Central Sports
The Home of Badminton
Reinventing a heritage brand with a complete design refresh and ongoing, always-on content-driven marketing to deliver record-breaking e-commerce sales.
Full 360: Branding. Words. Pictures. Video. Website. Social. ECRM.
The objective
Central Sports has been respected in the badminton market for more than four decades and Sporting Eric was tasked with creating a new brand look and feel, new e-commerce website together with an ecosystem of supporting social media channels and ecrm.
What we did
We completely redesigned the brand giving it a fresh contemporary feel but ensured the ‘Home of badminton’ ethos – a club where every player is welcome – was at the heart of the offering. With a completely new ecommerce platform, the user journey was vastly improved, and content played a key role in attracting new customers to Central Sports, while also ensuring the loyal existing customer base was well catered for. As part of an ongoing, multi-channel content calendar we activated partnerships with badminton icons such as Chris Adcock with advice-driven content, then celebrated the clubs across the UK with a video series based on the people who play at grassroots level. Social channels spoke daily to our audience with the best curated and bespoke content in the sport.
“Sporting Eric have been a one-stop marketing and creative shop for us, they’ve not only reinvented the brand for the modern era, they’ve also built new platforms and consistently found creative ways to engage our audience and ultimately helped make us the number one retailer for badminton in the UK.”
— Wai Lim, CEO, Central Sports
What happened
A year-on-year sales increase of 60%, allowing the brand to break the seven-figure sales mark for the first time in our first full year. Within three months, our social campaign delivered a reach of 2.7m on Instagram and a 391% increase on Facebook. We launched the brand’s Instagram, taking it to 19k followers, regularly attracting over 1m monthly views. Our weekly content-driven emails also delivered – providing average open rates of 36%. Sporting Eric’s multi-channel marketing activation helped drive Central Sports from an annual revenue of £98k to £2.6m. In the first year of the Sporting Eric-built e-commerce platform, we increased revenue by 770%. Year two saw 115%, and since then the growth has been on average 20% year-on-year.
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