Revolution Live Aces Audience Targeting with ToneDen
Sure, you could have a good time in Fort Lauderdale (it’s home to the International Swimming Hall of Fame, after all), but wouldn’t you rather have a damn good time? At Revolution Live, a multi-tiered indoor club that hosted Lady Gaga when she was still more Stefani Germanotta, that damn good time is basically guaranteed.
“The artists we have playing next weekend could be playing arenas next year,” says Cristina Mariani, Marketing Manager for Revolution Live. One of four properties in the Damn Good Hospitality Group family, Revolution Live has a fourteen-year history and a commitment to featuring incredible talent, regardless of genre. Glance at their lineup and you’re likely to see anyone from Lupe Fiasco to the Pixies.
Fans can watch performers from the balconies or the pit, but Mariani’s insider tip will ensure an unbeatable view. “One of my hidden favorite things about the venue is you can actually walk from the side of the stage on the second floor,” she says. “If you open those curtains, there’s a single standing spot, where you’re in between the speakers, exactly in line with the band. I take social media videos from there a lot.”
A former performer, Mariani has time to capture videos of the talent at their peak thanks to ToneDen. “Definitely, as a one-person marketing show for Revolution, anything that can make things is a little bit easier is always worth it for me. That’s a huge part of what’s helpful.”
“Exponential Improvement”
The main thing that ToneDen makes easier for marketers like Mariani is measuring. With a degree in Music Business and experience working for Live Nation, she understands the value in being on top of your metrics.
When she first came onboard at Revolution Live, though, a few key pieces of the marketing puzzle were missing. The social posts the venue was running didn’t allow fans to buy tickets. Plus, the effectiveness was a total mystery. “They weren’t measuring metrics at all,” says Mariani. “No Facebook pixel. They were just running every social ad as an engagement post, so there was no way to track anything.”
A new partnership with ToneDen, plus Mariani’s knowhow, changed all that for Revolution Live. “As soon as I came in, I obviously started tracking with a pixel, within Facebook. To couple that with ToneDen was like exponential improvement.
“Not only could we track our ads, but they were optimized to perform as best as possible.”
Optimizing is a must if you’re a marketer — you want to make sure you’re spending your budget on the ads that perform the best. But just as important is efficient targeting. Who you advertise to is just as important as what you advertise. And ToneDen’s software makes all that pretty complicated algorithmic work basically … automatic.
“Totally Worth It”
“Since we’ve been around for fourteen years, our biggest marketing sources for information and data are Facebook and our email list,” Mariani says. “When we first opened, the owner would say to every individual as they walked in the door, ‘give me your email and I’ll give you a drink ticket,’ to compile a database.”
And while she loves that at this family-owned business no one’s too big to do anything, she appreciates how ToneDen makes advertising not only to those fans but future fans, too, more efficient.
Take a recent Kali Uchis show. Revolution Live ran a conversion campaign on Facebook to announce Uchis’s October show.
By using ToneDen, Mariani saw how many of the people who engaged with the ad followed through and purchased tickets.
Important stuff, right? But ToneDen’s audience building tools helped Mariani even more. That $100 budget was split among a handful of audiences: people who’d Liked Revolution Live on Facebook, people who’d visited the venue’s site, fans of Kali Uchis, and more.
The campaign was a huge success. Revolution Live saw $2,790 in revenue, which means they earned almost $28 for every $1 they spent. But the success goes beyond dollars and tickets. With ToneDen, Mariani can see how those different audience segments performed. Who clicked the most? Who bought the most tickets? (Remember: clicky fans aren’t always the best buyers.) In other words, Mariani gained valuable information about her advertising audiences.
For Mariani, who’s handed out her share of flyers, seeing these numbers is kind of a dream come true. ToneDen lets her get ads in front of people a marketer can’t always make contact with. “To market to those people digitally when you may not be able to usually, that’s incredible.”
These are the sorts of possibilities that appeal to Mariani. She’s eager to keep using ToneDen to bring more to Revolution Live’s fans. “One thing I definitely want to do moving forward is one of those timeline announce campaigns. The fact that it automatically messages them when the show goes on sale with a ticket link is absolutely incredible to me.”
ToneDen lets her focus on the people who love Revolution Live, and that personal connection is important — in fact, it’s her favorite aspect of ToneDen: “the concierge-like services you guys provide. That’s something that people take for granted — that people are on top of things and on time.”
Of course, she loves the “actual data and metrics,” too. And though, admittedly, she was “a little wary of the price,” she’s found the value to be impossible to quantify.
“When you think about how many shows we have a year and how much money we spend on social ads, when you break it down by twelve months, saying this is how much you’re spending per month and if you have five shows per month then it really doesn’t come out to that much per show, and when you think of it that way — as long as (which we are!) you’re making more money on the return of those ads than what you pay for the service then it’s completely worth it. Once you break it down on that kind of level, it’s totally worth it.”
You’re worth it, too, and so are your audiences. Ready to market smarter? It’s easy to get started with ToneDen.
