The result
- Multiple sold out events
- High-performing function lead funnel
- Marketing system for weekly events with monitoring system
- High-converting website
Case Study
Hound & Stag Brewing Co New Venue - Full House
We were engaged to help a new brewery in an industrial area with an amazing live music space and world-class food service become a destination for all these things in the local community.
Our roles
We were the plug-in digital marketing team handling all paid digital media as well as providing a guiding role for the in-house organic social media team and internal system creation.
The brief
Create and execute a strategy for people in the area to consider this venue located in an industrial area, as their new go-to venue for drinks, food and gigs.
The challenges
- Starting from a very small social following.
- People are creatures of habit, and changing their ‘local’ venue was a challenge.
- No past sold-out shows to help drive urgency to buy early tickets.
How we did it
We created different strategies for the elements of the business that needed it. We knew that once people set foot in the venue they would be blown away as the owners left no stone unturned. Everything from the food quality, the sound system for bands and the aesthetic of the building was of the highest level. With confidence in the retention of the venue – our goals settled around that first visit.
1: Ticketed Events
The venue had a broad range of acts booked that we marketed individually across Facebook and Instagram. After establishing a cost per ticket sold, we advised budgets for each show that matched the sales outcome of the owners. Our goal was to get to our first sold-out show as quickly as possible so as to attach the notion that ‘This venue sells out, don’t wait to grab tickets’. We achieved this early in the piece with a tribute act, and shortly after, another event sold out. This positively affected the launch sales of all shows that followed.
2: What’s On Weekly
We were given a weekly budget to apply to the various themed nights happening Mon-Sun such as Trivia, Bingo and Food specials like Parmigiana night. We created a time-boxed ad schedule to set ads live across the week at relevant times for the audiences and split test creatives to see what connected. We also created a Google Sheet tracking system to measure the ultimate frequency of a themed event, such as Trivia in a monthly cycle uncovering valuable insights for venue planning in a 3 month period.
3: Function Bookings
The venue boasts a range of spaces perfect for functions of any occasion so we implemented a multi-stage funnel across Facebook, Instagram and Google to attain leads for the internal bookings team. With such strong visual venue aesthetic, we advised on specific video content that included text overlay with venue highlights and strong calls to action. It did not take long for the leads to roll through to the bookings team, where we helped implement a system for quick callbacks and follow-ups.
4: New Website
We noticed an unusual dropoff in the lead ads at the venue website and were given to go ahead to create a more intuitive website that catered for people making a high ticket item decision such as a function booking and also conveyed the energy of the other aspects of the business. In addition to this, the client wanted a site that could be updated by their staff and did not need a web developer. Our in-house team designed and delivered a new site that showed an instant uptick in conversions for functions and an easy-to-update backend. Automations were included to hide events after they had finished, and form submissions were delivered directly to their CRM.
Takeaways & Learnings
We work with 120+ venues nationally, and one common factor of venues that succeed, aside from the passion of the people within the business, is the willingness to set realistic budgets for the goals they want to achieve.
Digital marketing uniquely provides the ability to exact a cost per purchase which can then be matched with the desired outcome to create a realistic budget. The Hound n Stag team understood this concept from day one and rather than giving a static budget that had no relation to the goal, we crunched the data with them and then set the correct budget, and most times – hit the target outcome!
Services engaged
- Performance marketing across Meta
- Performance marketing across Google and YouTube
- Strategy and consultation
- Copywriting
- Data analysis
- Internal systems creation for measurement
- Web development and integrations
