How Contribly enables engaging partnerships to be activated at speed: HBVL & KRC GENK
HBVL.be a hyperlocal newspaper in Belgium now have the tools to engage with their community and can react to events at speed - increasing value for their partners.
Topline results
When Brand Marketing teams use Editorial products right, magic can happen:
Offered a plan to their partners & executed it all in 3 days.
Increase digital growth: app downloads up 44%
3500+ fan photos collected, printed and wrapped around the players bus in 2 days
2x more fan photos than planned for in 1/2 the time expected! Still easy to manage.
New KRC Genk football newsletter with a 94% newsletter sign-up rate.
Reader engagement bringing Local partnerships to life with great results
When all fans weren't able support the team at the stadium, HBVL offered a plan to their partners & executed it all in 3 days.
Thousands of fan photos, collected, sorted, and printed onto the team bus, a new fan newsletter and breaking news across the country. Building new revenue and products has never been faster.
How the newsroom software brought the community closer to their club
HBVL.be use Contribly everyday to engage directly with readers, get leads on stories and create original engaging campaigns that increase reader subscriptions, and app downloads.
When breaking news, or special occasions take place, the team are ready to act and create magic for their audience.
In this example, The local football team reached the final of the cup.
The question, how could HBVL capitalise on this fantastic news?
The HBVL partnerships team approached their partner club and suggested they do something special: Invite all the fans to travel to the final on the players bus.
The football club bought into the idea straight away. They would create a call-out and ask fans/readers to send their photos, and print them on the player bus.
If done manually this plan would take weeks, with Contribly’s newsroom tools by their side, this entire project would be executed from start to finish in 3 days with fantastic results.
On day 1, HBVL.be set the call-out up, the same day the club agreed. This takes a few moments in the Contribly newsroom tool.
On the second day, they published it on all their channels. Allowing readers to go to their apps (or download it) to upload their photo, agree to the terms and conditions and register for the new KRC Genk newsletter if they wished to do so. They also used a QR code in print to get readers to come to the app and engage.
In the first 2 days of being online 3500 fans had shared their photos most wearing the club colours. Footballers family’s, the mayor and even some famous figures got involved. HBVL even had to close the call-out because they received way more entries than expected.
At the end of day 3, these thousands of photos were sent off in bulk to the printers, resized and ready to cover the bus.
Usually, resizing this many images is a manual process - with Contribly, that serves out images of all sizes ready to be displayed in on huge number of digital formats, this was an easy task.
In any other situation, a campaign like this would take weeks for a news brand to launch. From creating the call-out using marketing tools, to manually extracting all of the content, dealing with the GDPR and terms and conditions to resizing thousands of photos for the printers to vinyl the bus. It can be a logistical nightmare - and most likely not even suggested.
“Contribly was a great help in a fantastic initiative between HBVL and K.R.C Genk. We were able to suggest a large scale campaign and deliver at speed.
The campaign was a massive success. We were able to bring fans closer to their club at a time when they couldn’t show their support in person.
Thousands of fans got involved – we even had to close the call-out to limit the numbers for printing reasons. Some famous faces also shared their photo, including the footballers, their families and the mayor of Genk.
The tools helped us gather thousands of photos in days and deliver them to printers in exactly the right format – something that would have been very time consuming and would require more resources if done manually. It also allowed us to gather the information we need to keep their fans engaged and grow our K.R.C Genk newsletter.
All in all, it’s an approach we aim to repeat in various ways with other partners in the future.”
Why were the results so good?
A 44% increase in app downloads: The value exchange for fans here was high. Who doesn't want their face on the players bus? So HBVL could include a higher barrier to entry, asking readers to download their app to join in on the fun. This resulted in a huge increase in app downloads, one of the groups most important KPI’s as they know that readers on their app build more habits, can receive more push notifications and are most likely to subscribe.
A new KRC Genk newsletter with over 94% or fans getting involved signing up: At the point of uplaod, readers could also sign up to HBVL’s new KRC Genk newsletter. For HBVL this was the easiest way to segment readers and pull them into something they will genuinely be interested in is by creating a engaging call-out to that segment.
3500 KRC GENK Fans travel with the football club team to the Final on the bus
The activation itself was reported on all the news channels of the country. For once the HBVL news team weren’t reporting on the news, this time they were the news. No one could miss HBVL’s logo all over the bus in all the reports either, this was great for brand recognition.
This was the first time HBVL executed a full brand marketing campaign with a partner in such a short amount of time. The right tools meant is was possible, and the constant use of the tools in their everyday editorial processes meant that they felt confident they could deliver. They offered a plan to their partners & executed it all in 3 days.
This lead to many other executions being even more engaging. From walking challenges, to apple trees being distributed and readers sharing their progress, bringing in readers content has never been easier.
Readers loved it, 3500+ fans took part, 2x more fan photos than HBVL had expected at first in 1/2 the time they had originally planned. Yet, still easy to manage.
Internal sylos broken down: This execution and the right newsroom tools helped the Brand marketing teams and editorial teams work closely together delivering reader engagement at scale.
HBVL’s team were confident they could deliver this ambitious plan, because their teams use the right tools everyday.