How to maximise digital marketing spend around live football

Lowering the cost of customer acquisition and retention amongst the “football punter” demographic remains a huge challenge for operators in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Huge marketing budgets are expended in an attempt to stay front-of-mind among the growing pool of recreational customers.

But beyond the big money, above-the-line ads, battle lines are being drawn among bookmakers directing greater spend into digital marketing channels. The success of these campaigns is largely dependent on the level of insight that can be gained about your customers’ behavioural characteristics.

Recently, Betgenius conducted a research project using a sample of over 130,000 unique users who both registered and subsequently placed a bet online before or during a football match. We analysed when registrations were most likely, the timing of bets, and likely subsequent bets, in order to make inferences about audience behaviour.

The findings provide marketing teams with direction to maximise their ROI and while the research is specific to the UK market, much of its essence can be applied to other territories.

Timing is everything

A fundamental and largely unsurprising finding was that almost all (96%) of new account registrations occur prior to kick-off. On that basis, any operator running acquisition campaigns after that point is throwing money down the drain. But it’s the next stage of the customer journey – converting new sign-ups into first time depositors – where bookies can really start to optimise their approach.

According to the data, 83% of football customers make their first-deposit within two hours of sign-up. This relatively short window of opportunity is where the battle for market share can be won and lost. Using on-site behavioural data to segment their audience, and targeting those who have registered but not deposited with compelling promotions and bonuses during this short period, gives operators a far greater chance of converting players who could, under normal circumstances, be lost forever.

Another valuable finding shows that bet patterns vary greatly depending on the timing of a football fixture. For example, matches that kick off at 3pm have a greater lead up time and distribution of bets compared with evening matches.

By understanding the way that players engage with different events – a Swedish Allsvenskan match in comparison with an English Championship game, or a Tuesday evening fixture compared with a Saturday early kick-off – operators can tailor their digital campaigns to make them as precise and personal as possible, and ultimately drive the lifetime value of players to a sportsbook.

We have developed proprietary media buying algorithms and designed its digital marketing system to factor these variables. Personalisation for existing customers is easily done; personalisation for non-registered players is where the true challenge resides.

Fine tune “in-play”

When it comes to in-play, the potential to misplace and waste marketing spend is even greater. Our findings support a two-pronged approach for in-play digital campaigns so that they focus on customer retention and reflect a customer’s previous betting behaviour. We have seen repeatedly that this strategy delivers excellent results.

To operate with even greater accuracy, bookies must also overlay the timeframes in which their punters are most likely to place an in-play bet. If we know, for instance, that 70% of in-play football bets are placed after the half-time whistle – perhaps driven by the failure of pre-match bets such as first goalscorer or scorecasts – it makes it far easier to plan these campaigns accordingly.

Our algorithms crunch all these data points and enable a bookie to offer the right bet, at the right time, to the right player, all in a fully automated and highly efficient manner. Without access to these insights, and the capabilities to pinpoint and target customer accordingly, sportsbook operators are fighting a losing battle when it comes to digital marketing spend.

To read the full Digital Marketing Whitepaper, click here.

Josh Linforth is business development director for digital marketing at Betgenius.