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Building Demand for a New Way to Play
Mad Swans is not a conventional golf club or a city-centre padel venue. It is a countryside hangout for mavericks, where golf feels less gate kept and padel is open to anyone curious enough to pick up a racket.
When it launched, both sports were growing fast. Padel is one of the fastest-growing sports in the UK, while golf has seen growing interest from younger and more diverse players. Mad Swans was well placed to catch both waves, but only if it could cut through quickly, build an audience from zero and turn that interest into paying guests before competitors did.
The Potential
Mad Swans launched with no existing audience, no brand recognition and two sports that needed very different things from paid media. Padel was a busy, competitive market where standing out came down to offer and creative. Golf needed to shift perception and make the game feel accessible. Both needed to build from zero and drive real bookings fast, with every pound of spend accountable to revenue.
The Insight
Padel and golf needed different reasons to get people booking.
Padel was operating in a competitive local market across the Mendips and South Downs, with plenty of places to play. Mad Swans needed to give people a reason to choose it over other local options, while staying true to its position as a place to play, eat, stay and spend time together.
Golf had a different barrier. It can still feel expensive, time-consuming or not for everyone. Mad Swans had a more accessible way in, with its 12-hole round offering a lower-pressure and more affordable way to get out on the course.
The Idea
We used Meta to introduce Mad Swans to new audiences and Google Search to capture people actively looking to book.
Meta built awareness and gave us room to test audiences, creative and offers. Google Search captured people as they moved from discovery into actively looking for somewhere to play.
We also set up purchase tracking and optimised campaigns towards completed purchases, rather than clicks, views or landing-page visits. This gave Meta and Google a clearer signal of what success looked like. By feeding completed booking data back into the platforms, campaigns could learn which audiences, searches and creative were most likely to drive revenue. Budget could then be focused on activity delivering real bookings, improving performance over time.
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The Technology
For padel, we used Meta targeting and creative to reach people likely to be looking for a social plan. We tested audiences around Date Night, Social Club, Padel, Pickleball and Pizza, alongside people who had previously booked golf at Mad Swans.
Creative and offers paired play with food, positioning padel as an easy option for a date, catch-up or group plan. Over peak summer, we tested three landing-page routes to understand which booking journey worked best: the Generic Homepage, General Purchase Page and dedicated Padel Purchase Page.
Google Search captured high-intent demand from people searching for padel courts and places to play nearby.
For golf, the activation focused on making the game feel more open, flexible and easy to fit into the day. Creative led with the 12-hole offer as a more affordable, lower-pressure way to play.
We tested broad golf interest audiences, including Callaway, Ping and golf courses, alongside lookalike audiences built from previous purchasers. Lookalike targeting uses signals from existing customers, including purchase and engagement behaviour, to help Meta find new people with similar characteristics who are more likely to book. These audiences performed best, showing that Mad Swans' own customer data was the strongest signal for finding the right people.
The Impact
Paid media helped Mad Swans build awareness from the ground up, reaching more than 1.5 million targeted people through Meta and generating over 13,000 Google Search clicks from audiences actively looking to play.
That reach and intent translated into strong commercial returns across both sports. Padel achieved a 4.97x ROAS on Meta and 5.06x ROAS on Google Search, with social-first creative, offer testing and a clear booking journey helping turn interest into action.
Golf delivered a 4.42x ROAS on Meta and an exceptional 15.39x ROAS on Google Search. While Meta helped make the 12-hole offer feel more accessible to new audiences, Search captured people already looking for a local place to play.
Together, Meta and Google Search created a connected route from discovery to booking - building brand awareness, capturing demand and delivering strong returns across both platforms.
