MEDIA & PUBLISHING

How Sporting Life effortlessly turns stats into powerful visuals with Content Stadium

Sporting Life sports social media content in the Content Stadium CREATE tool
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Millions of clicks

from social media to the website

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Quick & easy

content creation process

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Higher quality

graphics and stats visuals

Published in September 2021.

Meet Chris

Chris Hammer is the Social Media Manager at Sporting Life — a British sports media website. Sportinglife.com covers horse racing, football and other sports with news articles, opinion pieces, tips and statistics.

Chris leads a team of 3 social media specialists. Their main goal is to increase engagement, reach and followers, in order to ultimately drive more traffic from social media to the website. Recently, Sporting Life took on a new voice, with a bigger focus on talking about sports and displaying statistics in a new, more appealing and visual way.

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With Content Stadium, everyone on the team can create quality, eye-catching graphics quickly and effortlessly. It would have been impossible to do even a fraction of the graphics we’re producing today without this powerful tool. The traffic and social media engagement it’s helped us achieve has been immense.

Chris Hammer | Social Media Manager at Sporting Life
Chris Hammer, Social Media Manager at Sporting Life
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With Content Stadium, everyone on the team can create quality, eye-catching graphics quickly and effortlessly. It would have been impossible to do even a fraction of the graphics we’re producing today without this powerful tool. The traffic and social media engagement it’s helped us achieve has been immense.

Chris Hammer | Social Media Manager at Sporting Life

Before Content Stadium

Before using Content Stadium, Chris relied on an in-house designer to create his stats-based and more elaborate graphics. Such graphics took a while to design, which meant Chris had to plan in advance. But how can you predict a sporting result ahead of time? This led to unused graphics, wasted design time, and less content opportunities.

Chris also used Photoshop (PSD) templates to create simple visuals. But as the social media team grew, it became more complicated for everyone to use the program correctly. In addition, the growing team needed more graphics, but their designer couldn’t keep up with all the requests.

Our solution

To enable Sporting Life to deliver on its new stats-focused strategy, we built a series of templates based entirely on the team’s requirements. Chris and his team can now access these templates in our Content Stadium CREATE platform, to create eye-catching and complex graphics in no time.

Key features of their templates include:

  • Data connection with Gracenote and Sporting Life’s own horse racing API, so the team can automatically import accurate data, populate jockey silks and create bar charts in a couple of clicks.
  • Landscape, square and portrait sizes, to suit different social media platforms — including a one-click size duplication feature to switch between sizes without the need to recreate the content.
  • Photo cut-out tool that expertly removes backgrounds from photos in one click, to spotlight a player, coach or other key subject.
  • Static as well as animated templates, to bring their content to life.
  • Plus the option to easily switch colors, move and hide elements, import images, edit texts, and more!

See one of their templates in action in Content Stadium CREATE:

“The team at Content Stadium are keen to understand your industry, so they can tailor the graphics to you as best as possible. For example, horse racing is a big part of our website. And while they didn’t know much about the sport, they took everything we explained on board (including some very niche aspects) and delivered graphics that have resonated really well with our audience.”

Chris’ social media team use their templates to cover a wide range of topics on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — from team and player head-to-heads, to player stats, leaderboards, quotes and more:

In addition, Sporting Life’s website team use the same templates to create eye-catching infographics to illustrate their news articles:

Football stats template from Sporting Life's website

From Manchester United transfers news article

Football stats template from Sporting Life's website

From Euro 2020 by numbers news article

The results

Sporting Life is already into its second year of using Content Stadium CREATE. They use the platform daily to create multiple graphics for their website and social media channels. Why are they still with us?

  • Increase in traffic and readership: “We’ve seen tremendous results the longer our partnership has progressed.” For example, their new Facebook racing page grew from zero to 30,000 followers and 0.5 million clicks to the website in less than a year. Meanwhile, their main Facebook page drove 7 million clicks to site, and their main Twitter page 0.5 million in the last year. “Content Stadium has played a big part in helping us pull in this huge growth in numbers.”
  • Quick and easy content creation process: “With Content Stadium, everyone on the team can create eye-catching graphics quickly and effortlessly. This means that we can respond almost in real-time to a win or other event by creating a relevant graphic from scratch in minutes.”
  • More and better quality content: “It would have been impossible to do even a fraction of the graphics we’re producing today without this powerful tool.”
  • Tailored templates: “The team of graphic creators tailor all our designs to our every need, and work with us to deliver graphics that exceed what we thought was possible.”
  • Time savings for the in-house designer, who can now focus on other tasks.
  • Quick to onboard new starters: “The user-friendliness of the platform means that anyone can use it after just a short training.”

Read Chris’ (and more) reviews on G2, and learn more about our content creation platform for media and publishing teams.

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Content Stadium is a game-changer. It has revolutionized the way we promote ourselves on social media and on our website. Plus, it’s exciting to use. Thinking about how we can visualize something in a new way using these flexible templates brings a lot more joy into the work.

Chris Hammer | Social Media Manager at Sporting Life

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