White Oak Music Hall's Ashley Dawson on Effective Event Marketing, Maximizing Word of Mouth, and more

One of the benefits of working at White Oak Music Hall – the multi-venue live complex just north of downtown Houston that hosts more than 400 shows a year – is that you have the opportunity to see your favorite acts play. For marketing manager Ashley Dawson, that act is Anthony Green, solo artist and vocalist with Circa Survive, Saosin and L.S. Dunes.

“He's my favorite artist of all time,” says Dawson, who when not marketing shows is busy fronting alt-rock outfit Chancla Fight Club. “But I'd say also Glass Animals on The Lawn [White Oak’s outdoor stage]. That was incredible. We had Pierce the Veil on The Lawn, and I loved that.”

Here, Dawson discusses her marketing strategies at White Oak Music Hall, getting the most out of their social media channels, customer behavior trends, utilizing street teams, and much more…

How do you get the most out of your social media channels when you're marketing an event?

I think just understanding who you're targeting and how to target them. So younger shows, the Gen Z shows, we're not going to spend a lot of time on Facebook for those – Gen Z's not on Facebook. So we're spending more time on TikTok, more time on Instagram. But with country shows, Facebook is a really good place for that. So I think it's just understanding who you're trying to reach and then using the social media accordingly.

Are there certain kinds of content that work well on TikTok and Instagram in particular?

Video works really well for TikTok, but organic video. People don't want to look at an ad when they're on TikTok, so making it as organic as possible is really good. Video works really well on Instagram, too. But the thing that does the best on Instagram is our fan photos – we’ll do recaps of fans. And those always do really well.

Do you have a photographer taking those images, or are you just scouring Instagram for people who have tagged you?

We have a house photographer. We're actually lucky because our marketing assistant is a wonderful photographer. Her name is Keylee.

So it's not so much the photos of the artists that resonate, it's more the photos of the crowd?

Yes. We want to prioritize getting fan photos for sure over artist photos. Definitely we still want to get a couple of artist photos. But the priority is capturing the fans. How fun is that – you go and have the best time of your life, and then you're scrolling Instagram, you see your face. People love it.

How do you try and recapture and remarket to those people? Or is it more about White Oak awareness and brand?

I think it's awareness and brand. We really want to be a local staple. We just want to showcase our community.

Are there certain ways White Oak tries to involve itself with the surrounding community?

Yes, we do. We do a yearly benefit show. And we've done blood drives, we've done food drives, we've done tree drives, like giving away trees and plants. I'm really proud to work at White Oak.

You mentioned that Facebook is really powerful for country music – do you find that certain genres resonate across different channels better?

Definitely. In general, we have different plans for different genres. With metal, for example, we use Facebook for that, because there's a lot of metal Facebook groups. So we'll post in the Facebook groups, and we'll do giveaways in the Facebook groups and stuff like that.

Where would you go for hip-hop?

It would really vary on that one, because we have younger hip-hop, and then we have Z-Ro coming. He's older Houston hip-hop. So I would probably do more Facebook, Instagram for that.

But then the younger hip-hop artist, I'd want to do more Instagram, Tik Tok, and probably some partnerships.

We need to have partners that have the reach for people that are into that. And we'd have to make sure our targeting is really good for our ads.

How important is your mailing list when you're marketing your shows?

Our mailing list is very important. We're able to target by genre and past buyers and frequent show buyers, past buyers of affinity artists.

I feel like the email list is really low hanging fruit because if you're on our email list, you know who we are. You like us enough to have subscribed to our email list. And it's just a direct link from the venue to the fan without the social media algorithm standing in the way or mistargeting.

So I think that email is very important.

You’ve got 400 events annually at White Oak Music Hall. It must be a really fine line between making sure that the people you are emailing aren’t getting blasted every day with event after event. How big a role does segmentation play in that?

It plays a huge role. We go by genre, past buyers, and affinity artists.

We wouldn't email past Gary Allan buyers about 100 gecs coming to the venue, you know. So, yeah, it's very specific.

Do you have an example of an execution that's worked with your SMS messaging recently?

With SMS, we use it pretty scarcely, and it's got to have a call to action on it. We won't just say, “Hey, guess what, this is happening.” We will say, “Hey, here's a presale code. Here's a ticket link.”

We've also used it in urgent situations – for example, we had boygenius, and the doors kept getting pushed back because of weather. So that was a situation where we needed to make sure that [the audience] knew what was happening. 

So we use SMS in situations like that. We’re kind of picky about when we use it.

What have you found to be really effective ways of creating FOMO?

