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Fanduel


Winning the battle for sports fans’ attention

Challenge

With its leading fantasy sports games and sports betting services, FanDuel has become the go-to online destination for sports fans. Having first reimagined the concept of fantasy sports by enabling fans to play one-day fantasy sports contests for real cash prizes, then adding the FanDuel Sportsbook to its roll of services, the brand is now one of the largest providers of daily fantasy sports services in North America, serving around six million registered users.

FanDuel’s success rests on its range of fantasy sports options and its appeal to players of all abilities. Football, basketball, baseball, soccer – all these sports and more are covered. And whatever their level of expertise, FanDuel players always know who they’re up against. So they can be sure it’s a fair matchup, even if they’re a beginner.

With the FanDuel Sportsbook acquiring a license to operate in a growing number of US states, the company wanted to build on its strong position in the market and increase the number of new user acquisitions. The goal: to first increase brand awareness of its Daily Fantasy Sports and FanDuel Sportsbook lines of business, and then convert that brand recognition potential into a raft of new users. The plan: to create and activate a full-funnel cross-platform paid social strategy focused on boosting brand awareness and maximizing the return on investment.

What Accenture did

Working with Adaptly, part of Accenture, FanDuel activated a multi-platform full-funnel marketing strategy. Dedicated budgets for user acquisition, retention, and reactivation ensured every part of the funnel could be targeted effectively in a series of new social-focused campaigns spanning leading platforms (leveraging Adaptly’s strong relationships with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat).

With an updated direct response strategy tailored for each stage of the marketing funnel – from broad awareness building and demographic/interest/lookalike targeting at the upper reaches through to customized messaging for registered non-players and lapsed players – the team improved campaign efficiency, maximized reach, and limited audience overlap. This included creating a highly tuned retargeting plan based on users’ past behavior in FanDuel applications (such as installation, registration, first-time deposits, and so on).

The multi-platform marketing strategy was designed to continuously learn and improve. Each campaign included detailed brand lift measurement analyses, enabling FanDuel to get a clear sense of what was working, and how, to inform future campaigns. Plus, a more holistic attribution model provided a deeper understanding of cross-platform performance during key periods in each campaign.

A surgical approach to budget pacing was central to helping FanDuel increase campaign efficiency. That meant carefully aligning multi-platform marketing with the sporting calendar, strategically increasing spend at key points such as capitalizing on the buzz around the football season kickoff.
Accenture-FanDuel-Watching-Game

People and culture

A strong collaborative spirit was central to the success of this project. Adopting a genuinely ‘hands-on’ attitude, both organizations worked closely together, across marketing, creative, and CRM, with the Accenture team effectively acting as an extension of FanDuel’s own business. This was critical in ensuring the team’s collective marketing and industry expertise could be quickly transformed into better business outcomes for FanDuel.
"Adaptly, part of Accenture, have proven to be outstanding partners for us this football season. They have been able to accommodate the increasing scale of our business as we've expanded our FanDuel Sportsbook product into multiple new states, all while maintaining the high performance standards we set for the year."
- Aaron Dugan, Director – Online Marketing for FanDuel

Value delivered

FanDuel was able to seamlessly scale its business across North America. By focusing on high-growth platforms like Snapchat, the team helped FanDuel iterate its marketing creatively and tap into a host of new inventory sources. The impact on the business has been significant: campaign scope was doubled while holding acquisition performance metrics steady, showing a strong ability to scale.

With more and more people enjoying sports via social media, the ability to engage with consumers on these conversational platforms is critical to a company like FanDuel. But the fans benefit just as much, using FanDuel’s smart social marketing as a lever to connect and converse with other players by posting their own comments, memes and trash-talk. They’re also better able to “get in the game”, learning which teams and players are favored as they play daily fantasy games or place bets. That’s helping FanDuel turn casual fans into true fantasy sports fanatics.

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