ISPO.com

News platform for the sports business

The challenge was to transform a “space marketer” into a leading digital medium in the B2B sector. In addition to the 4.5 million visits and 12 million PI’s p.a., another outstanding result was achieved – 2nd place of the Drupal Europe Award 2018 in the Publishing/Media category.

ISPO Munich, which has existed in Munich since 1970, is the leading trade fair for the international sporting goods industry. The B2B trade fair not only has a very international trade audience, but also two foreign trade fairs in Beijing and Shanghai. In recent years, the fair has already begun to establish digital services – such as an open innovation platform, a job exchange for the sports industry and an academy for the further training of industry experts.

Measures

• Development of marketing concept
• Implementation CMS, design and website
• Structure of the editorial office DE & EN
  (about 120 content pieces / month)

These services we have used:

This is what it’s about

How do you transform a classic trade fair, whose original business purpose is the marketing of stand space, into a digital B2B2C key medium? This was the challenge of the relaunch of ISPO.com by THE DIGITALE. The answer is one of the currently largest and most complex content marketing platforms in Germany with its own journalistic editorial staff and an integrated content marketing strategy.

The Content Hub combines journalistic content and trade fair services

THE DIGITALE developed a website based on the content management system Coremedia with a focus on content marketing that meets all the requirements of a modern media site: Speed, operability, design, functionality, mobility, future-proofing. At the same time, we set up a journalistic editorial office under the direction of Gunnar Jans, who has been head of sports at Abendzeitung for many years. The editorial staff and a pool of external specialist authors now publishes around 150 to 160 news items, editorials, interviews and comments in German and English every month.

The Content Marketing Strategy Behind ISPO.com

The magic word of ISPO.com’s content marketing strategy is B2B2C: ISPO.com wants to be a medium that can compete with all relevant specialist media (B2B) in the first step and establish itself as a B2C brand in the long run. Even though ISPO MUNICH itself will remain a pure B2B trade fair, it will become increasingly important not only for the brands exhibiting at the trade fair to gain direct access to the end customer via content marketing.

The reach that ISPO.com builds through the SEO, Brand Traffic, Social and Native Advertising channels is not an end in itself, but follows clear conversion goals that are measured using a balanced scorecard. This means that each article must always meet two conversion targets, depending on the target group it is aimed at. It is therefore equipped with teasers and links that direct the user to an ISPO service. Typical B2B conversions at trade fairs include selling stands and tickets, registering for newsletters or posting a job advertisement in the ISPO Job Market. Typical B2C conversions are using the Job Market or registering as a participant for an Open Innovation project.

Transparency for highly complex content marketing

In order to track and measure its goals, ISPO.com has a sophisticated tracking system with data protection-compliant tools in accordance with Deutsche Telekom AG standards. Both the client and the editorial staff of ISPO.com know at any time how many people are moving on the platform, which articles they are reading and which conversion goals are being met. All goals are reported monthly and the content marketing strategy is optimized and adjusted if necessary.