From a marketing perspective, what are Sportradar’s expectations for the new football season?
As millions of fans celebrate the start of the European football season, now is the time for operators to ensure their campaigns are optimised to attract their first bets and stay ahead of the competition. Football is the world’s most popular sport, so the betting market is huge. We provide our clients with coverage of more than 25,000 matches a month, so creating and delivering this volume of adverts on such quick turn arounds presents a huge marketing challenge.
Operators are subsequently turning to automation technology to scale their campaigns and streamline their marketing processes. The start of the season is a key period for customer acquisition. Automation is used within programmatic advertising technology to efficiently acquire new bettors at this critical time. Programmatic automates the buying of online advertising in realtime to serve highly targeted adverts to the most relevant audiences, which is highly efficient and limits ad wastage. In fact, our proprietary ad:s programmatic marketing service has enabled our global operator clients to increase click-through-rates by up to 60%, while increasing net gaming revenue by as much as 110%. We estimate that reducing the manual inputs in this process saves our clients up to two months’ worth of productivity annually.
Automation is similarly enhancing operators’ advertising performance across publisher sites, such as high-profile sports and media news websites, and for their sponsorships. By using data to understand fans’ most consumed online content,Sportradar’s publisher products adtech uses automation to display contextually relevant betting ads across both premium publishers and rights holders’ websites. The range of these adverts and the speed at which they are delivered increase click-through-rates by up to 225%, which would be impossible to replicate manually.
How important is it for operators to know exactly where their customer is and what their sports betting habits are?
If operators can better understand their fans’ interests and browsing habits, they can more effectively target and engage them with personalised content. This is key to acquiring new customers, re-engaging existing players and building brand awareness.This is why we engineered ad:s, as our operator clients approached us requesting an industry specific marketing solution that would enable them to fully understand where and how bettors were interacting with their brand.
We provide this visibility by collecting data points across the full marketing funnel, from first impression to conversion, so operators can identify fans’ favourite teams, betting markets and preferred channels. These customer insights power digital marketing technologies, which decide the most relevant bets to serve to players, on the right platform at the right time. This personalised approach engages fans more deeply, delivers greater conversions, customer loyalty and revenue growth, while limiting advertising waste.
Social media is also a popular platform for football fans to engage with their sport. With a reach of more than three billion global monthly users, social media generates 50% more engagement per post on average than any other sector, making it an extremely effective and vital advertising channel. Given this popularity and importance we have made ad:s available across Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Instagram. This enables operators to cut through the pre-season noise and target fans with the most cost-efficient and effective acquisition campaigns.
Operators possess deep pools of anonymised customer data, which offer valuable insights into fan behaviours and interests, such as previously bet on teams or most frequented digital channels
AI can no doubt play a part here; how is it brought into play at Sportradar within this field in particular?
AI’s role cannot be understated, but it needs data to deliver marketing efficiency. Similarly, data is a resource that is only as useful as how effectively you use it. Therefore, the real game changer is when the two are combined. Operators possess deep pools of anonymised customer data, which offer valuable insights into fan behaviours and interests, such as previously bet-on teams or most frequented digital channels. AI algorithms within digital marketing technologies process this data to create personalised dynamic football adverts that can be delivered on fan-favourite channels. For instance, a Spurs fan who regularly uses Instagram might receive dynamic ads containing the odds for their team’s next fixture across the platform’s stories function.
With this data readily available, the AI capabilities within marketing services, like programmatic or paid social, allow operators to truly create highly targeted and customised fan experiences that achieve greater acquisition and brand awareness.
How can AI help increase the efficiency of marketing to ensure less resources are used on the wrong marketing methods?
By focusing on the content that fans care most about, AI-driven personalisation tools can drive efficiency and limit advertising waste. This is essential at this time of year when operators must supply advertising creative for the hundreds of weekly matches played across football’s biggest competitions. While this was previously a protracted, manual process for creative teams, AI and automation technologies are powering Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) solutions to address this operational challenge quickly and at scale.
We use DCO in our industry-specific Dynamic Display solution to engineer an unlimited supply of personalised betting advertising creative, based on fan content preferences and the most popular pages on operators’ websites. The customised content within these creatives engages end users more deeply and improves clickthrough rates, while automation saves valuable time and money to achieve more effective budget spend and higher ROI.
In the same way that clubs allocate their transfer budgets effectively to deliver the best performance on the pitch, operators who execute efficient marketing strategies are most likely to succeed in the marketplace. By leveraging data and AI within the latest advertising technologies, operators can better understand their customers, find their audience quickly and serve them with the content that’s most relevant to them.
