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20Shots has been shortlisted in the Best Low Budget Campaign category of the Global Social Media Awards, an international award to commend and reward organisations which use social media in new, interesting or far-reaching ways.
As the name of the category we’re shortlisted for indicates, 20Shots isn’t a huge agency with massive marketing budgets. While it would be great to be able to just pay someone to create great content for us, or to hire a celebrity personality, the creativity that a lower marketing budget can foster is actually priceless.
And in the case of this low budget campaign, not only did we not spend money to harness the power of celebrity influence – our campaign was so good that it worked the other way around! A big, big name in the industry saw our campaign and we ended up signing him for a client.
What was the low budget campaign?
20Shots is a marketing affiliate in the iGaming space, providing several iterations of fantasy sports games, such as football and basketball, from the UK to the US and Latin America. Our main product is our free-to-play fantasy football game based on the English Premier League, Fantasy5.
The fantasy football and affiliate marketing sectors are massively over-saturated, and as a small marketing business, we needed to find a way to reach our audience in line with our brand personality, and our goal of creating creative comical content.
As we discussed what engaging social content looks like, particularly for our Premier League fantasy football game, we found more and more that video-assisted referee technology (VAR) was being discussed as a huge point of contention for our audience and therefore garnered a great deal of debate and engagement on social media.
The strategy was simple: to conceive and create weekly content about VAR decisions and best practice, and to do so in ways that would engage audiences.
A few weeks previously, the Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL), who manage refereeing for the Premier League, had released the audio from a disallowed Liverpool FC goal against Tottenham Hotspur FC, which in part led to Liverpool’s defeat.
This caused a huge social media uproar, even amongst non-Liverpool fans, as firstly, it was the first full audio release, and secondly, because it demonstrated how many flaws there were in not just that decision, but in the implementation of VAR as a whole.
So we waited for the right moment, then we took our chance: we scripted, recorded, produced and edited a spoof VAR decision-making conversation between PGMOL and the referee: and the crowd went wild!
Big numbers, small campaign
The tweet (X post) containing the VAR spoof audio garnered more than 5.7 million views, doubled our average engagement rate and increased our followers by 21%. But most importantly, that week, we increased signups both to the game and to our clients’ games by 34% and increased game entries by 24%.
One of the things our partners and clients praise us for is understanding their end user and what motivates them. And we do this through interacting with players on our platform, but also, daily on social media. We know what makes them laugh, what frustrates them and what they like about the fantasy gamification of a live sporting event.
We also wanted to represent all of the fun of social media of days past – our social media campaigns are for business and marketing purposes – but they also make people laugh, interact, and most importantly, enjoy social media the way it was meant to be.
If you’d like to check it out, head to: https://twitter.com/Fantasy5Jackpot/status/1721986779048263878
Congratulations to those shortlisted alongside us in our category and thanks a million to The Global Social Media Awards and Don’t Panic Events for this brilliant opportunity!
