Changing course: Checkd Media on its bold new strategy

Since making its debut in 2012, Footy Accumulators has cemented its position as one of the industry’s most prominent social media affiliates. Yet while the brand’s owner, Team FA, was largely able to replicate this success with The Winners Enclosure and AccaTracker, the Manchester-based firm is now overhauling its strategy in a bid to solidify its claim to be the UK’s largest sports betting community.

Earlier this year, Team FA was rebranded to Checkd Media as part of a wider strategy to broaden its expertise away from social media and to remodel the business as a professional media publishing company. CEO and co-founder, Jamie Knowlson, says the change was influenced by the ongoing success of industry-leaders such as XLMedia, as well as a realisation that operators today are more fastidious about the type of traffic affiliates can send.

The ambitious rebrand is now complete and Checkd Media is recruiting in a big way to ensure it has the skill-set required to diversify into areas like SEO, PPC and product development. Speaking to EGR Marketing, Knowlson explains why he is confi dent his new strategy will take the affiliate to the next level and could even prompt the business to make an acquisition or two further down the line.

EGR Marketing: What was the thinking behind rebranding the company to Checkd Media?
Jamie Knowlson (JK): There were originally three owners who set up Team FA, now myself and Lee Struggles want to take things forward. The second thing was that we wanted to professionalise ourselves to show we’ve evolved from a pure social media affiliate, so we decided to rebrand, change the name and realign our strategy.

Checkd Media co-founders Lee Struggles and Jamie Knowlson

We now have eight different brands under the Checkd Media banner and are doing social, SEO, PPC, paid media and offering mobile applications. It was all about presenting a real change of image to the industry but for our punters and followers, nothing has really changed from that perspective. In fact, we are almost trying to keep the Checkd Media image away from them.

EGR Marketing: Do you see this as part of a wider trend to professionalise affiliate marketing in the online gambling space?
JK: I believe so. If you look at Catena and XLMedia and their approach to things, they are just buying up everything. The barriers to entry are also a lot harder now for affiliates and the ones that can professionalise themselves and move with the times will be the ones that survive. However, the ones that stay as small social affiliates are just going to get leſt behind. There will be a ceiling to what they can achieve. From our experience, operators are looking to work with partners that have it all and don’t just have one source of traffic
– essentially a platform to meet all requirements, whether it’s new customer acquisition, retention, impressions or exposure. It looks like that’s what they want to work with moving forwards, which works really well with our strategy.

EGR Marketing: Does it now help to have a portfolio of brands when negotiating with operators?
JK: It’s a massive help these days. One operator I was speaking to at LAC was saying they just wanted horseracing mobile players – that was great for us because two out of the eight brands we’ve got, we could supply to them and get an attractive deal done. A lot of operators now, especially with the acquisition targets they’re getting, are very much narrowing down to exactly what they want and are looking for people who can supply it. And again, that helps with what we’re doing too.

EGR Marketing: Did LAC prove a success for Checkd Media?
JK: It is always the most productive conference for me, while going to ICE is always a great experience because you forget just how big it is. It’s very similar to Cheltenham though: you go down on a Tuesday and by the time it comes to Friday you don’t want a Guinness, nor do you want to watch another horse race or talk about work.

EGR Marketing: While you might be attempting to diversify away from social media, is Footy Accumulators still Checkd Media’s main brand?
JK: Each of our brands has a different strategy. Footy Accumulators is the longest-serving one which everything originated from and now has a Facebook page with 400,000 likes, a Twitter page with nearly 500,000 followers, an Instagram account and a website. The latter is probably our Achilles heel at the minute and, on reflection, we actually started in reverse to a lot of other businesses. Usually you start off with a good website, which you use to monetise your traffic, and then you put that money into social media to direct more traffic to your website. However, we started with the social pages and then powered the website afterwards.

Checkd Media’s office in Manchester

EGR Marketing: Are you finding success with RequestABet in partnership with Sky Bet?
JK: We’ve got a relationship with Sky Bet through which we have a special section on their site for games featuring RequestABet. We send our RequestABet selections over daily, they price them up and put them on their site. We then tweet this out to our followers and
encourage them to get involved. We recently had an 80/1 RequestABet winner for a Champions League game and the sheer volume on the back of that has been astronomical. I think more than 4,000 bets were placed on it in total so it’s been all hands on deck to make the most of that opportunity. It was the biggest RequestABet pay-out in Sky Bet’s history.

EGR Marketing: What are you looking to do differently with your acquisition strategy?
JK: We are looking to aggressively revamp our websites, our SEO capabilities and focus on some AdWords work as well to complement our strengths in social media. They are the four pillars as it provides a good rounded amount of traffic to operators, but also value as well. You often get people saying social traffic isn’t as valuable as that coming through their apps or websites, but if we can get a good mix via those four pillars, then the operators are far happier with the overall blend of traffic coming through.

