Stakester gets its own little case study.
Because this job took over my life.
Part 1: content
Originally I was hired as a Copywriter and Marketing Coordinator. One of my first tasks was to build a team of intern writers and create a blog that would make us one of the biggest gaming brands on the internet.
That was the brief. I had never really done anything like that before. So I hired two interns and we wrote. And wrote. And wrote. We found partners to share our content to a wider audience. And we wrote some more.
Within a year, we had 150k monthly visits to the site. We were one of the biggest content publishers in the FIFA space for the UK and the US. We routinely beat the bigger competition (think Dexerto etc.) for the #1 ranking for informational keywords.
We also learned a lot. We didn’t have nearly enough high intent keywords. We had too high a bounce rate. And ultimately, the Stakester App wasn’t stable enough to support the number of potential users we drove there. But we built a serious audience.
Part 2: rebrand & TOV
As soon as I started at Stakester, we were having discussions about the branding. It just wasn’t right. So I worked with the Head of Design on a brand guidelines document, with a new logo and a new TOV structure.
For the first time in my career, I led the process to define the new TOV – running workshops with stakeholders from across the company.
Part 3: PR
Our CEO and Founder was a huge believer in the halo effect of PR. So we pursued coverage everywhere, always trying to come up with fun, creative ways to get our name in the paper.
On the B2C front, the strategy was to get ourselves in publications favoured by the 18-32 year old male audience. We aimed to run creative campaigns that spoke to that laddish sense of humour. We did things like proving the effectiveness of the “lean forward” meme and measured how many calories you can burn in a really competitive gaming session.
On the B2B front, we were chasing coverage that could help us build better partnerships and chase investment. We achieved a lot of coverage around our unusual working environment – and it did wonders for our hiring team.
Ultimately though, we weren’t able to track the effectiveness of these campaigns at all. Our approach was too scattergun - and if I had to do it again I’d do less and do it better.
Part 3.5: Head of Marketing
Our previous Head of Marketing (my manager) went off to the big leagues to join Fnatic and I was offered the role. I started managing the marketing team of 11 – including the video team, our CEO’s podcast producer, my intern writers and the performance marketing team.
Part 4: social
Organic social was massive for us: we built large audiences on TikTok and Twitter through up-to-the-minute FIFA content produced by our Head of Social.
I’m not going to pretend I was the genius behind it – that was all him! But, while working together I learned how to build and nurture an audience.
We found a lot of success on TikTok, which has become somewhat of a personal specialty. If you need help growing a TikTok audience I guarantee I can do it for you.
Part 5: the B2B pivot
In 2022 shit got extremely real for many startups. The free money was all gone, suddenly everyone wanted a path to profitability rather than growth. We had to think fast.
We had been experimenting with a competitive product for mobile game developers, so we started selling. I wrote a cold outreach campaign myself (based on the genius sales advice of Robert B. Cialdini) and we signed deals with two of the biggest game devs on the planet.
TO get to that point, we needed a new brand, a new website and a whole new messaging architecture. We did it on the shoe string and if we had been blessed with a little more time, it would’ve been massive.