Urgent messaging is a good one: “Don't miss out! Get your tickets before it's too late!” And just showing people how much fun it is being at our venue, so that when we're saying, “You're not gonna want to miss this”, they'll know that they don't want to miss it.

And we always post low ticket alerts and sold out posts. I think that helps, too, because we'll sell out pretty often. And people that are following us are aware of that.

Word of mouth is also a big driver of ticket sales. Do you have any techniques for encouraging word of mouth?

Yes, we implement our street team. And we really lean into giveaways as well.

So we'll do like, “Tag two friends on this post to win.” And we work with local businesses. And that really helps.

We have a pretty large street team, and we have them post about it in the most organic way. You know like, “Oh my gosh, I can't believe that [this artist] is coming to White Oak.” So I think that's helpful.

So it's almost influencer marketing in that way? Or is that different with the street teams?

I think for our digital street team, yes, it's very similar to that. We do have traditional street teams as well. And they take posters and calendar flyers every month to around 200 businesses.

So those are the two different forms of street team.

The street team is a pretty big part of our marketing strategy, especially when it comes to lawn shows. We’ll have them exit flyer at other shows that are relevant. And also, again, it's that sense of community, because we have a very large street team, and we'll all meet up together once a month, and the venue will pay for pizza or whatever.

And then we'll walk over to the venue together and watch a show. And I think that's just really exciting for people. We're giving them the chance to be involved with live music, and we're giving them the opportunity to get free tickets. It's such a mutually beneficial and fun relationship to have.

One of the trends at the moment is people buying tickets late. Is there anything you can do to mitigate that? Any techniques that you've found really work in terms of trying to get people to buy a little earlier?

We’re already a pretty heavy walk-up market. But we've seen that happen a lot more across all genres.

But I think to try and nullify that, again, urgent messaging is really important. And we do a lot more reminder posts as well.

But we have so many shows that it's impossible to do that for all of our shows. But we do try and just remind people that this event is happening, especially as it's coming up close to the event.

Do you have a technique for figuring out, okay, this show’s maybe not doing so great so we need to dedicate some more resources to this, as opposed to, this show is doing really well, so I think we'll just be able to sit on that one? How do you manage that when you have so many shows?

[Concert marketing platform] Sparrow! Before Sparrow we were using Airtable, and that was fine. But I didn't know how wonderful life could be until we had Sparrow!

You get a quick glance of what shows need help. And everything's in there. So we're able to see what our estimated attendance is, where we're at with ticket sales. It's in chronological order, it's just so helpful.

And we have automated tasks in Sparrow too. So we'll get a task when a show is two months out, one month out, like check in on the show. That’s when we'll go in and be able to look at these individual shows and see like, where are we at? Do I need to change anything? Looking at our ads and seeing, is this working or is there something we need to change?

But overall, the answer is Sparrow. I highly recommend it to anyone who's in event marketing.

Beyond buying late, are you noticing any other trends in customer behavior at the moment?  

People don't just go out to venues without knowing who they're gonna see anymore.

It's kind of rare for someone to be like, “Hey, I'm just gonna go see what's happening at White Oak.” They want information ahead of time. So keeping our Stories up, and who's coming tonight, that's a quick and easy way to help with that.

I think that's a big one, where people just want to have a plan ahead of time instead of just going to see what's up.

Do you think fan expectations of venues have changed over the years? As ticket prices have gone up, are people expecting a nicer place with better amenities? And if so, do you try and reflect that in the marketing?

I definitely think so. I mean, if somebody is choosing to spend their money to come to one of our events, we really want to make sure that they have a great time. And we're really prompt in our customer service.

So for example, if somebody wants set times, I'll give it to them. They want to know what time their favourite artist’s coming on, I'm gonna let them know.

And our onsite staff are really friendly and helpful. And we just try to make sure that their experience is the best it can possibly be.

How can promoters and artists make your life easier?

Making sure we have the assets we need.

And this might be a hot take. But I think something that makes my job easier, or our graphic designer’s job easier, is when bands do press photos where there's five of them standing up, and one of them is sitting on the floor – those are so hard to work with!

We have to figure out how we fit everybody in. Or some of our messaging is covering up someone's face. It's not a big deal, but it's smoother. We can make it work if we have to.

When you're advertising through Facebook or you're posting on Facebook or Instagram, how important is a call to action? Will you always have the ticketing link in all of your messaging?

It's really important when we are talking about a specific show, to always have a call to action for those.

But then we do some other things where we wouldn't have the ticket link. Like we do local spotlights or recaps of things. So we won't have the ticket link in there. But in general, yeah, we make sure we want to make it easy for the fan to buy a ticket, we don't want to make them have to search for it.

Visit White Oak Music Hall here. Follow Ashley on LinkedIn here.