Case study · Scottish Business Conference 2025 · Glasgow
£105k of ads paid for themselves. Then the room sold £3M+.
A business conference makes money twice: at the door, on a ticket ladder from £79 to £2,499, and on stage, when speakers sell coaching and programmes to the business owners in the seats.
My job was to fill those seats with buyers. 305 came through my ads, and their tickets paid back every pound the ads cost.
Client
Scottish Business Conference
My role
Research, ads, copy, landing page
Channels
Meta and LinkedIn
Ad spend
£105,000
Event
20-21 Jan 2025
The numbers
What went in. What came back.
£105k
Ad spend across Meta and LinkedIn
✓ Fully paid back by ticket sales
305
tickets sold through ads
500
Business owners in the room, the rest came from the waitlist and the client’s email list
£3M+
Sold live from the stage
From the six Meta campaigns shown below (£20,926 of the spend):
Client
519,125
Impressions
2.79M
CPM
£7.50
Link clicks
20,150
Landing page views
9,269
Source: Meta Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Total spend £105,000 across both; the metrics strip covers the six Meta campaigns in the screenshot below. Ticket revenue covering the ad spend, attendance and live sales reported by the client; the on-stage sales were made by the speakers, and my part was filling the room.
01 · THE BUSINESS MODEL
Five ticket tiers. Then the real money, on stage.
SBC is the only business conference in Scotland built around one promise: a better return on your business. Speakers including Adam Stott, Ollie Ollerton, Lee McQueen, Paul McFadden and Andy Harrington share the systems behind their companies, then offer programmes to go further.
Tickets ran on a five-tier ladder, each tier with a different level of access, and selected tiers went out at up to 80% off. The ladder was there to pay for the ads, and it did: ticket revenue covered the full £105k. That made the campaign self-liquidating. The 305 buyers from the ads came in at no net acquisition cost, and joined the waitlist and the client’s existing customers to fill a room of 500. Every pound sold on stage was on top.
- £79Tier 1
- £199Tier 2
- £499Tier 3
- £1,499Tier 4
- £2,499Tier 5
02 · THE BUYER
I wrote to one person: a Scottish business owner having a hard year.
Before writing an ad, I researched the industry and built the customer avatar. The ads only work if they say what this person is already thinking. Four things kept coming up.
Sales are slow
And marketing isn’t fixing it. Worried about another downturn.
Local costs are rising
Parking fees, low-emission zone charges and bus gates, all eating into footfall.
They do everything
Stuck handling every part of the business themselves.
They want proof
Advice from people who’ve actually built eight-figure companies.
03 · THE CREATIVE
One promise, five angles, three formats.
I designed the ads and wrote every line of copy. Each angle speaks to one of those four problems, so the data could show which pain sells a ticket. The same angles ran in Feed, Stories and Reels.
Stories · the local angle
Parking fees, LEZ charges and bus gates: specific to Glasgow, so the ad sounds like it was written for the reader. Paired with up to 80% off to make the decision easy.
Reels · Adam Stott on camera
Video lets a buyer meet the headline speaker before paying for it. Hook: “Are you frustrated by slow sales and poor marketing results?”
04 · THE MEDIA PLAN
Optimise for purchases. Move the money to what sells.
£105k across two platforms: Meta and LinkedIn. On Meta, sales campaigns optimised for ticket purchases, never clicks. Budget followed cost per ticket. In the campaigns below, the ones selling at around £60 a ticket kept their spend, and a test that cost £143 a ticket was left to starve.
COLD · BROAD
Ages 18–65+
Let the creative find the buyer.
COLD · INTERESTS
Ages 30–65+
Business owners and entrepreneurs.
WARM · RETARGETING
Visitors and engagers
Closed with urgency and the speaker line-up.
LANDING PAGE
Optimised for sales
Copy and layout tuned to turn visits into tickets.
Meta Ads Manager, six of the Meta campaigns (£20,926 of the £105k total), names blurred. The largest of these sold 131 tickets at £60.12 each on £7,877 of spend.
05 · WHY IT WORKED
Three decisions that paid for themselves.
Judge the buyer by the room, not the door
A £79 entry ticket was the first step on a ladder that ran to £2,499, with coaching sold on stage after that. Valuing a buyer by everything they could spend, not the first ticket, let me buy with confidence.
Specific beats clever
“LEZ charges and bus gates” does more work than any slogan, because it proves the ad knows the reader’s street. Research first, then copy.
Let purchases, not opinions, pick the winner
Five angles, three formats, one metric: cost per ticket. What sold got the budget; what didn’t, didn’t.
The takeaway
Sell the seat. The room sells the rest.
Ticket sales paid back every pound of ad spend, so the buyers cost nothing and the £3M+ sold on stage was pure upside. That’s the model I build for: make the first sale pay for the traffic, and everything after it is profit.
Next
Need seats filled with buyers?.