If you like your Vegas with tractors and trucks, twangy for the good ole days, your people are probably do-se-doing at Stoney’s Rockin’ Country. With live music once a week on Friday’s and sometimes Saturdays, and dance lessons five nights a week (and, yes, “Bikini Bull Riding” on the first Thursday of every month), Stoney’s brings Nashville to Nevada.

Jeff “Toad” Higginbotham, Marketing Director for Stoney’s Rockin’ Country (Pictured Left)

The man getting the cowboy boots to the club is Jeff “Toad” Higginbotham, Marketing Director at Stoney’s Rockin’ Country since 2007. In addition to traveling to and from Nashville, Toad is a co-buyer at the club; he manages social media and internal databases, triages with artists, and promotes Stoney’s radio station, Country AF Radio. “It’s all about the country lifestyle,” Toad tells ToneDen.

While partnerships and radio promos once served Stoney’s needs, Toad knows things are changing. “Social media has definitely … [reached] the people that we get into our club. It’s more cost-effective, more targeted, and our growth has grown 95%.” Catalyzing that growth is ToneDen.

Toad’s Two Step

Toad’s been using ToneDen for almost a year, but he cut his teeth (or polished his spurs) in “the late 90’s and early 2000’s … Back in the day, I used to put bands together in the same line-up touring. I would take the best band in San Diego, the best band in Los Angeles and the best band in Vegas, and we’d all trade shows … I ended up doing this in 17 cities.”

While Toad is no newbie, he’s optimized his personal strategy with ToneDen. On a daily basis, the platform has helped him improve his time management. “Because I build out a couple campaigns and audiences that I can re-use — and that’s probably another one of my favorite things — I can just go in and re-use something that I’ve already done with an audience that I’ve already used with a similar ad and know it’s going to perform well.”

Gaining access to a wider audience remains an invaluable feature of ToneDen. Toad appreciates that he can “go after multiple audiences and get a handle on response, reach, and engagement.” It’s easier than doing this in Facebook, he admits: “I really love that part of the platform.”

But there’s a new feature that’s put some extra pep in Toad’s two-step. As he tells us, “My favorite thing are the Dynamic Event Ads more than anything — the return on that is just stupid.”

100X Returns (Or How $50 Becomes $5K)

Who’s the talent making boot-stomping, barn-raising country music at Stoney’s? Throughout the year, the Vegas venue will host a slew of musicians, everyone from Alex Williams and Casey Donahew to Carter Winter and John Gurney, Jagertown — (Yanktown, too), Austin Burke, Clare Dunn, Michael Ray, Montgomery Gentry, Brett Young, Cody Johnson, Granger Smith and more.

Marketers like Toad have long understood the importance of marketing multiple events, a technique known as calendar advertising. Calendar ads used to take up entire pages in newspapers — with no way of guaranteeing those spots actually found the right viewers. Spending on campaigns for a month of programming is a pricey gamble. Fortunately, ToneDen has made huge innovations to this ultra-efficient means of marketing.

ToneDen’s Dynamic Event Ads automate the calendar ad, without you having to build a single campaign. The process is simple:

  1. ToneDen compiles a catalog of your live events — price, date, everything — that become pages on your favorite ticketing sites and social channels.
  2. When people visit specific event pages, ToneDen creates audiences based on those visitors.
  3. People who’ve shown interest will receive an ad for the specific event.

Toad couldn’t believe the results when Stoney’s Rockin’ Country tried out a DEA. “The neatest part about it is that we looked at different things before we used DEA’s … Now, if you go to the website to buy a ticket, you’ll see an ad for that show. I have friends of mine that send me their screenshots because they keep getting served my ads and I’m like ‘duuuuude.’ It’s working. ‘I see your shit all the time.’ And it makes me happy. This is what it’s all about.”

For a recent DEA campaign for his 2019 calendar, Toad spent a mere $50. The campaign ran for just nineteen days and reached 742 people. Of those people, 105 click and 104 purchased tickets. By the end of the campaign, Toad had brought in more than $5,200 — an impossible 104x return on ad spend. Toad was so impressed with the DEAs, he’s already running his second campaign: “Both of them are amazing,” he says. “To me, it’s already paid what I paid for you guys.”

Country and Beyond

Toad sees so much promise in DEAs, he wishes he could keep them a secret. He jokes, “I’m going to go ahead and tell you that they’re horrible and nobody should use them except for me.”

“I’m going to go ahead and tell you that they’re horrible and nobody should use them except for me.”

In reality, though, Toad can’t recommend ToneDen widely enough. “A friend of mine just signed up this weekend. I actually have a meeting with her to see how her campaign went and give her an insight into what I’ve learned … She’s working with a sandwich shop in town and trying to figure out better engagement with what they have.”

From sandwich shops to Stoney’s, casinos to radio stations, ToneDen is an invaluable tool for any marketer or business owner. Toad has even seen success using ToneDen with a casino he works with — he can’t believe the number of audiences he can target and the number of potential applications for ToneDen that exist.

“I work with a realtor here in town,” Toad says, “and I’m going to try and take this same kind of approach and see how I can push the envelope with his business using the ToneDen platform.” The opportunities are endlessly beneficial. As Toad puts it, “ToneDen is worth every penny.”

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