A concert marketing plan is the written document a promoter or artist team puts together before tickets go on sale, covering ticket targets, creative assets, ad channels, responsibilities and reporting. You write it once the dates and venues are confirmed and before any money is spent on advertising, so every person involved is working from the same page.

Key Takeaways

  • The plan is a document, not a calendar. It answers what you are selling, to whom, with what assets, through which channels, and how you will know if it is working.
  • Write it after the dates are locked but before the on-sale date. If you start spending money without it, you will waste budget on the wrong cities or the wrong audiences.
  • A good plan fits on a few pages. If it is longer than that, nobody on the team will read it.

Why You Need a Written Plan

Most promoters have a version of the plan in their head. The problem is that the person buying ads, the person posting on social media, the artist's manager and the venue's marketing contact all have a different version in their heads. A written plan gets everyone aligned before the first ad goes live.

It also gives you something to measure against. If a show is not selling, you can look at the plan and see whether the issue is the creative, the budget, the audience or the timeline, instead of guessing.

When to Write It

The plan should be finished before the public on-sale date. For a single show, that means writing it as soon as the deal is done, usually four to eight weeks before the event. For a tour with ten or twenty dates, you want it ready even earlier because you need to produce creative assets (photos, video, graphics) and those take time.

We have a separate article on this site about the week-by-week advertising timeline for a concert, which covers when to launch and scale ads. The marketing plan is the document that comes before that timeline. Think of it as the brief that makes the timeline possible.

Section by Section: What Goes in the Plan

Below are the headings you can copy straight into a document. Under each one, I will explain what belongs there.

1. Show Details

Artist name, tour name, date and city for every show, venue name and capacity, ticket price tiers, on-sale date, and any presale dates. This sounds obvious, but having it in one place saves everyone from hunting through email threads.

Include the total number of tickets available per show. That number is your target.

2. Ticket Targets by City

Not every date sells the same way. A hometown show might need very little advertising. A date in a city where the artist has never played might need a lot. Write down, for each city, how many tickets you expect to sell through paid advertising versus organic demand (the artist's own following, venue email lists, word of mouth).

This is the part of the plan that forces you to be honest about where the hard work is. If you have 15 dates and 12 of them are in cities where the artist is not well known, your ad budget and creative needs are very different from a tour where most shows are in stronghold markets.

3. Audience: Who Are You Reaching

Describe the people you want to buy tickets. Age range, where they live (the city the show is in plus a realistic travel radius), what they listen to, and where they spend time online.

For Facebook and Instagram ads, this matters because you will target people in specific cities, and you will often find that the 40-plus audience is where most of the ticket purchases come from on those platforms. Younger audiences tend to convert more through Instagram Stories and through the artist's own channels.

You do not need to write out full ad targeting settings in the plan. That is execution detail, and getting it right takes experience with the ad platforms. What the plan needs is a clear description of who you are trying to reach so whoever runs the ads can build the right audiences.

4. Creative Assets: What You Need and What You Have

List everything you already have: the tour poster, press photos, a trailer, live footage from previous tours, album artwork, quotes from reviews. Then list what you still need to produce.

Good ads for concerts almost always use video. A 15-to-30-second clip with live footage and the tour dates over it will outperform a static poster in most cases. If you do not have video, plan to get some, even if it is just well-edited phone footage from a recent show.

The plan should name who is responsible for producing each asset and when it will be ready. If the video is not finished until two weeks after on-sale, that is two weeks of running ads with weaker creative.

5. Channels: What Does What

Write down every channel you will use and what role it plays. Here is a realistic list for most touring productions:

Facebook and Instagram ads are typically where most of the paid ticket sales come from. You are paying to put the show in front of people in the right city who would not otherwise see it. You can also retarget people who visited the ticket page but did not buy, which is one of the highest-return things you can do. Adsome is a Stockholm-based agency that makes the film and images and runs the Facebook, Instagram and Google ads for touring productions, for artists such as Smokie, Galenskaparna and Christer Sjögren. On Meta ads alone across those three artists, Adsome spent 744,656 SEK (roughly 75,374 USD) and tracked 6,875,257 SEK (roughly 695,911 USD) in ticket sales, with every date sold out.

Google Search ads catch people who are already looking. Someone types the artist's name plus "tickets" or "tour" and your ad appears at the top. This is a small but high-intent audience.

YouTube is where a trailer lives. If you have a strong 30-to-60-second trailer, a YouTube ad campaign can put it in front of the right people in each tour city. It works well alongside Facebook and Instagram because it reaches people in a different moment.

The artist's own social media (organic posts) is free and reaches existing fans. The plan should include how many posts, when, and who writes them.

Venue and promoter email lists reach people who have bought tickets to similar shows before. Note which venues have lists and how far in advance they need the copy.

Press and radio still matter for certain audiences and genres. Note who handles PR and what the timeline is for pitches.

The plan does not need to spell out exact budget splits or bid strategies for each channel. Getting that right is where specialist knowledge of the ad platforms comes in, and it changes week to week based on how sales are going. What the plan does need is clarity on which channels are in play and who is responsible for each one.

6. Budget

Write down the total ad budget for the tour or show. If you do not know an exact number, write a range. Then note how it will be divided across cities. Cities where you expect organic sales to be strong get less. Cities where the artist is less known get more.

A common pattern in Europe is to spend somewhere between 3% and 10% of total potential ticket revenue on advertising, but the right number depends on the artist, the market and the ticket price. This is genuinely one of the harder decisions in tour marketing, and getting the city-by-city allocation right makes a bigger difference than the total number.

Give budget figures in both the local currency and USD or EUR if you are working with international partners.

7. Tracking and Reporting

This section is easy to skip and expensive to leave out. Before ads go live, you need to know:

  • How ticket sales will be tracked back to ads. On Facebook and Instagram, this means having the Meta pixel installed on the ticketing site so that when someone buys a ticket after clicking an ad, the sale shows up in Meta's reporting. Without this, you are spending money blind.
  • How often you will check results. Weekly is the minimum. For a short campaign (two to four weeks), every few days.
  • Who gets the report and what it includes. The promoter, the artist's manager and whoever is running ads should all see the same numbers: amount spent, tickets sold through ads, cost per ticket sold, and how each city is tracking against its target.

8. Responsibilities

For every section above, write one name next to it. Who produces the video? Who sets up the ads? Who sends the venue email blast? Who approves creative before it goes live? If there is no name, that task will not happen.

9. Timeline Milestones

You are not writing the full week-by-week ad schedule here. That is a separate document (and we have an article on this site that covers it). What goes in the plan is five or six key dates: when creative must be ready, when ads launch, when the first progress check happens, when retargeting starts, and when the final push begins.

Common Mistakes

  • No ticket targets by city. If the plan just says "sell out the tour," nobody can tell whether a specific city is behind until it is too late to fix.
  • Waiting for perfect creative. Running no ads while you wait for the ideal video costs more in unsold tickets than running ads with a decent still image and upgrading later.
  • No tracking set up before on-sale. If the Meta pixel is not firing on the ticket page from day one, you lose the data from the first wave of sales, which is often the biggest.
  • Splitting budget evenly across cities. A city where the artist sells out on name alone does not need the same spend as a city where nobody has heard of them. The plan should reflect that.
  • No single owner for each task. If three people think someone else is handling the retargeting ads, nobody sets them up.

Want your next tour to sell out? Adsome makes the film and images and runs the Facebook, Instagram and Google ads for touring productions.