As a specialist sports marketing agency, Digital Playmakers were chosen to team up with Premier Sports to increase their OTT & SVOD subscription numbers and scale their Scottish Cup football subscription base.
Digital Playmakers were appointed to drive subscriptions through a variety of paid digital channels, helping to improve metrics throughout the entire acquisition funnel and most importantly the cost per acquisition (CPA).
Having already worked on campaigns with Premier Sports, the objective of this campaign was to drive the maximum number of paying subscribers to the Premier Sports network within four rounds of the 2020 William Hill Scottish Cup; 4th round, 5th round, quarter-finals and semi-finals.
Scottish club football fans are typically known as football fanatics. The loyalty and passion shown by Scots fiercely rivals that of any global team. However, their economy is considerably smaller and limited expendable income can make retaining subscribers difficult in the long term. This was challenge number one.
The second challenge has been caused by the consistent increase in digital ad spend across the traditional social and search channels. Consequently, increasing CPM’s to record levels in Q1 of 2020. This meant that to maintain and improve year on year performance the CTR’s and conversion rates of our campaigns had to better than ever.
In summary, Premier Sports challenged us to find prospective customers across any digital channels whilst maintaining a low average cost per acquisition (CPA) and improving warm audience KPI’s.
Social media is still a powerhouse for conversions. The advanced targeting and optimisations available for Facebook and Instagram coupled with its audience base being a hive of passionate self segmenting sports engagers, meant success was inevitable.
Digital Playmakers knows that most modern technology users (especially sports fans) attention spans are shrinking. They are busier than ever and more often than not are dual or tri-screening. Therefore, hitting the right audiences are the right time was crucial for success.
Conversely to European football fans, Scottish football fans have a greater tendency to watch live football rather than utilise the on-demand part of the streaming service.
Digital Playmakers achieved outstanding success working on the William Hill Scottish Cup campaign with Premier Sports, with a conversion rate 40% above target, 25% CPA decrease Y-oY and over 100,000 potential new Premier Sports subscribers.
We believe this was due to learning and gathering extremely detailed audience insights, therefore enabling us to understand the customer better than ever before. In addition, allowing us to create a bespoke strategy, specific to individual Scottish football clubs/fans, as opposed to a blanket UK/Scottish football fans. The devil is in the detail…
