Belgian National Orchestra

33% increase in subscription sales

At the end of 2024 the Belgian National Orchestra (BNO) engaged Lone Wolves as their social media advertising partner with the objective of boosting the orchestra’s subscription sales for the upcoming concert season. This initial scope quickly broadened as we also took on video production and campaign photography.

Campaign strategy

In a first step, in close collaboration with the client we crafted a campaign strategy, which entailed:

Target audience analysis: What does the target audience look like?
Segmentation: Which products should be promoted to which target audience segments? BNO offers different subscription formulas, each targeting different musical preferences and demographics.
Data analysis: How did historical social media campaigns perform? How is success measurement organised?
Channel strategy: Through which channels can these classical music lovers be targeted best?
Content strategy: Which content is needed to reach the target audience?

This collaborative process took about a month to finalise, well ahead of the start of the promotion of the new season in March.

Campaign implementation

With the strategy clear and agreed, we moved to implementation. A dashboard was put in place to track the campaign performance and channels were dressed up with copy in three languages and visual content.

From March to September Lone Wolves ran a total 9 social media advertising campaigns on Facebook, and Instagram, reaching over 350.000 classical music enthusiasts. Each of these campaigns targeted:

Existing customers
Lookalikes modelled on the existing customer audience
Website visitors (retargeting)
Users who engaged with BNO’s Facebook and Instagram channels
Meta users with bespoke musical interests

3 out of these 9 campaigns were video campaigns for which Lone Wolves also produced the campaign video. Without exception these video campaigns outperformed account benchmarks as well as industry benchmarks.

Besides Meta, the campaign also featured sponsored advertising on Spotify (a first for both the client and our agency), which reached another 17.000 classical musical lovers and which was at par with the Meta campaigns in terms of CTR and CPC.

All in all close to 370.000 classical music fans on Meta and Spotify were reached through these campaigns, resulting in hundreds of visits to the booking engine. At the start of the new concert season in September 33% more subscriptions were sold versus the previous year.

Last but not least, Lone Wolves produced the photography for the 2025-2026 concert season. This unique imagery can be found in printed materials, on the BNO website, at the BNO offices and at the Bozar concert venue in Brussels. See the reel below for a behind the scenes look of this photoshoot and examples of its practical application.