Case study: PA Sport

Background

PA Sport is the global leader in sports information, and a division of the PA Group of companies. Drawing on a global network of reporters and production staff, PA Sport is the partner of choice for many of the world's leading news organisations, publishers, online destinations and sport federations - providing comprehensive sports information including news, data, results, editorial, video, previews and statistics.

A sporting challenge

PA Sport's marketing team communicated to us their vision of how they were already developing as a business. Via audacious restructuring and acquisition they were becoming an unrivaled global player in sports information - not just in traditional print media, but across online, mobile and newly emerging platforms.

To match this expansion they required a partner who could provide a coherent digital marketing strategy - one that could help to both communicate their offer, and also spearhead their key goal of new business lead generation.

Marking off an approach

We worked closely with PA Sport to identify three key areas in which we could innovate - helping them attract, inform and and interest new contacts:

• Stronger communication of their products and services
• A better web presence and tracking ability
• A content management system to allow non-technical users to easily manage and update their website
• An email newsletter solution to enable creation, broadcast and reporting of email campaigns

Let's show our colours

Step one was to embed ourselves in the company - their values, ideas and people. From here we generated a number of visual brand statements that were used internally at PA Sport, and in the trade press, to help impart their core vision of where they are now - and of where they would like to be.

This activity provided a framework within which we should operate - and drove the development of their visually arresting new website.

Enabling understanding

As a B2B services company, PA Sport clearly understood that their online operations have to be the hub of all marketing activity. Six months after we started they had a website that not only informs them about visitors and statistics, but also tracks and validates leads from all of their marketing activities - whether on- or off-line.

And it looks great. Our vision of an edgy, market-leading image has carried over perfectly to the web, immediately drawing interest from customers and competitors alike.

Agile communication

Not only did we rebuild their entire web presence from the ground up, but we engineered a solution that integrated with people. PA Sport required more than a website - they needed a whole marketing process that allowed non-technical staff to easily edit and update their website.

We installed our in-house content management system, Firefly, providing a simple means to manage site content. And for our lap of honour we also customised the system to enable them to use it to author email newsletters quickly and effectively - before pushing them out to subscribers.

Cheering them on

To demonstrate PA Sport's sheer scale of operation and reach we needed to think laterally - and literally; why couldn't we leverage the masses of sports data that they amass on a daily basis to visually explain just how far ahead of the pack they are?

The result was the PA Sport 'Scorecard', a cross-media campaign and microsite designed to speak volumes - by visualising the staggering amount of information that they deal with every day, in a simple and impactful way.

Technically this was both innovative and challenging - but we conceived an XML-based solution that seamlessly integrates with PA Sport's real-time data gathering systems, does the maths, and delivers the results to a user-friendly Flash-based website. A solution that allows visitors to experience and learn about PA Sport in new and absorbing ways, while reinforcing their main capabilities.

And the results came in...

In a word - spectacular. Traffic to the PA Sport website has leapt, and the average time spent on the website by each user has increased massively. And the bottom line? Enquiries about their products and services have increased - meaning an increase in the number of sales leads.