What new marketing trends will define the football betting industry this season?
This season, personalisation will be key for engagement and acquisition, and Sportradar is working behind-the-scenes to help our operator clients maximise this opportunity at a crucial time in their marketing calendars.
The modern football bettor is increasingly demanding instant content that is tailored to their individual preferences, so providing personalised experiences has gone from a ‘nice to have’ to an essential component of operators’ acquisition and retention strategies.
We’re seeing operators continually personalise more aspects of their marketing activities, from their ad contents and end-user experience, to retention strategies through tailored CRM tools. At Sportradar, we’re delivering this through our ad:s multi-channel marketing service across programmatic display, video, audio and digital-out-of-home (DOOH), paid social media and our VAIX retention services for CRM and on-site personalisation.
This season more than ever, if operators can personalise their content to football fans, they’ll be more likely to be rewarded with their interest and custom.
With an increasing number of competitors, how can sports betting operators stand out this season?
In an industry as competitive as football betting, serving the right ad to the right fan, on their preferred digital channels, when they are most active, is essential. It is this individualised targeting and customised advertising that will enable operators to stand out.
Operators can separate themselves from competitors by using the right technology to serve personalised and targeted ads, for example placing a display ad on football sites where fans check team news, or within social media feeds just before kick-off. Whilst this is something you would think most operators are doing, you would be surprised about how much room for growth many still have. In a competitive market, success ultimately comes down to advertising efficiency and achieving better marketing ROI than your competitors and having the technology to do this is key.
If you know where to reach individual football fans and understand the types of bets they place, you’re in a prime position to create the unique experiences that they want. Without this data-driven understanding, marketing just becomes a guessing game.
This season more than ever, if operators can personalise their content to football fans, they’ll be more likely to be rewarded with their interest and custom
What else do sports betting operators need to deliver successful, well rounded marketing campaigns?
Whilst acquisition is essential, brand awareness shouldn’t be overlooked. Making your brand well-known plays a massive role in increasing fans’ trust and purchase intent, which elevates acquisition efficiency.
With the sheer volume of content available today and fan attention spans shorter than ever, traditional broad brand awareness strategies are unlikely to cut it. Just like acquisition, brand awareness campaigns should use data and AI to highly target fans with personalised messages. Channels like programmatic video and audio can identify relevant sport betting audiences and seamlessly serve messages for maximum brand exposure and return-on-ad-spend.
In fact, simultaneously using performance marketing channels, such as programmatic display and paid social, with brand awareness channels like video, audio or digital-out-of-home (DOOH), can provide holistic marketing efficiency. By increasing lead generation and brand familiarity through targeted and personalised brand awareness, your acquisition channels are in prime position to persuasively convert customers.
Sportradar is integrating live sports odds into social media ads. Can you explain the thinking behind this, especially in the context of football?
We’ve already seen great success with the integration of live data into static ads on social media, so saw a massive opportunity to apply the same dynamic creative technology to video.
We therefore partnered with Meta and launched this industry-first service to help operators maximise their acquisition of customers on social media. As one of the primary ways fans now follow football, social media has become a key marketing channel for operators, so the ability to deliver live odds and real-time content into video ads allows them to engage customers with more immersive and relevant content. This dynamic data includes team names, kits, logos, kick off times and more, which really make ads ‘pop’ in fans’ news feeds.
Football fans also consume significant amounts of short-form video, so including live odds and data into this advertising format allows operators to meet this growing content preference and improve advertising efficiency. By automating millions of dynamic video ads, which are updated in real-time to reflect betting market movements and live sports events, we’re helping operators scale and optimise their matchday operations.
Fans demand for stats has continued to grow in recent years. How is Sportradar meeting this appeal?
The use of data and stats helps to shape the sports betting experience for fans, as it informs their choices, provides deeper insights into the teams and players they’re interested in, and creates greater excitement. Through our technology and data, we’re incorporating data across more digital touchpoints so operators can meet this demand and unlock new levels of marketing efficiency.
For example, if a customer’s reading a website article on Manchester United, we can serve data-recommended ads and stats that are relevant to the content they’re consuming. Thus, could include the odds for the team’s next fixture, historical results, current form, down to the likelihood of a new signing starting or scoring – all of which create richer and more engaging experiences.