In light of the recent Cricket World Cup success, this case study was created to analyse and showcase the effect that online and offline performances can have on an athlete’s personal branding. In this instance utilising Jofra Archer, professional and England International Cricketer. Here we will deep-dive into:
How to successfully grow your personal brand using social media.
What social media channels are most effective and are worth investing in.
Find out how personal branding can increase personal revenue.
Check out this ♻ version of the #bottlecapchallenge for Coca-Cola
— Jofra Archer (@JofraArcher) July 19, 2019
When you recycle your empty bottles, remember to keep the cap on!#challengeaccepted #recycle #cricket #ad pic.twitter.com/gxU5FRB2Cq
In this day and age, we all know that social media is the easiest way to reach untapped and super relevant audiences. Currently, there are approximately 3.5 billion active social media users throughout the world [1]. In this case, the target audiences were:
In the last few years, Digital Playmakers has seen athletes and brands hand over their social media profiles to agencies who reel off tons of stock photos and videos. We call this the ‘lazy social effect’. Therefore, a decision was made to keep the content in line with Jofras own personal values. He is a very humble, laid back and transparent young man that lets his performances do most of the talking.
We feel this type of ‘real’ content resonates far better with audiences who follow athletes. Yes, it is not perfectly consistent, as some brands would have their profiles, but ultimately users are after the uncut, unedited and backstage pass kind of content. Using this knowledge, combining it with optimised and trending posting times, in-line with fixtures, breaking news announcements and great performances, allows for a fantastic recipe for success.
To help overcome these challenges we started by arming ourselves with crucial data and to create in-depth customer profiles, of which we were able to put together thanks to the aforementioned digital health check.
Constructing accurate customer profiles is critical, not only to improve budget efficiency, paid engagement and conversion rate but also to report actionable insights to the client. Beyond first-party data, web retargeting and lookalike audiences we placed a real emphasis on locating high-quality prospects.
Jofra’s social media followings have skyrocketed. When athletes or teams results on the field have been absolutely outstanding (in Jofra’s case, winning a World Cup), it’s all about jumping on the moment and maximising each individual post reach and engagement. Jofra now has over 250,000 followers across Twitter and Instagram and this will definitely continue to grow with time.
You can see from the data that Twitter and Instagram had similar growth rates. Both channels gaining a significant volume of followers, however, Twitter took the top spot with a 354% increase and Instagram came in second at a mere 321%.
Interestingly, Jofra has a personal Facebook account but does not have a Facebook page set up, which we feel says a lot about how athletes and professional sportsmen and women are choosing to communicate with their followers.
Due to Jofra’s fantastic offline and online performances, he is now a sponsored ambassador for Adidas and has recently participated in the bottle cap challenge in collaboration with Coca-Cola. Both of which are huge personal milestones.
In the last four years, he has gone from playing village cricket to becoming a World Cup Winner and working with arguably two of the world’s biggest and most popular brands.
