2015 highly commended: BT Sport, Best Business to Business Marketing - case study

The challenge

Critical to the commercial success of BT Sport was the need to break into the pubs and clubs market, who unlike consumers had to pay for the service. This commercial market was dominated by Sky, and BT had no track record in sport or content provision to build upon – representing a serious challenge in terms of driving brand awareness, credibility and conversion. Added to this, others that had gone before them and challenged Sky had not succeeded (Setanta had pulled out of the market the previous season) – this was a major challenge to overcome.

The solution

BT Sport needed a different approach to just selling the sports content to these pubs and clubs. Many of them, particularly independents, are struggling to survive and they knew the cost of BT Sport could be prohibitive. So their strategy was not just to sell the service but provide a complete support package that could help their businesses survive and grow.

They achieved this by first acquiring pubs and clubs using personalised pricing based on what they believed they could afford. And then providing a complete support package which helped to pull punters in, keep them engaged and drive repeat visits with a toolkit. This contained amongst other things, mobile interactive beer runners, a pub finder service and assets that they could download.

The results

From a starting base of zero, BT Sport exceeded all expectations driving subscriptions 42% ahead of target by acquiring 19,000 venues. In just 9 months this equated to 24% of all pubs, just a shade behind Sky’s 25% which they’d grown over 20 years. They even grew the category 26% - getting sport into more pubs and clubs than ever before. And the campaign achieving a substantial ROI of 553%.

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(Please note: parts of this case study may have been redacted for confidentiality purposes.)