Lights, camera, activation: How operators are ramping up online content to drive engagement

The yearly battle of bookmakers scrambling for custom during the Cheltenham Festival will have died down by the time you read this, and while the jockeying at the front of the pack among betting’s short-priced favourites may have subsided, the race for supremacy among some of the longer-odds players has been underway for a while.

Bonuses, free bets and gimmicks will have been put to bed, with marketing campaigns bubbling away under the surface ready to explode come the next big date in the racing calendar. However, away from the traditional names promoting a “live stream every day of the festival”,  exclusive access behind the scenes of “your favourite Premier League teams” or “money back if your first bet loses”, the marketing strategy among some of the industry’s less traditional names has adopted a much more long-term focus.

For as long as the internet has existed, extra-curricular bookmaking content has been available in some form or another, however, aside from imaginative PR campaigns, third-party previews or novelty markets, content has often failed to strike a chord outside of the non-betting public.

The proliferation of online news and sports sites in conjunction with the decline of print media has meant traditional betting columns have slowly made way for other forms of betting content. With the advent of dotcom news sites becoming the norm for operators, it poses the question whether it’s possible to stand out from the crowd and create engaging content for potential customers as well as existing ones.

Brands have long produced content advising on promoted markets and previewing upcoming sporting events, yet to break through into a cluttered media space, the quality of in-house marketing has seen an upturn in prominence.

In February, betting exchange Smarkets announced the launch of a new news site, declaring it would “bring together leading writers from the world of sport and politics to bring unique insight, betting tips, previews and trends […] as a source of information”.

The site is pitched at both punters and non-punters alike and features articles from in-house expert Tom Collins, formerly of the Racing Post, alongside goal.com journalist Robin Barnier, golf writer Brian Keogh, multi-sports journalist Liz Byrnes and US specialist Mark Woods, all of whom pen bespoke previews as well as long-form opinion pieces.

Aside from traditional betting previews, Smarkets said it was to go one better and use the news site to extrapolate its own data to indicate trends within the news cycle.

Speaking to EGR Intel, Smarkets’ head of customer marketing, Adam Baylis, explains: “What we’ve lacked for some time has been the ability to apply narrative and to communicate a story to our customers. Often the data operators have is used to look to the future, but we can say what is happening in the present and pass that on to whoever is reading.

“Smarkets news gives us the opportunity to weave in the narrative that goes along with sharp price movements, especially those that you will see in political markets but also last-minute price changes from the team sheets going up on a Saturday, for example,” he explains.

With gambling news sites often the domain of affiliate marketeers and preview-style padding pieces, Smarkets decided to keep that to a minimum. Taking over six months from the conception of the idea to its launch, the London-based exchange made sure the right people were in place to eclipse the usual offering from other operators.

Additionally, Smarkets has adopted a multimedia approach as a way to appeal to the public, with the firm’s sportsbook sub-brand SBK launching a podcast in 2021 plus an additional SBK news site to launch in the coming months, tying together content from both writers and the podcast itself. All of which point to a synergy between audio and written content aimed at reaching as many customers as possible.

If you like my poddy  

Despite what BT Sport host Jake Humphrey might think, podcasts have been anything but niche since 2020 (and before that) and operators have been attempting to corner a market for themselves within the sports betting sphere for over a decade.

With so much content available across podcast providers, firms have traditionally found the podcast world a hard nut to crack.

While most major operators have their own podcast – Paddy Power has From the Horse’s Mouth, William Hill with The Punt and Ladbrokes’ Moody on the Mic – it has often been difficult for bookies to capture the attention of the non-betting population.

As well as producing in-house content, many operators instead lend their name to non-betting podcasts for visibility. One firm that has managed to elevate its in-house production to reach a wider audience and have its content available on major podcast suppliers is Irish betting exchange Matchbook.

Following the rescinding of its UK licence by the UKGC in February 2020, Matchbook had to wait six months before re-entering the market. That re-entry was eased by the presence of the popular Matchbook Betting Podcast, used as a brand-promotion tool as well as a way of attracting new customers.

Matchbook’s communications manager, Aidan O’Sullivan, says his firm “wouldn’t have the advertising budget of a Betfair” so alternative methods to “get our content out there” is a way of circumventing that. “It’s very cost efficient in comparison to a TV campaign. I think that was the goal at the start and it has grown exponentially since 2017 to where we are now.”

