Andy Roberts is our Chief Marketing Officer at Planet Sport Group, leading on all things marketing and strategy. Andy calls on over two decades of experience in sports, media, gaming, professional services and music sectors – in both corporate and SMEs.
Throughout that time at businesses like KPMG and Sky Sports, he has refined the balancing act that is maintaining long-term strategic vision versus daily operational delivery and performance. Here he shares some of the ways he and his team have been working to stay adaptive, inventive, but focused on meaningful business growth in an ever-evolving sports media and tech landscape.
1) Long-Term Vision Vs Daily Delivery
In previous roles I've introduced agile principles to marketing management to maintain a clear line of sight to day-to-day activations and projects. Planet Sport Group has been no exception. The difference today is that we can now call on some fantastic SaaS platforms rather than whiteboards and post-it notes of yesteryear to make stand-ups, communication, progress monitoring and planning a dream.
My Marketing & Strategy team have been enthusiastic adopters of SaaS project management platform ClickUp. This excellent AI-powered platform allows my team to collaborate on work consistently and systematically across a range of demands and requests from various internal stakeholders while always prioritising the macro/micro demands of our customers.
With that bedrock of ongoing organisation and clarity on day-to-day priorities sorted, it's possible for me to find time for strategic planning; plotting a long-term growth path for the business.
Our recent involvement in accelerators such as Barclays Eagle Labs ScaleUp programme and TopTech Yorkshire has really helped our CEO, Barrie Jarrett, and I develop our thinking and plans for scaling the business.
We've been able to focus on the core areas such as go-to-market strategy, operations, profile raising, structure, investor engagement and performance management strategies that will help scale the business sustainably to foster long-term growth and success over time.
2) Great Talent = Winning Engagement
At Planet Sport Group, we’re fortunate to operate great brands that have loyal audiences, great brand histories and traffic in all the right geo-locations. But staying still and resting on laurels is never an option in digital media.
The landscape continually keeps fragmenting onto new platforms, channels, tech and means of consumption. Audience behaviours are always shifting, which means that in the search for ongoing meaningful engagement, you have to keep experimenting with formats, distribution, and editorial approaches. It's something we do a lot.
We are lucky to have some of the best publishing and content people in the business doing do just that. Finding the resources, the right experience and mindsets to deliver across developing channels or niches is part of the challenge, but finding people with exciting, fresh ways of thinking is essential for a business like us.
Our incredible teams are being augmented with creative specialists in social media, SEO, video and commercial activation who have proven experience in and around the sports media sector. It's exciting to work with these guys, and it is down to my team to support and collaborate with them to help them activate new audiences and grow revenues.
3) The Personalised Content Quest
Personalised content is absolutely a personal mission of mine. It's my dream that there should be perfectly curated sports content following our audience around, content that is useful at the right place and delivered at the right time. This is starting to be baked into our mission to create the ultimate fan platform and continually entertain and engage audiences – both our own and those of our customers.
Our last 12-18 months have been spent designing and implementing a marketing technology stack that builds towards that reality from a marketing, communications and tracking perspective. We needed to improve the ways we communicate and understand our audience: how it is segmented, what their particular preferences are and what makes them convert.
This project has kept my team really busy, as we have been really careful to think long-term, with growth in mind at every step – be it in scoping requirements, road-testing platforms or auditioning the right partners – to ensure we have best-of-breed, cost-effective technology solutions ready to go.
Meanwhile, we've been working with our product and technology teams as they develop our product suite further to reach that dream. Undeniably, AI innovation will have a hand in analysing large amounts of data, as will smart curation of content. Our own innovative platform, CrowdyAI, does just that and is going to be a significant part of how we deliver those tailored experiences for our audiences and clients from here.
4) Good Data & Expert Interpretation Is Everything
When your business runs on content, sports data, and marketing insights, clean data isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s essential.
In consumer publishing, revenue follows attention. That makes KPIs, like session volume and dwell time, fundamental to what we do. Improve these metrics, and the revenue follows. On the B2B side, client retention and satisfaction are core to us, but those clients need their own reporting routines catered for.
We operate a super-smart Business Information & Analysis team who keep an eagle eye on all of these metrics and more. We’ve invested in building a robust data warehouse that acts as a single source of truth across departments, so the team are able to provide the short and long-term information, views, visualisations and forecasts needed by the business and our clients to grow, engage and activate audiences through ever-enhanced content experiences.
5) Leverage Your Networks
We're not (yet!) in a position to spend vast sums on raising Planet Sport's profile across the many and varied places – near and far – markets that we operate in. But one cost-effective route is to be active in, fully engage with and be helpful to the networks you can easily access.
In our case, you've got a network right at your fingertips with LinkedIn. We've been steadily building up credibility, capability and content output by being present and offering some decent thought leadership, insights and behind-the-scenes access to what makes the business tick. We try to tap into the networks of our team members to make the most of our organic resources when posting and are trying a variety of executions to take our messaging to new audiences.
On a local level, our HQ home of Leeds boasts excellent sports and technology sectors. I know – from previous experience in music – you can make a mark by getting out there and building the network whilst doing good things for others.
Being useful to people is a win-win, so that's why we fully engage with Leeds Digital and why I founded Digital Sport North. The latter is an ecosystem aiming to develop a local network of people working in sports, media, and technology, providing them with useful insights, platforms, support and opportunities to network and build businesses and careers for individuals alike.
Ultimately, a great business approach isn’t just about tools; it’s about strategy, people, community, and housing on delivering value where it matters most.
