Talent Unlimited — Music Futures Festival

In 2016, I worked with London music charity Talent Unlimited on the launch of its Music Futures Festival at Asia House, that programmed seven shows across four days, with three performances per show, featuring almost 30 young classically trained musicians.

The goal was simple: sell out the festival while building an audience Talent Unlimited could keep.

The Challenge

Talent Unlimited is a charity supporting exceptional young musicians as they make the difficult transition from training at some of the world's leading music schools (think the Royal College of Music in London) into professional careers.

This is often a challenging time for any musician: post-training, pre-career.

That meant many of the performing musicians had limited name recognition, despite being extraordinary players capable of performing the works of Chopin, Beethoven and Mozart at an exceptional level.

And if we think musicians can be resistant to social media, that was nothing compared with the world of classical music in 2016. Social media wasn't necessarily seen as particularly highbrow – or even particularly relevant to building a serious classical career.

So, selling tickets based on a list of unfamiliar names wasn't going to work.

The question became: how do you communicate to an audience that this will be worth their time?

The Strategy

Using Promogogo, the product I was working on at the time, I developed the digital marketing and audience strategy with Talent Unlimited.

Rather than relying on name recognition of the performers (the most traditional way to sell tickets), we built the campaign around the quality of the experience itself — giving potential audiences enough context to understand what the festival was, while making it easy for those interested to explore further.

We created a simple digital structure made up of a collection of landing pages:

Festival
→ 7x shows
→ 3x performances per show
→ each performance performed by a solo/duo performer

The main festival page gave an overview of all seven shows. Each show had its own page presenting the three performances on its programme, with each performance featuring one or more musicians. Each musician then had an individual page telling their story, including their biography, photos and performance videos.

Instead of asking an audience to take a chance on an unfamiliar name, the repertoire became the experience they were being invited into.

Once the assets were built, the campaign became deliberately simple: systematically put each landing page in front of the audience throughout the run-up to the festival.

The Result

All seven shows sold out.

Around 300 people attended, bringing the festival to full capacity.

The campaign generated more than 18,000 engagements, while Talent Unlimited's Facebook audience grew 45% in just over three months.

But the social metrics weren't the objective.

The objective was to get people into the room.

And they came.

Passing It On

As part of the festival, I hosted a workshop for Talent Unlimited's musicians: “Why Social Media Is Important for Musicians”.

Rather than teaching them how to post on Facebook or what to say on Twitter, I talked about how to think about their professional identity online, and how the internet could give an audience somewhere to discover their work after encountering them for the first time.

Here are my notes from the talk at the time:

## You As A Person VS You As A Brand

If you are pursuing a career a as a musician and you want to be taken seriously, you need to have something for the audience to find.

What I will talk about is how to think about yourselves as musicians.

So if we take an example, of this musician – let's say this is a man named George. George has got three kids, a dog, and is really interested in sailing.

He is also a musician. He posts videos of his performances online and he does shows.

Now for the audience – the people that like the songs – they might not have any interest in his three kids or his dog. They don't like sailing. They have no interest in him particularly as a person. They just like his music.

Same for you. Your audience, they don't want to creep on your lives.

They just want to see your music videos, and know if you're doing any shows. That's all they want.

The way to think about this, is that you are basically two people now. You are you as you, with your adorable niece and family and friends that want travel updates and all those normal things. Then there is you as the musician. You the musician post all of your music related updates in the same place so the audience can find all of it with ease.

How this works on Facebook, is you have your Facebook profile for all your friends and family stuff if you use it. Then you have a Facebook page for all your music stuff.

Not all your friends are interested in your music, and your audience will be uncomfortable with creepin on your personal profile.

Creating this seperation of yourself is actually freeing, because if you have a lot of music stuff happening, you have a place to post it without spamming your entire network. The only people that will see it, are those who have actively asked for it.

## Okay. So how does this work in practise?

To promote this festival, I put together a little plan we've been following.

The aim is to bring people in to see the performances. This is not an easy task in general, but it makes it much harder when you have a new festival like this one, and you also have musicians who are relatively unknown.

If I had to do the exact same thing for Glastonbury, I'd just say "oh, just tell people it's Glastonbury". People already know what Glastonbury is. They buy tickets before the lineup is announced, because they trust the judgement of the organisers to deliver on an experience consistent with previous years.

That's not we were working with.

We are working with a Facebook page that had 611 likes in June when we started seriously working on this festival. I have looked up every single musician online for this festival, and [ARTIST NAME] is the only one that has an online presence to speak of.

So I knew if we would just publish a list of the musicians’ names, that would convey no information to the audience – even if they would sit and google 30 different musician names. They'd just come up empty, and maybe buy tickets to [THAT ONE ARTIST’S] performance.

So that's out.

But I know the quality of the Talent Unlimited musicians. I know that musicians of this caliber attract an audience.

So how can we communicate to the audience – this will be worth your time.

So here's how you do it: you need to have all the information that's available about all of these musicians accessible to the audience.

This is why we emailed the participating musicians to send us bibliographies, photos, YouTube videos, and the whole lot.

For this festival what we needed was to lay out all the information about the festival in an organised way. We needed to not just tell the audience what was happening and when – but who are these musicians performing?

So what the audience now has, is a) a clear outline of what's happening. and b), and this is key – the ability to explore the programme on their own.

If they can't make it today to see [ARTIST NAME], that's fine. They might like pianists, so they might see that on the evening of the 28th, there will be three pianist performing together!

Excellent! that hypothetical person might think to themeselves – let me check who these musicians are.

By going to the event pages there is the programme they can access, and they even have a video of each musician so they can see if they like their style.

And now the festival is sold out.

## How This Applies To You

What you have is an incredible skill and talent you've been honing for years. Your commitment to the craft is from what I've seen world class.

Being on social media is about bringing that to the world. People spend an incredible amount of time on the internet, and what they like is something that is amazing or beautiful or makes their lives a little bit better.

You already have the skill and talent.

The internet is at your fingertips, and is always hungry for more.

Use it to your advantage. Invite people in. Share what you do with the world. They will listen, if you let them.

Read:What Using Promogogo Can Look Like For You — Promogogo case study