Discover how APL transformed into a data driven organisation that operates with a unified customer view and applies real time marketing automation, all in just nine months.
After unbundling from Football Australia (FA) in July 2021, the Australian Professional Leagues (APL) set a new vision – to ensure domestic football continues to engage and excite fans and grow the game of football across Australia. APL tapped Digital Alchemy to help plan and execute this vision into reality.
The overall strategy focused on increasing fan engagement through digital channels, and a key part of this strategy involved arming APL and the 14 Clubs under it with best in class data and marketing platforms to create meaningful, long lasting and engaged fans.
The Problem
APL, the governing body for the A-League Men & A-League Women, consists of 14 clubs – each had their own marketing platforms, e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, data practices, marketing teams, and fan engagement touchpoints. If multiplied by 14 businesses, APL is left with many sources of customer data (150+ data sources) stored in various locations, creating data silos league wide.
APL needed to deliver data and martech platforms and services with a tight timeline and amid challenging and busy periods for the football league.
What DA Did
An enormous task requires a well planned strategy and data foundation – from selecting best-in-class modern data and martech stack, implementing the platforms and onboarding clubs to connecting 150+ data sources and automating it across the stack.
Digital Alchemy provided an assessment and delivered a SWOT analysis across major data and marketing automation platforms. Since these clubs operate on various data silos and martech stacks, several issues like duplication of records, fragmentation of data, lack of reporting and total fan insight, data integrity risks, and duplication of costs need to be addressed.
DA worked closely with APL to select the best-in-class platforms for a league-wide managed service. A dedicated team, comprised of a Head of Data & Martech, Data Analyst, Marketing Specialist, Data & Platforms Engineer, and Reporting & Visualisation Specialist, was onboarded to create a sophisticated architecture and martech solution focused on building a strong foundation for APL’s data & marketing maturity journey.
DA developed managed services across data, analytics, and marketing applications while maintaining clear separation in zones of data. The architecture was designed to have entity dedicated data zones – each having its dedicated martech instances of each platform – to enable governance with access controls, ensuring data security, privacy, and integrity. The team worked together to implement the platforms, integrate data at scale, put up a martech and adtech ecosystem, and onboard the clubs.
Key Outcomes & Benefits
Consolidated Data Infrastructure
Setting up a strong data and marketing foundation enabled APL to have the largest single source of first party Football Fan data in the history of Australia just within nine months of starting their journey. All club’s 150+ combined data sources were integrated into CDP and Data Lake and consolidated to stitch over 6M fan identities into 1.8 unique football fans.
Real Time Marketing Automation
The onboarding and adoption of data and martech platforms, such as Braze, Segment CDP, BigQuery, Salesforce, and Tableau, paved the way for APL to achieve real-time marketing automation. This enabled the clubs to have real-time data capability and build marketing journeys considering multiple fan behaviours across different touchpoints. These marketing journeys are orchestrated in a single place for both martech and adtech.
Unprecedented Visibility of League Wide Data
Since Tableau was rolled out, every club was granted visibility on the consolidated data stack (e.g. club members, ticketing sales, broadcast, etc) and accessibility to common league wide metrics, which helped improve member and fan engagement strategies.
Transformative Speed and Scale of Implementation
In a remarkable six-month timeframe, we were able to establish capability that propelled the entire league into the future with best-in-class tools, giving APL a competitive edge.
- We completed Braze implementations for 12 clubs and CDP implementations for 13 clubs.
- Over 120 data sources were seamlessly integrated into a cohesive data ecosystem.
- Five clubs benefited from newly implemented CRM systems for both sponsors and fans.
- The establishment of Google BigQuery as a central repository using modern data architecture frameworks and housing the Master Football Fan ID and deduplicating 4 million customer records into 1.6 million unique football fans, created the largest football fan data repository in Australia… ever.
- Accomplishing the all-elusive martech and adtech integration
- Deployment of Tableau across all clubs
All equipped APL with unparalleled data insights and strategic advantages.
Working with DA
“Having collaborated closely with Digital Alchemy, I can confidently affirm their
exceptional expertise in marketing automation consulting and operational services.
Throughout our collaboration, they consistently demonstrated a high level of professionalism, reliability, and an unwavering commitment to delivering top-quality results.
Digital Alchemy’s tailored services played a crucial role in the success of our
projects, showcasing their dedication and proficiency in their field. Their proven track record of excellence and steadfast dedication to client satisfaction make them an invaluable partner for any organisation.”
– Rob Nolan, Director of Data at A-Leagues
