The ‘campaign in focus’ series documents a sporting campaign of The Goat Agency, identifying the challenges of reaching that sport’s demographic, as well as what the agency learnt from the event. 

In this edition we spoke to the company’s co-founder, Harry Hugo on the Agency’s work for the ICC Cricket World Cup, where it was tasked with appealing to an incredibly diverse fanbase and increasing ticket sales for the tournament. 

InsiderSport: Firstly can you tell us more about the purpose of the campaign with the Cricket World Cup? 

Harry Hugo: The purpose of the campaign started off with driving as many ticket sales as we possibly could, as well as people entering the ballot which was about two years ago. This drove people to put their name down for the ballot to see if they wanted tickets and get themselves signed up. The aim of the campaign was to drive sales which then progressed to building hype for the competition.

In the lead up to the tournament the aim was to get influencers to attend certain events such as the trophy tour in order to create a buzz before it got underway. The campaign was well rounded and as the tournament reached its final stages, we were doing less because it wasn’t as needed due to it marketing itself.

InsiderSport: What challenges did promoting the cricket world cup present in terms of reaching such a diverse audience? 

Harry Hugo: This is a very important point, we were really tactical in the fact that we needed to create various types of content for different types of people in each audience group. The brief was about reaching fans in a variety of locations around the world in different ways. From this, we were very niche in how we targeted the countries we were after, but at the same time very broad because it’s generally sports fans who are interested in a big tournament that is being hosted in England.

We were mainly looking to market to people in England, but that could be Bangladeshi natives that live in England as well as English people who are looking to go to an amazing event in their home country.

“The tournament itself, the matches, the players, the drama that ensues, that’s really what creates the legacy”

InsiderSport: How important could the campaign be when it comes to ensuring the tournament’s legacy? 

Harry Hugo: I think the tournament’s legacy speaks for itself. They couldn’t have asked for a better conclusion to the tournament and better match to finish it. From a legacy point of view, the home side winning is always a good thing for the tournament. If we look back on how well Great Britain performed in the London 2012 Olympics, it increased a legacy which was created off the back of the event.

We built a tournament from nothing, to something where people were able to get involved in and were really engaged throughout. The tournament itself, the matches, the players, the drama that ensues, that’s really what creates the legacy and we saw huge growth. If you type ‘Cricket’ into Google trends you can see the number of search terms that are made on the word cricket which backs to 2004 and the highest amount is the day of the Cricket World Cup Final by about 10 times.

InsiderSport: Can you reveal any unique methods you utilised in order to engage the cricket audience? 

Harry Hugo: Understanding that the cricket audience is so diverse, was the first thing that we used. There isn’t anything massively unique in what we did except from creating specific content for Indian fans versus Bangladeshi fans, versus Australian fans, versus English fans. That was the way we engaged the audience. I wouldn’t say there was anything groundbreaking that we did, we just pulled it off across the board very consistently and very well whilst engaging with a broad set of fans to engage in niche content.

InsiderSport: Which platforms were most effective when it came to the cricket campaign? 

Harry Hugo: Facebook and Instagram were probably the most effective platforms for targeting different consumers. We utilised these to really target down on the nationalities and languages that we were trying to go after, such as; Bengali, Indian and English. This was a nice way for us to target these audiences and create specific messaging for them.

Twitter was much better for creating conversations around the matches because that’s where people have live conversations, so that’s how we split what we did on each platform. In terms of hype, it was always going to be created on the platforms that we could target down on, whereas creating conversations and getting involved in matchday topics was always going to be on Twitter.

InsiderSport: Where there any lessons learnt from the Cricket World Cup, that the Goat Agency has been able to take to other campaigns? 

Harry Hugo: We expected to sell out the ballot, that was always the key goal at the start in order to sell the tickets. The great thing was, as a collective and as an agency team we managed to sell out the ballot way ahead of expectations and that really helped drive the ability to create hype earlier than we thought. In terms of planning for the event, we could have brought forward some things we were doing because we managed to sell out the ballot so fast.

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