Since its opening in 2015, Malmö Live Concert Hall has truly been a multi-purpose venue,

hosting a range of activities, from symphony-orchestra concerts to electronic pop concerts

and a multitude of cultural/political programming.

As a young venue, the organization has also been exploring how to best focus efforts and

streamline operations, and initially, this caused the marketing team to outsource digital

campaigns. As they had little available data, the knowledge of channels and campaigns of

the agency was very attractive and allowed the marketing team to focus on building core

competencies and processes in the first years.

“With a relatively small team, you always have to make hard decisions, and outsourcing digital campaigns was a way for us to make ends meet, while still ensuring a digital presence”, says Kenan Ganic, Digital Manager at Malmö Live.

But, with only general knowledge and assumptions, the marketing campaigns had to rely

on the algorithms and customer knowledge in Facebook and Google Ads, resulting in a

relatively high campaign cost relative to conversions.

Connecting The Dots To Better Target Campaigns

In 2018, Malmö Live went live with Activity Stream, with an ambition to build a better understanding of each customer and enabling a more targeted communication and marketing strategy. Initially, the platform was to build knowledge about buying patterns, preferences and campaign performance, and provide the marketing team with an easy-to-use interface to find and use relevant segments.

Activity Stream built on the historical information from Tessitura, tagging up customers

based on their behavior and preferences, as well as validating and enriching the profile

information. As an example, this enabled the marketing team to easily segment audiences based on their distance to the venue, which improves the relevance of the data used to

seed paid campaigns.

“Seeing the immediate impact of basing our campaigns on a deep understanding of our customers and better segmenting our target groups, we quickly made the decision to move our campaign efforts in-house, saving us the agency fee as well”, says Kenan Ganic.

The ability to quickly and easily segment also enabled the team to set up more variants of

key campaigns – e.g. differing messaging to premium and budget buyers. Setting up target-

ed campaigns is always a tradeoff between time spent and improved returns, but the team

was now able to create segments in minutes, enabling new experiments and targeting.

With automated tracking of campaigns a central part of the solution, the team has been

able to more consistently evaluate campaigns and support continuous learning across the

team, with significant results:

  • ROAS has increased by 90%!!!

  • Number of ads reduced by 34% (as the team is now putting money where the effect is)

  • Ad spend reduced by 11,3%

  • More than €12,000 saved annually in consultancy fees

Looking Ahead

Building on the strong results, Malmö Live is now working to further improve customer

profiling through various projects – one being a mapping of customer motivations in collaboration with Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, another improving the tracking of Google Ads through the Activity Stream project.

In summary, Kenan Ganic comments:

“Seeing the impact of segmentation, we’re now pushing to see how far we can go. The improved results mean that the work pays for itself, enabling us to do so much more with the same marketing budget, which is really the best way to success for us.”