• +125% Opening Night attendance
• +78% Brew & Bite Friday attendance
• +69% festival website visitors
• 0 → 2,682 Facebook followers, from zero
• Plus: 93,000 total festivalgoers (up 3%), 7,524 email subscribers (up 20%), 3,789 Instagram followers (up 13%)

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The Bathurst Winter Festival is a free, region-defining event run by Bathurst Regional Council - success was never going to be judged on ad-platform clicks, but on visitation, occupancy and local spend. We came in after a difficult, COVID-affected stretch, with the festival's marketing spread thinly and fragmented across a grant budget with no clear owned audience to build from.

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Channel budget followed evidence, not habit - test then concentrate, not spray. Audiences were split in-region versus out-of-region with warm and cold funnels inside each, and every tracking gap was treated as a problem to fix rather than a limitation to live with, so the numbers held up under scrutiny.

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We consolidated the fragmented grant budget into one hyper-targeted social campaign, deliberately built to reach out-of-region audiences and grow the festival's first owned audience from zero. Along the way, we flagged ticketing-pixel and tag-manager gaps that had been quietly costing the client visibility into their own results, and worked alongside another agency delivering the broader festival campaign.

Every decision was made against what the festival was funded to deliver: visitation, occupancy and local spend, not ad-account conversions alone. Audiences were split in-region versus out-of-region, each with its own warm and cold funnels, and every tracking gap was treated as a problem to fix rather than a limitation to live with.

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Opening Night attendance grew 125% and Brew & Bite Friday grew 78%. Website visitors were up 69%, and the festival's Facebook following grew from zero to 2,682. Total festivalgoers reached 93,000, up 3% year-on-year, alongside a 20% lift in email subscribers and 13% growth in Instagram followers.

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