You’re a musician or comedian, so you’ll do everything in your power to get your fans to your shows. So this story should strike a chord:
It’s the day after you played a show in some city, and you make a post on social media thanking them for a great show. But then you get flooded with messages from your fans in that city, lamenting that they missed your show because they didn’t know you were in town.
Frustrating, right? It’s not your fault. Social med ia helps spread the word on your shows, but the algos gatekeep you from your own fans—especially for important stuff like promoting ticket sales.
Email marketing is still the gold standard in direct-to-fan music sales and marketing. But even if you have the patience and expertise to work it, one tour blast is just not relevant enough to alert John in Denver to your Red Rocks show on a particular date.
At Beacons, we heard your stories and thought, this is EXACTLY the type of problem that an integrated creator platform could best solve. So in this guide, we’re going to go over:
1.) The Best Way Collect Location on your Best Fans
2.) How To “Geo-Target” To Promote Shows
3.) How to Use Beacons AI generation to promote shows**
4.) Invite Me To Your Show! (Seriously)
One thing this is not is a defense of email marketing, first-party data and/or direct-to-fan marketing. If you aren’t already convinced of its importance, you’d probably be uninterested in the rest of the words on this page. But if you’ve made it this far, you already know email marketing is the best way to get butts in the door. So let’s get it…
1. The Best Way to Collect Location on Your Best Fans
First: you HAVE to make it easy for your fans to give their location. But you also want enough precision that it’s useful for you. And so you’re left with two bad choices: Most email platforms makes you decide between one or the other:
- Full address, where you’re asking your fans to fill out street, city, state, etc. Very exact location, but you’re probably going to lose more than half of your potential subscribers because, well, ain’t no one got time filling all that out.
- Country Pull Down Menu: Fairly easy for subscriber to give their location, but so imprecise as to be almost useless to you. Especially for fans in big important countries like United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, etc.
Finally, there’s a third way now that combines the best of both worlds.
Introducing: City Auto-Complete by Beacons. It’s so stupid simple… in a good way!
Just one field. Your fan starts typing their city. Within a few keystrokes, their city should pop-up as an automatic suggestion. Ready to submit. It’s that easy.
At a minimum, the elegant user experience will get more of your fans to subscribe.
But the real magic is in the backend. Not to get too technical, but this last bit is super important for us to be able to easily make location based audiences; without the headache of spreadsheets or advanced querying that other email platforms require to do the same. Spoiler-alert, you’ll see the real-life magic of this in the next section “Promote Shows Locally with Geo-Targeting.”
For now, let’s get this thing turned on, shall we?
- Sign in and go to Link-in-bio app (or click this link while signed in)
- Click into Your Email Signup Block to Edit (or Add an Email Signup Block)
- Under the “Form” tab, click “+Add Field”
- You should see four options for location format. Pick the top “City” Autocomplete option
Note: We did not have City autocomplete as an option before April of 2024. If you already had location field enabled before then, you will need to opt into the new option.
Using Beacons gives you other advantages in organizing your audience. When you send marketing emails on Beacons, IP location is recorded when those emails are opened. IP location can be inaccurate and incomplete, so it’s best to not rely on it. It’s always best to actively collect location from your subscribers up front (99%+ accuracy). However, IP location is a great backup for older subscribers you hadn’t already collected location from, so that you can still target them for shows in their area. Coming soon: importing your external contacts with location attached.
Once you start collecting good location data on your subscribers, you are ready to start sending show-specific campaigns…
2. Promote Shows Locally with Geo-Targeting
Let’s say you’ve been collecting good location on your subscriber audience. How do you actually use it?
One obvious and underutilized way is to send “targeted” messaging about a specific show to fans specifically in the area. Scores of marketing research shows that utilizing this kind of “targeted relevance” makes the messaging more “actionable,” leading to higher “conversion rate.” A jargony way of saying, it just works better than a tour promo to your entire list.
Intuitively it makes sense, right? Think of all the pitfalls of the one spray-and-pray tour blast to your entire list or social following. You’re asking your audience to scroll through small font to search for their city and date. Tour announce happens weeks to months ahead of when you run through their city, so they’re unlikely to commit. After that lost moment of intention, you’re relying on great follow-through and memory on the part of the fan to follow through.
Contrast that with an email to your fan John, in Denver, about your Red Rocks Amphitheater show, this Saturday night, evening weather forecast to be warm, and oh by the way, tickets are almost sold out!
Pretty obvious why this email might perform better, right?
If you’ve already tried to promote a show only to subscribers in a certain area with another email marketing platform, you probably quit out of frustration and confusion. If you actually succeeded, it probably required excellent technical skills and persistence.
No longer. With Beacons, we make “geo-targeting” super intuitive and easy. Simply pick your city and mile radius when picking your audience, and that’s it.
Geo-Target Your Audience: Beacon Step-by-Step
Go to the “Broadcast” tab of your Beacons Email Marketing app.
- Start a “New Broadcast” (pro tip, there are email templates to promote a show)
- Create 1. the body of your email and 2. your Subject line.
- In the “Recipients” section of your email build (step 3), you will see the ability to pick a city and radius.
- Complete the steps to send or schedule your perfect geo-targeted email!
3. How to Create Geo-Targeted Marketing Campaigns in 1 Click
The workflow above should take most of the headache out of doing truly targeted show promo. But here’s the thing: even that little bit of headache is unacceptable, amirite?
At Beacons, we’re always searching for ways we can use AI to help you, the artist. And not the other way around. So we built a 1-click way to automate the entire workflow above. Let’s get into it:
The first thing you’ll want to do is import your show dates on our new Tours and Events block in your link in bio. <help doc link coming soon>
Once imported, Beacons will know all the important details of your show: date, location, ticket link, etc. This is where the AI magic begins:
In the admin panel of your Tours and Events block, you should notice this little icon:
Go ahead and give it a click. Once you do, it will generate a fully formatted and optimized email draft in your email marketing app, promoting your show with all the important details. Give it a try!
Once you do, you can review the email draft and make edits as necessary. I recommend uploading a better tour poster at top, as that is a bit tricky to pull from the internet. Then complete the email build flow and send the email blast when you’re ready!
This removes almost all of the grind work required to promote a show. So you can get back to making art!
Keep in mind, this “Show Readymade” feature it still in beta. We have a lot of exciting improvements in store on our product roadmap, including:
- Writing the post in your “voice”, down to your favorite emojis!
- Automatically geo-targeting the recipient audience to the radius of the show.
- Creating AI generated drafts promoting an entire tour or leg of a tour (E.G. The “North American” leg of a tour)
5. Invite me to your show! (Seriously)
Before I joined Beacons, I spent 15 years doing direct-to-fan digital marketing for musicians & comedians. And even for me, properly promoting ticket sales was a pain. These are the tools I wish I had.
I’d love your feedback on all of the above tools. What you like and don’t like, improvements we can make, and whether it worked out for you, etc. You can find me here <link to beacons>.
Next time you have a show in San Francisco, I’d love to come! Set up everything above, let me know, and I’ll sign up for your list! If I’m free, I’m there.
If you need help setting up these features, please do not hesitate to comment here or reach out to me directly. We’re very much in the early days of building these music + comedy tools, so we value every bit of feedback we can get.
See you at your next show!
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