You have a lot of possible partners to team up with to create your fantasy sports game. You can hire freelance developers, try to do it in-house, ask your digital agency for help, or hire an expert. Let us explore why hiring a true fantasy expert is your best bet.
An expert truly knows the marketing mix
Ok, you are thinking about creating a fantasy game, but where to begin? The 4 Ps of the (digital) marketing mix are a good starting point to create a decision framework. An expert guides you through the initial process by offering his services (eg. developing the product) and advice (eg. on content strategy) to deliver a coherent product and strategy.
Your fantasy sports product needs to be custom made and have solid USPs. How does this new game position itself in comparison to other comparable games? Why would people want to play it?
What is the pricing going to be? An expert helps with the revenue model, it being direct sports betting, an indirect advertising model or another variant.
The place of the game will be online, and you have loads of options to choose from: as a standalone entity, as part of an app, embedded in your news website or platform, or even as a chatbot.
The last P is that one of promotion, a make-or-break factor. An expert gives you marketing communication support. As demonstrated by our clients, there are many different ways to promote a fantasy game. Use your existing reach (visitors, readers, viewers) and create engaging content like Play Sports or Sporza. Or take the Scorrd approach and go beyond your reach with popular but relevant influencers. DPG media advertises on social media and its other platforms.
An expert creates scalable products
A fantasy sports game can never ever be a victim of its own success. Therefore it’s critical to take scalability into account from the get-go. A fantasy game has to cope with big amounts of traffic in the days before the start (when everyone creates, edits and pays teams) and during gameweeks when the live games are happening. An expert will stress the importance of having a high performance website.
But scalability also refers to the product itself: thinking about growing a platform with eg. multiple games or offering more features. A fantasy sports expert such as Fan Arena has this way of thinking in its DNA. We share our learnings with all our clients. We work and improve more efficiently, which makes it more affordable than doing things on your own. We help you scale from 0 to 1.
An expert knows the ins and outs of data feeds
Sports data feeds are an essential part of a fantasy game. They provide all relevant data to calculate fantasy points and rankings. If you have access to a live sports data feed, you can offer your audience updates in real time. Read more in our blogpost Finding the right fantasy sports data provider.
A fantasy sport expert has experience in dealing with various data providers and their API and data structures. And ideally the expert offers an admin backend to easily edit statistics, because in our experience none of the data providers are accurate 100% of the time. Eg. a football data source may award an assist to the wrong player or misses a yellow card.
And when no data feeds are available for your sport, an expert creates a custom data scheme in the admin backend to handle everything semi-automatically in a timely fashion.
An expert helps you understand your data
A fantasy game generates a lot of data on the sport and on its users. An expert will continuously look at the data and point out crucial business opportunities and interesting stats to share with your audience.
Solid business intelligence answers questions such as: How many (un)paid teams are created each day? How do coupons affect my revenue? Who are my most valuable users? And much more.
Data on sports players allows the expert to mine for insights you can share to engage your following. Useful information to create and manage a fantasy team includes: most picked players and captains, team of the week, transfer tips, boosters used, etc. And when you merge insights with templates, you get an automated fantasy sports content generator.
An expert implements payment service providers smoothly
Payment Service Providers (PSPs) enable payments for your fantasy game. Don’t confuse a PSP with a payment method (credit/debet cards, PayPal and Apple Pay). A PSP offers a variety of payment methods in a single contract and collects them in a single account.
An expert has implemented various PSPs in the past and knows which ones suits your needs the best. A PSP can excel in user friendliness (for both the receiving and paying party) like Stripe or Mollie, or it can offer hundreds of local payment methods like Ingenico or Adyen. The goal is to let your users pay seamlessly and securely.