EGR Marketing: How would you sum up Checkd Media’s main priorities for the next couple of years?
JK: The main things we are looking to nail in the next 18 months is to get a good customer base for B2B, get on top of SEO and to become an industry-leader in creating our own content like Paddy Power does on the operator side. Lee [Struggles] has been tasked with driving that and to build a content division within Checkd Media. We are aiming to be a little bit like Social Chain – they are not based in the gambling world but they own a lot of social media accounts and brands often go to them to obtain a certain amount of impressions, for example. We’ve seen what they’ve done by creating good content and viral videos, and it would be great to find a similar approach with our strategy.

“We wanted to professionalise ourselves to show we’ve evolved from a pure social media affiliate” – Jamie Knowlson, CEO

The final part of our strategy is to bring more brands under Checkd Media. We don’t plan or expect this to be on the same scale as Catena Media or XLMedia, but there are smaller affiliates we know that are interested in either selling or coming in with us as a partnership. So we will be looking to add to the eight brands we’ve got at the moment and building that up over the next couple of years.

EGR Marketing: Do you think this marks a major step-change for the business to be able to go on the hunt for acquisition targets?
JK: We had discussions about this a few months ago and decided that we could have a real go at this to make sure it doesn’t become a lifestyle business – that was never what this was about. We want to be a serious outfit and to do that I think we need to be in a position to look at affiliate accounts that are in line with our strategy. We can now do that.

EGR Marketing: If you’re looking at new acquisition channels, does this mean you’re now increasing headcount?
JK: One reason for the rebrand was that we wanted to bring in some A-grade players and quality staff to help fulfil our vision and what we want to achieve. We believe that we are the UK’s biggest sports betting community and to make sure there is no doubt about that we need to ensure we work on the website and get some traffic in through Google and SEO. We have decided that we are going to aggressively recruit and find experts in that field to come and help us. We are experts in social media but when it comes to website development, we are probably at an intermediate level. So we’re looking for some experts to come in, join the team, get involved in the vision and add value to the strategy we’ve got going forward.

CheckdMedia is looking to increase its staff headcount

EGR Marketing: Are you still based in the same office following the recent rebrand?
JK: Yes, we are still based on Fountain Street in Manchester in the same office. However, we are looking to have a rebrand in here internally with a few little changes to make it less Team FA and more Checkd Media.

EGR Marketing: Is it difficult to find the talent you need where you’re currently based?
JK: I wouldn’t say it’s difficult but it’s definitely more limited – you don’t have the cream of the crop so-to-speak. With developers, for example, we are having to compete with the likes of bet365’s mobile office, which they’ve opened really close by, as well as Auto Trader and We Buy Any Car. These guys are all paying 10-15% above the going salary for developers, which makes it nearly impossible for us to compete with that. We also get on well with Andy Daniels at Degree53, so when we’re going after the same developers there can be some quite friendly competition.

EGR Marketing: So how are you trying to attract this talent?
JK: We are going with the angle of Checkd Media being a great place to work, that it’s an exciting business to be involved in and that you can come in, start working and get involved straight away. We’re also using the latest technology and a lot of developers find that refreshing because many of them are working with technology that is sometimes 10 years old. We have got all these other things that seem to be persuading people to come and join us, which is absolutely great.

EGR Marketing: How is everything going with the mobile side of the business?
JK: The apps are still growing month-on-month and year-on-year and another strand to the new Checkd Media brand is that we are going to start doing B2B. With the AccaTracker product, for example, we have white labelled a version which has been given to Revenue Engineers. The firm has got a version of it that it will flick on when the market regulates. We are also doing a couple more white labels for people in other areas of Europe, as well as in Australia. With our current offering and what we can supply to the affiliate marketing space, we are a lot of things now and not just this social media affiliate that we were labelled at the start.

EGR Marketing: Do you think B2B was the natural next step for Checkd Media?
JK: It won’t be a main focus for us, however, it is something we want to grow alongside what we’re currently doing. We do still want to be a partner for bookmakers but if there is mutual interest in supplying an app or a version of that we can monetise, then we’re happy to continue with this.

“We want to be a serious outfit and to do that we need to be in a position to look at affiliate accounts in line with our strategy” – Jamie Knowlson, CEO

EGR Marketing: Do you have any plans to diversify away from sports betting?
JK: Casino is something that is now in our strategy for the next 18 months or so. Because of our position with our followers and fans, we don’t want to look like we’ve sold out by tweeting out promotions for free casino spins. There is no major interest in casino to our followers so we’re going to have to be quite clever in terms of how we drive casino to not interfere with our usual community. Having said that, we wouldn’t be retweeting from the Footy Accumulators account, so most customers wouldn’t know the casino brand was actually ours. This could mean we will do paid media in the early hours of the morning, or we might use ads on our website or go down the email marketing route. It is definitely something we want to bring in and add to our incremental revenue.

EGR Marketing: Would that mean launching a completely new brand?
JK: I think what we will end up doing is having the sign-up offers on our current site that are not front-of-mind but will be on there, and these will then go through to a standalone casino website. This means that if bookmakers are looking for some casino traffic, then we at least have that in our back pocket.

EGR Marketing: Finally, are you doing anything particularly exciting from a technology perspective?
JK: The GiveMeOdds we’ve been working on is quite interesting. We have also been looking at chatbots and machine learning. Any way we can make a punter’s journey to put a bet on a lot easier – this is what our developers will be working on predominantly once we have hired them.