Within the first 12 months

• ‍70% of shows sold out or sold fast within 7 months of the venue launching‍
• 12.56x lifetime tracked ROAS‍
• 15,000 email subscribers built‍
• 7,200 Instagram + Facebook followers‍
• 47,000 accounts reached monthly, 93% non-followers

Northcote Theatre is a 1,400-capacity venue-for-hire with no front bar or restaurant, so its entire revenue depended on promoters choosing the room and audiences buying tickets. We were engaged three months before the first show was even announced, in a post-COVID market where both promoters and audiences were cautious.

Challenges included:

• Budget constraints with a high level of investment going into the new venue before the doors were due to open in July 2022, therefore we needed to create a strategy that would get the best results within the resources available.
• There was no pre-existing audience available to leverage
• The need to build trust and excitement among ticket buyers as the market continued to recover post 2020-2021

Most venues switch marketing on once a show is locked in. We treated it as infrastructure, built before there was anything to sell. Every sold-out night then reduced the friction for the next: promoters returned faster, new promoters took the risk, and programming compounded instead of starting cold each time. It's a flywheel —- audience built first, warm on-sale, promoter confidence, more shows, which grows the audience further again.

Our work with this client has followed three distinct phases:

1. Venue announcement and initial community building and engagement (Dec 2021 - Feb 2022)
2. First shows announced and tickets on sale (Feb 2022-July 2022)
3. First shows start and many more are announced on a weekly basis (July 2022 onwards)

Phase One was crucial as it required an initial brand-building focus to establish credibility and trust in the market, build an active and engaged following, and encourage event bookings.

In Phase Two, we shifted to integrating show announcements and ticket sales into our campaign strategy, and the focus shifted entirely to show announcements and driving ticket sales from Phase Three onwards.

We treated audience-building as infrastructure, not an afterthought - the primary objective from day one was building a database of engaged local fans, well ahead of any show going on sale.

That meant consistent content and paid social to establish the venue inside Melbourne's local live-music community, plus sign-up and follow mechanisms built into every touchpoint, feeding one owned list that was nurtured and ready to buy the moment shows landed.

Social Season's Erin Lyall and Ashlea O'Loughlin were part of the Venue Collective alongside the venue's owners, sharing a common history with the Corner Hotel, Northcote Social Club, 170 Russell and Max Watt's - a relationship of trust that underpinned the whole campaign.

By the time shows were announced in February 2022, tickets moved from day one, because the audience already existed and was warm. Within its first year, 70% of shows announced sold out or sold fast, on a 12.56x lifetime tracked return - and the campaign won the 2022 MEA Event Marketing Award for Victoria.