Cricket Victoria: Power play Success

3X Traffic Surge, 150% Longer Average Session Duration, and a 95% Reduction in Bounce Rate for Cricket Victoria Website Redesign and Digital Marketing

Overview

Cricket Victoria is the governing body for all levels of cricket in Victoria. Providing the opportunity for more people in local communities to get involved with the sport, Cricket Victoria oversees more than 1000 cricket clubs across the state.

Cricket Victoria’s 2017-2022 strategic plan, which is in line with Cricket Australia’s strategic plan, is focused on five key aims;

  • Vision: Victoria’s favourite sport and a sport for all Victorians
  • Purpose: Inspire and support all Victorians to love cricket
  • Make Victoria Number 1 for fans
  • Make Victoria Number 1 for participation
  • Make Victoria Number 1 in all formats

In order to achieve these objectives, Cricket Victoria needed a high-end web presence and digital marketing strategy to achieve its objectives. Along with this, Cricket Victoria also needed to develop an online shop for the membership fees and training levies collection along with other ancillary services selling opportunities.

6 Months and Ongoing

Professional Sports Body

Junior & Senior Cricket Players and Fans

5+

$100K +

B2C

Digital Strategy, UI/UX Design, WordPress CMS, eCommerce, Social

Increase Fan Engagement, Increase Player Registrations, Drive Organic Traffic

Victoria, Australia

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01

The Objectives

To build awareness of the Cricket Victoria brand, Cricket Victoria thought it was only fitting to have a website that reflected the academy’s excellence. They wanted a website that worked seamlessly across all devices, and that hooked up to their CRM system to manage applications from Australia and overseas. Cricket Victoria also wanted to develop an ecommerce capabilities to collect and self serve functions for different levies through its website. They needed a website that is sleek and simple, something fitting for their target audience. We accepted the challenge!

23 Digital was engaged to create an immersive digital experience for Cricket Victoria for both web, mobile and social platform to engage cricket fans in Victoria.

Objectives

  • Ensure site architecture and navigation enable easy browsing and accessibility of content
  • Up to date digital strategy
  • Branding pack and full site design and build
  • Information on competitions and teams
  • Development of support resources
  • Establish SEO foundations to increase search engine traffic, drive future growth and minimise impact to the existing traffic and customers
  • Ongoing development and search marketing support
02

The Challenge

The old website wasn’t effective at outlining the services offered by Cricket Australia and was also lacking in other key areas. Cricket Victoria wanted to design their digital strategy around their five-year roadmap plan. The challenges facing Cricket Victoria and the KFC T20 Big Bash League project included:

  • Launching the digital presence for a new cricket league teams and engaging the fans with their respective clubs
  • Introducing and increasing fan engagement with local club matches, domestic matches and the Big Bash League, its teams and players, six months prior to a ball being bowled every season.
  • Creating rivalry between the teams; to have fans declaring their allegiances and joining in the rivalry.
  • Allowing the members to pay their training levies and membership fees online.
03

The Solution

23 Digital devised a digital transformation strategy which was geared to make Cricket Victoria stand out amongst the other state based cricketing bodies. We unified the look, feel and content of the website to make it focused on increasing brand awareness, trust and familiarity.

Cricket Victoria has diversified cricket programmes and training resources – to make it clear to players and fans on how these classes will help them improve their skills and achieve a better performance in playing cricket professionally. Information was presented in multimedia formats, from articles to PDFs to videos.

Cricket Victoria selected 23 Digital for the following reasons:

  • Focus on usability allows even casual users to easily manage Web site without complicated coding.
  • Multi-site management provides support and content sharing across many sites across a single management platform.
  • Sport and entertainment credentials – WordPress is used by a number of high-profile sports teams across the world
  • To overcome low levels of initial familiarity, the idea was to create an energetic and cohesive program across all Web sites, leveraging opportunities afforded by digital media to reach the youth-oriented target market.
  • Following a stringent Information Architecture process that clearly defined the overall structure, content and hierarchy for site, 23 Digital worked closely with Cricket Victoria on the visuals for the sites, customising each design according to the appropriate team/league branding.
  • With fan engagement as a key objective, the KFC T20 Big Bash League site includes features such as a live countdown, hype videos to generate anticipation for the start of the competition, online membership and rich media content, encouraging fans to pick their teams.
  • Extensive social integration such as the Facebook Like Ladder and Fan Voice page create a sense of tribalism as fans are urged to join in and declare their allegiances, making them part of this exciting milestone in Australian sporting history.

23 Digital was able to tap into local and global resources that provided them with both feedback and advice on best practice implementation of the solution. What resulted were visually distinctive websites that are all part of one cohesive platform.

04

The Results

Cricket Victoria Organic Traffic
The WordPress platform allowed 23 Digital and Cricket Victoria to rapidly build and launch a digital presence for organisation and the new KFC T20 Big Bash League team pages inside of 4 months. WordPress provides a centralised platform for team sites to work out of which allows for easier management of content and admin access.

A few weeks later, the website came to life! The light, breezy, cool look instantly relays what the brand and the products they offer is all about. The content is informative and compelling, whilst the CTAs deliver conversions. The backbone of the website is an SEO-friendly content management system (CMS) which allows Cricket Victoria to make urgent changes with the click of a few buttons.

The websites have clocked up jaw-dropping numbers, with site traffic exceeding expectations. Over 3 million page views were delivered during the season and fan engagement on the site over 3 ½ minutes. The newfound fans have continued pouring in, with an average 300% per cent of new visits recorded.

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