LUDA Brewing Co., a Lincolnshire-based craft brewer, had an ambitious vision: launch The Crafty Beer Festival, a brand new day event in Lincoln city centre celebrating the best of craft beer, guest ales, Mexican street food, and live local music. The problem? Nobody had ever heard of it. This was the festival’s first ever city-based event, with no prior reputation, no audience data to lean on, and a social following that was still in its early days.

The brief was simple but the challenge was real. LUDA needed bums on seats, tokens selling, and an atmosphere that would make people come back next year. They didn’t have the luxury of a big marketing budget or months of brand-building runway. What they had was a great product, a killer day out on paper, and a tight window to make noise.

Atomic was brought in to run LUDA’s social media pages in the lead-up to the event and, critically, to drive event sign-ups through Meta Ads. The total ad spend? Just £300. That’s £10 a day for 30 days. In a world where most event marketers wouldn’t get out of bed for that budget, we saw it as the perfect test of what smart, targeted paid social can do when the strategy is right.

The stakes were high for a first-time event. Empty venues kill momentum, and LUDA needed a packed house to prove the concept and secure future editions. Every pound had to work overtime.

We built a focused Meta Ads campaign with one clear objective: Event Responses. No vanity metrics, no awareness fluff. We wanted people clicking “Going” and “Interested” because that’s what fills a room. We targeted craft beer and real ale enthusiasts within a 40-mile radius of Lincoln, layering in interest-based audiences to make sure every penny of that £10 daily budget landed in front of someone who’d genuinely want to spend their Saturday drinking great beer, eating tacos, and watching live music.

Alongside the ads, we managed LUDA’s social media channels, building anticipation with organic content that showcased the beer lineup, teased the food vendors, and spotlighted the local bands on the bill. This gave the paid campaign a credible, active social presence to land on when curious clickers checked out the page. The organic and paid worked hand in hand: the ads drove the volume, the social pages sealed the deal.

The strategy was deliberately lean. One objective. One audience. One location. No overcomplication. When you have £300 to play with, you don’t split-test fifteen creatives. You nail the message, trust the targeting, and let Meta’s algorithm do what it does best with a tightly defined audience.