How Entrepreneurs Are Using Festival Marketing Strategies to Build Brands

What You’ll Learn: Find out smart festival marketing strategies and tips on how to implement them for your business. Learn how to use these tactics to build your brand and increase your customer base.

Festival marketing strategies start with researching your target audience. From there, you can learn how to build your brand with merchandise, interactive experiences, influencers and more. Leverage social media and content to build excitement beforehand and connect with people throughout the event. The result can be multi-faceted—think increased engagement, more sales, and better customer engagement. 

Every summer and fall, festivals abound across the country. For many companies, these big events present an incredible opportunity to interact with everyday potential consumers. You can spread the word about your brand while gaining on-the-ground insights. Plus, festivals can be a powerful means to develop social media collateral that’s authentic. But these days, if your company has a presence at a festival, you’ll likely want to do more than hand out free samples.

Get insights into why festivals can be a powerful brand-building and marketing tool. Plus, discover some of the best ways for your company to maximize its presence.  

Why Festivals Attract Entrepreneurial Brands

When people attend a fall or summer festival, it’s because they want to be there. They’re passionate about the music, film, or other cultural moments the festival celebrates. Very often, they’ve paid for a ticket (or at the very least, waited in a lengthy line for entry). 

All that’s to say: Festival attendees are generally engaged and ready to have a good time. However, that’s not the only reason brands may want to engage with this audience. The following festival marketing strategies can also be attractive to companies looking to build their brand.

Drilling Down to Your Demographic

Whether you’re going after Millennial influencers, high-income Gen Xers, or Gen Z or Gen Alpha youth, it’s likely there is a festival that matches that age group. This is also true for other demographics and lifestyle factors. Festivals are a great way to connect with a targeted audience that’s a good match for your brand’s products or services.  

Reaching Lots of People

You can expect a lot of foot traffic at a festival. That means that you won’t have to worry about turning out a crowd; they’ll be there by default. Because most festivals take place in the summer or fall months, the weather also tends to be a bit nicer and won’t necessarily derail the crowds. 

Geography

If you’re interested in expanding into a certain region, you can find a festival there. While there are plenty of festivals in big metro areas, you can also go niche and find festivals in smaller cities and more rural areas. 

Festival Marketing Strategies That Work for Startups

If you’re a startup, you’ll want to use your funds wisely to stand out during your festival appearance. Some proven strategies include: 

Giving Away Your Product—or Swag

Providing people with your product or giving out swag that markets your brand are both tried-and-true methods for gaining customers. Still, at festivals, there may be many brands present, and you can expect that attendees may be somewhat sophisticated and looking for more exciting and immersive activations. (More on that later!) 

Getting Influencers Involved

There are a plethora of ways influencers can help with your presence at the festival. Consider creating a strategic partnership with someone who aligns with your brand. Think of them as priming the pump for attendees; they can post beforehand to raise awareness and excitement that you’ll be at the festival.  They can also be present at your booth or promotional area to help draw in attendees. In addition, they can post after the event, providing their followers with a sense of the excitement around your brand. 

Creating an Interactive Booth or Branded Experience

When it comes to activations, there are few limits for what you can provide to attendees. For example, you can have a glam area, where you provide various beautification services, or a more restful spot where attendees can get massages. 

You could offer live demos of your product or service, or invite guests to do a VR activity. Consider fun photo booths and interactive games or contests. Even practical areas, such as a branded charging or water refill station, can help bring visibility while providing value to festival attendees. Choose the activity and vibe that meshes well with your brand and marketing campaigns. 

Matching the Festival’s Vibe and Energy

Don’t show up to a yoga- and wellness-focused event with samples of Red Bull. It’s just not the right fit. The goal is to match your product or brand with the festival’s vibe.  

The Power of Experiential Marketing for Startups

Anyone can buy an ad on social media—but because there are so many of them running, users can get in the habit of scrolling right by without noticing yours. While experiential marketing reaches fewer people, it can have a far greater impact. After all, people are doing something hands-on. They might be engaging with your brand and its products with their eyes, hands, and ears. That’s far more memorable than two seconds of an ad interrupting an endless scroll. 

Experiential marketing means that you’ll get to interact with potential customers, which can lead to discovering valuable insights and data. Additionally, you’ll stand out from your competitors. Frame your experiential marketing to be something photo- or video-worthy, and you may also gain valuable user-generated content (UGC) to use on social media and other marketing channels.  

Related: Dive into these top 10 marketing books for more strategies.

How Event Marketing Drives Growth Beyond the Festival

A festival is a relatively short event. Many last a single day, perhaps a weekend, or a week at most. The investment may initially seem quite steep until you realize that you can gain benefits that extend beyond the actual days of the event. You can leverage the power of social media marketing and more beyond the festival. Here are some event marketing strategies that will maximize the return on your investment: 

Create Excitement Before the Event

There’s no need for your presence at the festival to be a surprise. In fact, there are many festival marketing strategies you can use in advance. You can market your brand beforehand on social media, where you can reach potential and confirmed attendees. You can announce you’ll be at the festival, give away tickets, tease your activation, and hype up any exciting people who will be joining (e.g., your founder, influencers, and so on). 

