Someone asked me this week why any venue would want to advertise through Peoria Music Live. I gave him a pretty thorough answer and realized not enough people know these things… so I’m sharing it here.
This is specifically about paid sponsorships for venues. I’ll address cohosting and additional promoting of events, as well as small business sponsorships in different posts. (Combining cohosting and sponsorship is the best way to go!)
We’ve raised the bar, so now others will need to as well
After 6.5 years, a huge percentage of the music-watching population knows to come to PML to get their information. But with everyone adding us as a co-host – we've now made getting on our events list “the ground floor” for publicly promoting music events in the area.
So how does a specific venue stand out and grab the attention of the people who are sifting through 50 shows in the next 3 days within an hour radius?
The answers are being top of mind and being familiar, and we can help with both of those.
You want to reach our 20,000+ followers
In the grand scheme of things, 20,000 doesn't sound like a lot when there are influencers all over social media with followers in the millions. However, if you look at the numbers as a percentage of the possible audience, you’ll see we're close to 10% of the adults within an hour of Peoria who could actually follow us... that's amazing.
What other media company is followed by 10% of the people who could possibly like them and be influenced by them? Very few, if any.
Not only do we have 20,000 followers, we haven’t paid to grow our followers artificially. Almost all of them are local live music lovers with some level of expendable income.
Our followers are also highly engaged. They chose to follow PML and interact often. If they didn’t want to see our content, they would stop following us because event posts and live videos are annoying if they have nothing to do with what they want to see. Our videos typically have a 10-30% engagement rate.
Your advertising dollars will go farther
There are other forms of advertising that many venues are already using. The biggest two are social media companies and radio. I am not saying that we should replace either of those, but here is some info to compare and contrast.
Social media companies are likely good at what they do, or they wouldn’t be able to keep doing it. However, they utilize your Facebook page (or other social media accounts) to get information out about your business, advertising mostly to your current followers while trying to bring in more.
We are actively advertising to our followers, mentioned above, letting them know why they should come to you, effectively bringing you new people at a lower CAC. (Customer Acquisition Cost)
When it comes to radio, my observation is this: Very few venues play only one genre of music. But radio stations almost always do. So when venues pay for radio ads, they pay to advertise to a specific genre's audience. This might help increase awareness for a specific show, but it won't convince anyone else to go there.
Because PML covers everything, we are reaching people who don’t realize they like a certain genre. People who would never listen to an oldies station may hear a cover band do a couple of oldies on our page and start making plans to see them. They come for the Matt Miller and stay for the Chicago Farmer or the 3 Mile High, not caring about genres - just loving that they get to experience music they haven’t experienced before.
You want our followers to become familiar with you
While venue packages include extra promotion of shows, that’s not the real purpose of sponsorship.
Being a PML sponsor is about having your name plastered all over a popular trusted local brand, Peoria Music Live. By telling people about your sponsorship, we are saying, “This venue not only supports live music by having bands in, but they are supporting PML who directly supports artists and fans. They care about the music scene here.”
Lastly, our packages include things like extra blog posts, Facebook posts, IG posts, etc – not necessarily about upcoming shows, but about the venue.
When I first started PML, there were a few venues that I would always leave fairly quickly… and for one particular reason. I had never been in there with the lights up and I didn’t know where to find the bathroom. I have a great camera system that I can use to walk through your building inside and out. I would love for that not to be a problem anyone who follows Peoria Music Live ever has to face again. (It’s more common than you think!)
We can also make posts with food to try, highlighting friendly staff faces, or any other things like these that will make people more likely to visit your venue.
If you are interested in finding out more, reach out to Mike…
If sponsorship isn’t in the budget at the moment, keep us in mind for the future and consider donating a couple of gift cards for us to use for giveaways.
Giveaways will help fuel our Green Room subscriptions and special event promotions and we’ll always mention a venue any time we do a giveaway with one of their gift cards.