Spartan | Introducing new event brands to an Australian audience

Spartan Australia, NZ & Fiji had a vision to develop an ecosystem of endurance event brands, with lower margin and more targeted events feeding the higher margin mass-participation parent events. Spartan planned to introduce two new brands; Spartan Trail (a sub brand of Spartan focussed on trail running events) and DEKA (a benchmark in functional fitness testing and fitness competition), in addition to revitalising the Spartan Endurance sub brand. With a new team in place, and a lot to do in a short amount of time, Spartan approached Call To Action to develop an overarching marketing strategy which would successfully introduce these new event brands to Australia. They also required more detailed plans to drive event registrations.

How do Spartan launch a multi-brand strategy, communicate the DEKA and Spartan Trail story effectively to an Australian audience, and ensure those who take part in new events then go on to sign up for the larger parent events. The Solution

The first step was a discovery phase to comprehensively understand each event brand and the markets they operated in. I dove into each brands identity and event-setup, conducted a full audience and landscape analysis, and held stakeholder interviews to fully comprehend the team’s objectives and resources available to implement the strategies and plans I’d devise.

The discovery gave us core insights for each brand, which informed the Integrated Marketing Strategy that followed. This included a bespoke strategy for each brand, as well as recommendations across all brands to help Spartan achieve their objectives. Each strategy covered off objectives and KPI’s, full audience personas, strategy and tactics, core creative and messaging framework, recommended campaign structure, tactics by channel (digital and traditional), technical recommendations, budgets and targets, and deliverables. This was to be their marketing bible!

Lastly, I developed integrated event marketing plans. The purpose of these was to make granular decisions regarding timeline, channels, budget and roles and responsibilities for each individual event (under each brand). These gave the Spartan team an overview of activity for each event, determined what budgets in what channels targeting what audiences would drive the required results and outlined a clear list of who needed to do what exactly when.

Spartan have an overarching strategy which will act as a playbook for introducing their new event brands to Australia. This playbook will ensure activity throughout the year for each brand is aligned, and the team has a clear understanding of the role each brand plays within the ecosystem, the story we’re telling, and how we’re going to tell it! The event marketing plans will enable Spartan’s new team to hit the ground running, increase event brand awareness, save time and marketing supplier costs and crucially hit registration targets.