Facebook invitations could work if you’ve developed a relationship with your audience and learned that they wish to be engaged on Facebook versus email. Also, if all you do is send out an impersonal ‘come to my gig’ type invitation, don’t expect people to drop everything to go.

Timing as well – I have one friend that sends me a gig invite perhaps two days before a show. That might be enough time for others, but not me. Is your audience able to attend a show with short notice?

These are the types of things that musicians need to be interested in discovering if they want to get more people out to their shows. If they don’t learn about their audience they’ll be hard pressed to provide valuable experiences.

How do you learn this stuff? By caring about your fans, engaging, interacting and measuring the results.

Marketing is part art and science, it needs to be tweaked for a particular audience to have maximum effect. You can try it once and write it off or you can start out knowing that you’re not going to get it right on the first try and commit yourself to caring enough about what the people who will pay to see you want to find out what will eventually work the best.

It’s a hard slog, but the alternative is to make little progress and play an endless stream of sparsely attended shows.

Getting sixty people to take time out of their day to come to a show is a success I think. Build from there!

I’m very glad you commented, because this proves the point of my article. Advertising, at least alone, largely doesn’t work. In this case, you didn’t pay to take out an ad (so at least you used guerilla techniques!), but fliers and e-mail/Facebook invites were largely ineffective. Which means you need to expand your concept of marketing and how to engage an audience.

Yes, it can take time to build a following. But many groups take years and still don’t build their fan base.

It’s also possible to immediately generate a large interest. But to do this takes creative marketing efforts and a compelling, “purple” product.

We found it a real struggle. We sent emails, created Facebook invitations, left flyers in a bunch of likely places, and in the end we had around 60 people attend the concert… which isn’t bad, but it’s hard to know what makes the difference between 60 and 100, or 100 and 200.

There’s obviously more we could have done (for example, we could have tried to make a story of the fact that we had a premiere on the program), but this whole area still feels very much like a black art.

Part of me says that it just takes time to build an audience, to develop a relationship with a group of people that means they’re interested in your music and want to hear it – but I’d definitely be interested to hear your thoughts on this, and whether there are any short cuts.