How to promote your market
Updated 27 August 2026
Market promotion has an unfair advantage most businesses would kill for: dozens of stallholders whose livelihoods improve when you succeed, and local media for whom a market is exactly the story they exist to run. Most organisers underuse both and overspend on the channel that rents its reach back to them one boosted post at a time.
One page that's always right
Every channel you promote on should point at one URL where the dates are always current — because "is it on this weekend?" is the whole question, and a Facebook page last updated in March answers it wrongly. Your StallsApp market page carries your upcoming dates with machine-readable event markup, which is what lets search engines and AI assistants answer "when is the market on?" with your page as the source — and it shows a cancelled day as cancelled the moment you call it. There's a calendar feed shoppers and stallholders can subscribe to, so your dates land in their calendars without either of you doing anything again.
Your stallholders are the distribution
Forty stalls with a thousand followers each out-reach any market account. Make promoting you effortless: announce the lineup before each market and tag everyone in it, hand stallholders a good photo of their own stall from your last market, and tell them their site number so their "come find us Saturday" posts finish the job. Stallholders promote markets where they had a good day — which means the deepest promotion budget is the one you spend making market days good.
Build the list you own
Social reach is rented; an email list is yours. Collect opt-ins where people already interact with you — StallsApp asks at stall application and at ticket checkout, keeps the consent records, and handles unsubscribes properly, with email campaigns available on the Standard plan and up. Cadence matters more than polish: a short note before each market day — what's new, who's trading, one photo — beats a monthly newsletter assembled out of duty.
Local media still shows up
Council what's-on calendars, community radio, the local paper's weekend guide and regional tourism sites all list markets free, and all of them prefer a story to a listing: the new season, the hundredth market, the stallholder with the odd backstory. Send good photos — the difference between a listing and a feature is usually the picture. These placements also compound quietly: being named on council and tourism sites is exactly the citation trail that makes search engines and AI assistants treat your market as established.
Measure it like you mean it
Ask every new stallholder where they heard about you — it's one application question, and it's your entire marketing attribution. If you sell entry tickets, presales tell you a promotion worked while there's still time to double down before the day.
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