off to your media partners. The hope is the media will take a photo and share the event on their socials for added awareness about the show.
Sometimes I will just do this for fun because it’s a cool show that the community is excited about so build the buzz.
Yellow
- For any yellow events you will still need to complete the majority of the event marketing checklist. You will want to track your daily ticket sales in line with your paid and promotional efforts of the show to see how your show is tracking in ticket sales.
- Depending on how your ticket sales goal is, you can use your daily ticket sales to know how likely you are to meet your goal.
- A good gauge of if you will be able to hit your tickets sold goal is to be 50% sold towards your ticket sales goal 8 weeks out.
- I.e. if your show is April 30th and your ticket sales goal is 100, you would want to have 50 tickets sold by 6 weeks prior to the show date, so mid-March.
- A good gauge of if you will be able to hit your tickets sold goal is to be 50% sold towards your ticket sales goal 8 weeks out.
- If your daily ticket sales aren’t in line with your goal then you would want to look into expanding on your promos and working with media partners for additional awareness, like in the red event level.
Green
- This is a show you know you can sell. The difference between the red and yellow events will mean fewer emails, less need for promotions, and hopefully, you will be sold out within a few weeks of tickets going on sale.
- Keep a pulse on daily ticket sales for ALL of your shows! There is going to be that one show that has sold out 2+ times and then throws you a curveball on the 3rd visit and makes you work for it haha.
Having this Red, Yellow, and Green Event Strategy in place will help you better manage your time so you can spend more time on helping the shows that really need help and hopefully catch a break with more green shows in order to do so!
Sign up for our Guest List Newsletter and you will automatically receive an email with the Google Sheets link to make a copy of or download the Event Marketing Checklist. From there you can pair down the event marketing checklist into red, yellow, and green events.
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