The Comedy Studio is a historic comedy club in the heart of Boston’s Harvard Square, surrounded by many other options for evening entertainment. Under new ownership following pandemic shutdowns, how could they break through the noise and reach an audience ready for a night of hearty laughs and strong drinks?
Reach locals and tourists within a specific geographic area while keeping ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) high enough to maintain a profit each night, especially on weeknights. There is an ecommerce component for purchasing tickets from the website.
Initially it was to create FOMO. The Comedy Studio has a wonderful atmosphere with constant laughs and a delicious variety of drinks (and food). Arc wanted to express that a night at the Comedy Studio brings guaranteed fun. The most obvious channels for this messaging were Meta (Instagram and Facebook) as well as YouTube, plus paid search ads for those actively looking for things to do in the area. Arc also encouraged the club to establish a presence on TikTok. Overall, this was an ecommerce promotion play, perfect for the customer acquisition specialist.
We also confirmed the suspected effectiveness of promoting headliners by name and past credits, drumming up excitement a few weeks before a show.
Working with the Comedy Studio’s creative team, we guided content and assets within the club’s already well-established design scheme to create compelling ad options, including poster-like static images, vibrant snippets of comedy bits, and effective video reels of audiences laughing, drinking, and having an all-around blast. We also established more accurate tracking and reporting mechanisms, connecting ad to lead to ecommerce purchase.
When possible, we highlighted special headliners and shows for specific nights. We leveraged geofencing to capture those within a select radius who could reasonably make it to a show. We also linked the Google Business Profile to ads for enhanced local visibility.
Every dollar out brought back multiples in, so much so that the Comedy Studio team opted to increase the monthly budget to bring in even more. Of course, we remained responsible adults by conducting forecasts to determine at what increased spending level we would see diminishing returns.
Several months into the engagement, we experimented with decreased spend to learn if, at that point, the ads were essential to the success, or if seats were filling on their own (especially for headliners). We immediately saw a direct correlation of less ads = less tickets sold. Restoring the budget restored the sales, even during the seasonal lulls of summer (it is a college town, after all).
The results were so positive they almost seem unbelievable. Within a month, the club was already seeing:
In addition, Arc’s efforts assisted the club overall by:
Perhaps the best sign of success is happy clients on the other end of reporting meetings, excitedly identifying that comedy shows are fuller since launch and even toasting to new attendance records.
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