Booking & Touring
Success Strategies & Secrets
On Thursday I shared a touring pattern with you that you can use to expand out from your home base of support and build a solid regional fan base. The Expansion Touring Pattern is one that allows you to use your Prosperity Touring Pattern as a template and create market demand in an ever widening circle.
Now I’d like to introduce a slightly different pattern strategy. The Seasonal Touring Pattern
continues to build upon the previous two patterns and takes it to yet another level. As you expand
your touring markets, you will find that planning to tour in certain markets at specific times of the
year makes touring a great deal more efficient. When planned properly, you may benefit from the
Season Touring Pattern in the following 5 ways.
Touring Pattern # 3: Seasonal Touring Pattern
1. Advance Planning of Where & When to Tour
When you structure your year seasonally, you decide in advance what parts of your ever widening touring areas to play during which months of the year. This allows you to avoid most bad weather spots and enjoy smoother travel to sunnier climates in their optimum seasons. This alone can impact audience numbers, types of venues you play and travel hazard avoidance. When getting from one part of the country to another, these factors make a huge difference in your bottom line.
2. Recurring Return Dates
When you return to the same area at the same time of each year, you establish an easy routing pattern to follow. This provides booking momentum and regularity. You know where you’ll be during each season, so it is easier to continue to expand regionally every year adding a few more dates to surround the ones you normally play.
3. Builds Audience Anticipation
When you return to the same places at the same time each year, your audiences begin to expect you and look forward to that time of year. If it’s October then you must be in the Northeast, for example. Those fans anticipate your upcoming gigs with regularity. This builds larger, loyal audiences.
4. Creates Media Anticipation
When you are a seasonal regular, the media are more apt to latch on to that regularity and give you coverage. If you’ve built your media relationships during the first two pattern stages, then at this point you’ve become a welcome habit they will look forward to writing and or talking about.
5. Booking Return Gigs is Easier
I’ve saved the best for last. If you know your Seasonal Touring Patterns, then when you are
are getting paid at the end of your gig in October in Hartford, you can whip out the old calendar
and say, “I’ll be back next year same time, what date would you like next year.” Now we are talking
booking momentum! If you do that all along your tour route this year, then you’ve already got a tour
building up for next year. This one benefit alone can eliminate that empty calendar syndrome I know
you hate.
I hope you begin to use this Seasonal Touring Pattern to create booking momentum, travel ease along with fan and media anticipation.
Look for the 4th Touring Pattern soon but for now look at your calendar and see if you can start right away to implement a seasonal approach to your bookings. It will give your bookings a boost not to mention momentum.
Let me know how this works for you. It was one of the most effective strategies I used to book my acts.
Leave me a comment below on this post.
If you would like more touring tips and strategies, just sign up and receive my free audio recording
5 Top Tips to Plan Great Tours .
Cheers,
Jeri Goldstein