Additionally, you can connect with influencers to create posts beforehand and market on other channels (newsletters, ads, and so on). You can also use PR to drive media attention to your presence at the event by placing stories and publishing a press release. While a press release doesn’t necessarily drive much consumer-facing coverage, it can help with your ranking in search. 

Coverage prior to the festival drives excitement and also a sense of your brand’s identity, even to people who aren’t attending the event. That is, your brand is now associated with the festival, which adds to your brand’s identity and sharpens brand knowledge from your core demographic. 

Create Content During and After the Event

You can share behind-the-scenes content (people tend to love this type of exclusive and inside content), as well as reposting user-generated content. You can bank a wide number of photos and videos for use in the future. Don’t shy away from creating a highlight of your photos. 

If you have a buzzy, visual activation, encourage people who stop by your activation or area to take photos and engage with it. Be sure that it’s clear how they can follow and tag you on social media. Getting tagged at a festival widens the attention on your brand to the friends and followers of attendees. 

Gain Insights and Contact Information at the Event

While you’re at the festival, seize opportunities to interact with attendees. During a conversation, you can gain firsthand market insights into how people react to your product or service as well as what they see as differentiators. Perhaps you’ll even learn about features they’d like. 

As well as gaining market insights, do everything you can to collect email addresses—this will allow you to add festival attendees to your email marketing streams. At some festivals, you may receive a list of attendees’ emails based on your contract. You can also aim to collect them in your own activation. 

Choosing the Right Fall or Summer Festival for Your Brand

If your company sells yoga mats, a heavy-metal festival likely isn’t the right fit. Similarly, if you’re promoting a youth-focused app, a festival aimed at Grateful Dead followers isn’t the best venue for promotion. The point is: You’ll want to select a festival that will have an audience that’s the right fit for your target demographic. That’s just one of many factors to consider. You’ll also want to assess: 

• Budget: Consider your budget and the cost of attending the festival. Costs can easily add up. Consider travel to and from the event, the cost of your activation, promotion beforehand, boosting content afterward, the cost of product samples and staffing, and all the myriad other charges that’ll accumulate. 
• Brand positioning: Again, you’ll want to promote your brand at an event that’s a match for your company’s core demographic. You’ll also want to ensure that it’s a good way to put forward your brand’s value and differentiators. You won’t want to attend a festival that might get wrapped up in any scandal or news stories, which would take the place of your brand in attendees’ memories. 

Budgeting and Logistics for Festival Activations

As mentioned above, there are quite a few of costs involved in attending a festival as a brand. Some of these will vary depending on your specific activation. Consider the following when planning your attendance at an event: 

1. Meet With the Festival Organizers

They can help walk you through some timing matters, such as the load-in and load-out dates, insurance and permit requirements, the electrical available at your activation site, and so on. 

2. Determine Your Budget

Knowing your budget can help you know what’s feasible and what’s out of scope. It’ll help steer your plans. 

3. Develop Your Activation Plan

Maybe you’re going to have a booth with a claw machine holding your products, or a table where you offer free samples. You might want to have a person—whether that’s your CEO, an influencer, or a mascot—present to draw in attendees. You’ll want to develop a strategy to get festival attendees to interact with your team/product, get a good sense of your product and services, and discern what next steps you want attendees to take after the interaction. Use this framework to develop your activation. 

4. Set Your Activation in Motion

Consider how you want your activation space to look, your key messaging and marketing collateral needs, and so on. Procure supplies and set up staffing accordingly. During this process, it might be helpful to check in with the festival organizers for a gut check and to ensure you’re meeting all of their needs. 

5. Think About Your Post-Festival Strategy

The days of the festival are just a small piece of the puzzle. It’s best to have a plan in place for leveraging any emails you collect, using footage and photos, and sharing learnings from interactions with potential customers with your wider team. Plan to send an event recap to the team and plot out these strategic elements. 

Related: Check out our Goal-Setting Ebook to advance your business goals.

Measuring the Impact of Festival Branding Efforts

Some of the key performance indicators that attending the festival has been helpful to your brand include: 

• Website visits
• Increases to your social media follower count 
• Engagement with your social media accounts 
• Increases in sales 
• An uptick in leads 

Festival Marketing Can Help Build Your Brand

A festival is a brief moment in time, but for your brand, investing in having a presence at these events can offer a bevy of benefits. These range from the opportunity to gain insights into customers to growing your social media following to connecting with your core demographic and amplifying your brand. The key to success: Start with a plan, and make sure to craft a strong event marketing strategy. You may just find yourself providing your brand with a big lift in terms of lead generation, clout on social media, and beyond.  

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