Give their experience in the sports betting market, Blueclaw team were aware that the campaign had to be driven by a tenacious, highly targeted PR strategy and an irresistible content marketing asset that was topical and simple, but data-driven and powerful.
The VAR from Perfect campaign involved input from across Blueclaw and with success assured by the project being divided into three rigorous phases –
Strategy, ideation and pre-outreach
Research, design and content development
PR, promotion and link earning Strategy, Ideation and Pre-outreach.
To ensure all goals were met, the SEO team worked closely with the Content and PR team to create an ambitious target audience media list of strong sites that met one or more of the following criteria –
- High Trust Flow
- Highly visited
- Topically-relevant to sport, football, iGaming, betting and more
- Proven to provide links
- Proven to cover mainstream betting brands in a positive light – no pushing at ‘closed doors’
As part of the developed strategy, the team coordinated the launch of the campaign with the start of the Premier League season (transfer deadline day slowed progress momentarily) to capitalise on the VAR controversies every weekend and ensuring we’d have fresh angles to go out with each week.
Competitor Challenges
Presenting significant commercial and SEO challenges, the betting and gaming market is currently more competitive than ever.
Major mergers and acquisitions in the sector have led to a huge amount of competition from rivals with enormous budgets and frequently, sports betting brands find it challenging to develop original, newsworthy content and story angles. Moreover, there is often pushback from publications who are reluctant to be seen as endorsing a betting brand.
Blueclaw’s proven answer to these challenges was to develop fresh content marketing and PR strategies that were relevant, topical, quotable and interesting to multiple audiences
Ideation and Creative Process
The Content and PR team began the creative process with:
- In-depth, creative ideation to hone in on specific topics with link-earning and high awareness potential
- Pre-outreach of shortlisted ideas to journalists and influencers to gauge their enthusiasm and shortlist ideas.
- Data was taken from FIFA and UEFA reports from around the world, with the World Cup being a particular focus with the results.
The team gained an exclusive interview with the secretary of the International Football Association Board (the lawmakers of the game), Lukas Brud, which helped gain extra coverage and led to widespread interest.
Along with quotes from Brud, the team obtained a feature from Mike Riley, General Manager of the Professional Game Match Officials Limited and incorporated both comments into key findings from the reports into the press releases.
The campaign launched at the same time as the Premier League season and with VAR controversies continually popping up every weekend, we were met with fresh angles to go out with each week.
PR, Promotion and Link Earning
To ensure awareness was raised for both the brand and the campaign the PR team focused on the following:
- Creation of media lists based on
- Our own black book of contacts.
- Eager contacts from pre-outreach.
- Industry/sports/betting contacts from SEO research.
- Fresh contacts from the various media databases that we have access to.
- Prioritised outreach combining segmented press releases via email and phone
- Re-engagement to secure links from non-linking coverage.
