Project Overview:
Northern Arena, one of the largest esports media organizations in Canada, needed an overhaul of its content broadcast brand, SQUADState. I joined the org as a content marketing consultant, revamped their entire Twitch and YouTube livestream content, scheduling and talent roster. I also took on production of the SQUADCast weekly gaming news podcast and worked with the editorial team to infuse daily high-engagement gaming news and evergreen SEO-centric content on the website.
Challenge
Northern Arena enjoys a large audience base, but its SQUADState media and content production brand was struggling to leverage web presence to improve content marketing on social media channels after production ceased during Covid lockdowns. The SQUADCast podcast had consistency but was having trouble gaining traction and the live streams had low-to-no viewership or had inconsistent bursts of traffic.
SQUADState social media channels had become stagnant and only used to ‘blast’ new articles as they came up on the website with little to no engagement.
We needed a complete overhaul and integration review to see how we could leverage existing clout in the content space to empower new channels and inspire growth and uptake with endemic and non-endemic audiences.
Solutions:
- I committed a complete rebrand of the Twitch, Twitter, YouTube and portions of the SQUADState website to bring all channels in line with the org look/tone/feel to ensure audiences knew that these properties belong in the same experience
- I completed a marketing content integration review to identify where we could cross-promote, leverage and showcase new properties in front of existing and new audiences driven by website traffic
- I liaised with our web marketing servies teams in the UK to identify how we could monetize and utilize visual display ads to help offset costs of new content marketing programming
- I worked with the editorial team to secure high-profile influencers and guest speakers for the SQUADCast podcast to drive more and new audience acquisition
Outcomes:
- All social channels were fitted with completely new, brand-centric visuals and key messaging which drove notable increase in audience cross-pollination as Twitch and YouTube users became regular website users and vice-versa
- Strengthened the SQUADState brand identity and developed a completely new content marketing schedule including more audience engagement-focused Twitter content series’ regular daily Twitch and YouTube streams, and more topical, guest-speaker placement on the SQUADCast
- Worked with web teams to embed live streams and leverage web audiences to populate livestreams adding an average of 70-150 concurrent daily viewers consistently
- Scheduled focus on esports titles for livestream – exclusive to SQUADState’s Twitch channel, driving regular concurrent viewers to 700-800 daily
- Worked with web dev teams to integrate more display ad space on high-traffic landing pages generating an additional 10-15% in ad revenue monthly
Learns:
- Every content channel must be tied together, visually and functionally, in order to maximize audience retention and cross-platform growth potential
- Leveraging your social media channels explicitly for promoting your content does not work for audiences – you can’t allow your channels to become billboards
- Staying on top of apps, trends and APIs that allow you to put your content in front of new audiences on your existing channels is critical to quickly amplifying your audience growth
- Collaboration with engaging subject matter experts and influential creators is extremely effective in producing high-quality content talk shows, live streams and talking-head content
- Awareness of under-used badges, classification and categories on each platfom is key to breaking through noise and saturation on highly populated channels like Twitch and YouTube
