Robbie Spargo, Little Dot Sport director explains how a clear digital media strategy and targetted creative campaigns increased viewership by 13x
Since the beginning of our partnership, the ECB’s YouTube channel has grown considerably year-on-year, with an exponential increase in views during the peaks of cricketing summers, as well as each off-season. A good off-season gives you even better results when the season returns.
The channel has seen a 13x increase in viewership between the 2017 and 2022 season, and a 13x increase in off-season viewing during the same period. Off-season viewership trebled in both the 2017/18 and 2018/19 off-season.
These results were achieved primarily through the implementation of a comprehensive off-season strategy, focused around leveraging The ECB’s existing archive of content including:
● Continuous output of evergreen content, including interactive fan-led videos like our T20 World Cup of Matches series and The Match That Made series looking at breakthrough performances from England Cricket’s star players
● As-live archive replays, including iconic Australia vs England matches prior to an Ashes fixture
● Reactive pieces responding to the latest England Cricket stories, such as Alastair Cook’s retirement
This use of content enabled us to stimulate growth during previously dormant periods, allowing it to build momentum and stay relevant within YouTube’s algorithm, allowing it to reap the rewards when cricket returned.
Scaling in non-key markets
The ECB’s global viewership increased 5x since the start of 2019, with India representing 70% of global viewing since 2019. The channel has also doubled its UK audience since 2019, and in 2022, it stands 3x larger than it did in 2016, before the partnership began.
Without the snowball effect of huge global growth driven by the Indian subcontinent, it would have been harder to achieve that local growth. YouTube is a global platform, and its algorithm doesn’t exclude international popularity from how it surfaces content domestically.
Additionally, YouTube viewers are globally minded - they want to see what’s trending internationally and be part of a global conversation. That’s why videos with millions of views are more appealing to a potential viewer than a video with thousands of views, and so the global halo effect is really important in driving local viewership.
Little Dot Sport has been working with The England & Wales Cricket Board since 2017 to enable them to reach more digital fans, through a robust, data-driven content strategy.
The company grew viewership for The ECB’s YouTube channel by 13x, resulting in the channel being the most viewed UK-based YouTube sports channel globally in July 2022. Little Dot Sport has also delivered several successful sponsorship campaigns and reached global audiences.
On YouTube, features deliver engagement
Features on YouTube are highly effective at engaging a younger audience domestically. Drawing from data across the last four years on the ECB channel, feature content draws 45.3% of its viewers from the 13-24 year-old demographic in the UK, significantly higher than the channel average of 32.8%.
For example, the documentary No Boundaries that features player journeys, supported by Natwest, has proved popular with UK cricket fans, with over a sixth of viewers coming from the UK.
YouTube is a sponsorship asset
During summer 2022, we delivered successful sponsorship campaigns across YouTube for the ECB’s commercial partners (Royal London, Vitality, LV), ensuring the successful running of pre-roll advertising on over 100 highlights packages. Moreover, for the first time, the ECB was able to secure a sponsorship in India for 2022, packaging and selling their huge scale of advertising inventory in India directly to a commercial partner.
Not only did these sponsorships mean the ECB was able to demonstrate increased value to their commercial partners, but it allowed those partners to align themselves closer to the content, providing the ECB with a highly compelling package to sell going forward.
Just as social is front of mind on marketing plans for sports organisations, it has a much more prominent future within commercial packages than before.
Facebook is the new YouTube
As soon as we started working on the England Cricket Facebook page, we implemented a long-form video strategy to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms increasing emphasis on watch-time.
Following in YouTube’s footsteps, we witnessed how long-form video, which keeps fans engaged for longer, is pushed algorithmically on the platform - primarily due to the content’s increased potential for revenue generation through in-stream advertising.
By leveraging ECB’s archive with long-form edits and reactive/relevant posting of older content, we increased minutes watched by 35% in the first year after we started working on it. This helped the page achieve 1.9 billion views since the start of 2021.
Today, I see Facebook where YouTube was a few years ago - a fairly basic algorithm surfacing/resurfacing content that gets long watch-times. It’s therefore the perfect place for using archive content to build an audience. Something that’s strongly associated with YouTube.
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