A cultural event is found before it is attended. The poster in the window, the press release, the social post: all of them work only if someone was already looking, or already follows you. The part of the job that brings new people is quieter, and it is the part that is usually left for last.
1. What cultural marketing is not
It is not a poster with a date on it. It is not a press release sent the week before. It is not a boosted post that disappears on Monday.
Those are distribution, and distribution is the last step. Before it, there are three questions that decide whether the event will be found at all: what it is, who it is for, and where the person who is looking will find it.
2. The four questions of a plan
A cultural marketing plan can be written on one page:
- What is the event, in one sentence a stranger understands?
- Who is it for: tourists, residents, schools, a profession, a community?
- Where does that person look, when they are planning: search, a local listing, an association, a hotel concierge, a friend?
- How will we know if it worked: visits to the page, bookings, people at the door?
If the fourth answer is "likes", the plan is not a plan.
3. The page that stays
Every event needs one address that does not change when the campaign ends: the title, the dates, the place on a map, the programme, the price, the booking link. A page that stays is read by search engines for years; a post is read for a day.
The page does three jobs at once: it is the destination of every channel, the memory of the event after it closes, and the proof, for a funder or a partner, that the event existed and was public.
4. The channels, in order
- The page first, because every other channel points to it.
- The place: the venue, the neighbourhood, the city page. An event linked to its place is found by people who are already planning to be there.
- The local network: associations, schools, hotels, guides, other institutions. It is the slowest and the most effective.
- Email, to the people who already asked to hear from you. It is the only channel you own.
- Social, with the link where people can click it. It is a reminder, not a discovery channel.
- Paid, last and with a criterion written before: what counts as success, and when the money stops.
The order matters: paying to send people to a page that does not exist is the most expensive way to learn that the page was missing.
5. The measurement
Three numbers, read every week, not every day:
- visits to the event page, by source;
- bookings or registrations, by source;
- people at the door, compared with the bookings.
Likes and impressions are not in the list, not because they are useless, but because they do not tell you whether the event worked.
6. What the archive adds
Publishing here costs nothing and has no ceiling: the event goes into the archive, onto the map and onto the city pages, where travellers read it while planning. 5,635 events are already published (figures measured on 22 October 2026), and yours can be next.
The Organiser plan, at 149 dollars a year, adds the organiser page, the whole programme in one place and the link to your ticket page. The free account is enough to start.
Publish your first event with a free account, and keep the programme together with the Organiser plan, 149 dollars a year: /organiser/
