How Ramona Surpassed Winter Revenue Targets by £186,000 and Acquired 2,100 New First-Time Bookers.

Date

2025

Deliverables

Stategy

Campaigns

Paid Media

Location

Manchester

Sector

Hospitality

Ramona surpassed its winter revenue targets by £186,000 (15% above goal), acquired 2,100 new first-time bookers, and generated a 55x blended ROAS across the season. The campaign ran against a specific strategic objective: launch the Winter Village season while maximising uptake across Ramona's full food, drink and live music offer, not just the headline events. In Manchester's Northern Quarter, where competition for seasonal covers is intense, that meant building a campaign architecture that made every strand of Ramona's programme feel like a separate, distinct reason to book.

The results

£186,000

uplift in year-on-year revenue

55x

blended ROAS across the campaign

2,100

new first-time bookers acquired

the challenge

Ramona is a multi-format venue in Manchester's Northern Quarter, combining a restaurant, bar, and a live music programme anchored by headline bookings. Its winter offer, the Winter Village season, spans seasonal food and drink, festive events, and live acts across multiple nights of the week.

The brief required more than a seasonal uplift. Ramona needed to convert awareness of its live music programme into advance food and drink bookings, reach a new-to-file audience that would return beyond the winter peak, and make the venue's full offer legible to people who might otherwise see it as a single-category destination.

the approach

The central insight was that Ramona's strongest advantage (the combination of live music, seasonal food and high-quality drink) was also its least visible in isolation. We structured the campaign around a single unifying frame: drinks, dinner and a show. That made the full experience legible in one message rather than requiring three separate campaigns to promote each element.

Content was differentiated by day of the week, matching the offer to the occasion and the audience most likely to book on each night. Purpose-built landing pages for each proposition reduced drop-off at the point of conversion. Weekly KPI tracking allowed real-time optimisation rather than waiting for end-of-season reporting to identify what was working.

The revenue uplift is the headline, but the 2,100 new first-time bookers are the longer-term story. A first-time booker, retained and reactivated, is worth multiples of the initial transaction across future seasons. That compounding value is what turns a successful winter campaign into a structural audience advantage.

The 55x ROAS reflects efficient spend against an audience already in decision-making mode. The campaign did not generate demand. It met demand at the right moment with the right message and made conversion simple.

We've built an amazing partnership with all teams by staying consistently engaged and going above and beyond on campaigns to ensure we hit our targets. Mustard truly understands our needs and concerns as a client, always coming through with a variety of creative solutions.

Alisha Crompton

Head of Commercial Events

What This Means for Hospitality Brands

A venue with multiple propositions (food, drink, live music) should not run a single undifferentiated campaign. Each strand of the offer requires a campaign architecture that makes it feel like a specific, standalone reason to book, and that connects it to the full evening experience. The brands that package those elements together outperform the ones that promote each in isolation.

When content treats every night of the week as the same opportunity, it misses the variation in audience intent. The person planning a Wednesday dinner has a different motivation to the person looking for a Saturday night out with live music. Differentiated content by occasion produces more relevant creative, higher conversion rates, and lower cost per booking.

The question worth asking before the next seasonal campaign launches: is your campaign promoting the venue, or is it promoting a specific experience that someone would feel they had missed if they did not book?

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do you grow food and drink revenue at a live music venue?

The most effective approach combines the live music programme with the food and drink offer under one booking proposition, rather than promoting them separately. Ramona used this approach to generate £186,000 in year-on-year revenue uplift and a 55x blended ROAS during its Winter Village season. A campaign framed around drinks, dinner and a show acquired 2,100 new first-time bookers: evidence that packaging the full evening drives higher conversion than leading with individual elements.

Q: How did Ramona Manchester beat its winter revenue targets by £186,000?

Ramona exceeded its winter targets by £186,000 (15% above goal) by running a campaign built around its combined food, drink and live music offer rather than promoting each element in isolation. Content was differentiated by day of the week, landing pages were purpose-built for each proposition, and weekly KPI tracking enabled real-time optimisation. The result was a 55x blended ROAS and 2,100 new first-time bookers generating £57,000 in new customer revenue.

Q: What is Booker Behaviour and how does it work for venue marketing?

Booker Behaviour is Mustard's approach to reaching customers at the moment they are actively deciding where to go, rather than broadcasting broadly and hoping for attention. For Ramona, that meant identifying audiences in active consideration for a Manchester night out and serving creative that made booking the logical next step. The 55x blended ROAS is a direct function of that intent-first targeting: less waste, higher conversion, lower cost per booking.