When we teamed up recently with The Stone Pony, the world famous music venue was stuck in the past. In one sense, that was a good thing: it’s part of the charm. But when you’re hoping to increase revenue through digital channels…not so much.

On the surface, our plan was simple: give their website and webstore a creative refresh, then launch a full-funnel social ad effort to sell merch online. Behind the scenes, the effort was more complex. The website needed to be optimized for our future campaigns and created with a “mobile first” mindset—over 40% of online purchases are made on phones, a trend that continues to rise. Not to mention, the traffic we’d be driving from social media advertising would likely be scrolling their feeds on their phones.

Once the site and e-comm experiences were live, we deployed social ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to multiple custom audiences. As results came in, audiences were refined, budgets shifted and creative was optimized.

We’re constantly reviewing ad metrics, ready to course correct on demand. So when one particular video ad was underperforming, we identified the potential issue and quickly changed the first scene of the video from a beach vibe to something more “rock ’n roll”, then redeployed the ad. That small tweak made all the difference as its Relevance Score shot up and purchases ticked higher.

We also couldn’t resist using the latest Augmented Reality tools for social, creating a Snapchat Lens and Facebook Camera Effect for the legions of Stone Pony fans.

By the time the effort wrapped, we had created new custom audiences of over 100,000 rock fans and matched The Stone Pony’s total 2017 online merch sales in just 4 months. Well, that, and built them a digital foundation for generating revenue for years to come.