The firm launched its podcast in 2017 and it has been turning heads ever since. What started as a one-off podcast focusing on football, horseracing and NFL evolved into the brand creating sport-specific shows released regularly throughout the week, something O’Sullivan says was key to its evolution.

“We turned it into a specific sports podcast as we looked at our goals at Matchbook. Quality, engaging, original and innovative content is truly a big thing for us.”

A crowded marketplace

One of the tasks most operators find when launching new content is how does it differentiate from other content already out there?

Speaking about the launch of the SBK podcast, Baylis says: “We tried a few different things around our launch. We thought about the brand and the fact we have made a lot of investment in racing in the last 12 months. We have various kinds of sponsorships in the works with jockeys and trainers, so we always knew we wanted to use the podcast to focus more on racing, and the more we did, the more the numbers went up.”

He adds: “But we didn’t just want to be another racing podcast. We focus on just a couple of races and we have a narrative. We want to tell the story.”

The SBK podcast tends to veer away from going through the card at every meeting and instead takes a deep dive into a maximum of five races and focuses on in-depth analysis while throwing in quick tips for other races throughout the day. Matchbook, on the other hand, took the decision in 2019 to start filming its podcasts and streaming them live. This enables fans of the podcast to watch live and interact while the show is being recorded.

“It requires a lot of planning but when you go live on the broadcast, you get such a buzz. And we have a really active community,” says O’Sullivan.

Wider appeal 

Elsewhere, Ben Keith-owned Star Sports, which was founded in 1999 as Star Racing, has always prided itself on its appeal to dyed-in-the-wool punters. “Our commitment to laying some of the largest bets in the industry attracts some of the most serious high-stakers in the world,” he claims.

This passion for sports betting has seen the company take a slightly different approach to content production. While others are trying to reach as wide an audience as possible, Star Sports knows its niche and is directly targeting its core audience.

David Stewart, head of content and social media, explained that the content Star Sports produces would appeal to punters and sports fans alike. The firm’s #BettingPeople vodcast interviews showcase an industry expert or pro punter chatting to Star Sports, which is then released as separate 15-minute videos daily over the course of a week.

Stewart says the format has proved popular with fans: “We took the view to publish them in bite-sized episodes of around 15 minutes as we believed it to be the perfect length for someone to watch during a lunch hour, between horseraces or half-time in the football. Editorially, it also allows us to focus on the specific content within that one episode and encourages interactions and comments.”

Alongside these video interviews, the site benefits from written content created exclusively for the site including blogs from flat racing star Silvestre de Sousa and Grand National-winning jockey Davy Russell.

Another feature Star Sports runs on its news site is Sharpe Mind, starring bookmaking PR doyen Graham Sharpe, who some consider the founder of bookmaking PR during his half-century as head of communications at William Hill.

He claims that Star Sports’ approach to bookmaking and its customer base was what drew him to writing his weekly contribution highlighting “some of the unexpected, unanticipated and unlikely aspects of the racing and betting world”.

The firm has steered clear of syndicated copy to “pad out” the site and all content is created “exclusive and unique” to Star. “Thinking outside the box differentiates content and makes it engaging,” Stewart says.

He went on to add: “There are 220 videos on our site now, some of which are viewed several years after publishing – reinforcement that a lot of the interviews are evergreen and not particularly timestamped.”

But does it work? 

An engaging piece of content – whether written, audio or visual – has proved to be both a useful acquisition tool and a way of raising brand awareness, according to O’Sullivan. “You don’t have to be a betting person to get what we’re doing and we’re constantly looking to evolve.

“It’s all about engagement and we are looking to build our community further. We are looking into future streaming platforms like Discord or Twitter Spaces. We want to get as many people involved and bring back a real community vibe,” O’Sullivan says

Baylis emphasises how all the content produced by Smarkets is a journey towards building brand identity and recognition, and both the sites and the podcast are steps along the way.

“The SBK racing podcast has been a real rising star for us, with listeners going through the roof across all kinds of platforms and I anticipate us to be doing a lot more in the podcast space in the next 12 months. For us, every piece of content, whether it be the SBK podcast or the news site, it’s all a brick that is building to something bigger.”

While the concept of in-house content production has been ever present since the advent of the internet, it seems that now, more than ever before, there is an appetite from operators and consumers alike for data-driven and opinion-led betting content that can cross over into the mainstream.

Certainly, as a marketing tool, operators are turning their attention to in-house production to mitigate smaller spending budgets and, for the most part, it seems to be working.