We helped an American sailing team achieve historic Ocean Race success with digital strategy.

283.5%

average achievement over target KPIs

Client

11th Hour Sailing Team

Industry

International Sports Team

Website

11thhourracingteam.org

Project Summary

11th Hour Racing Team's mission is building a high performance ocean racing team with sustainability at the core of all operations, inspiring positive action among sailing and coastal communities and global sports fans. They became the first American team to ever win The Ocean Race in its 50 year history.

Results

61

Countries with engaged users

30%

Under ad budget while exceeding targets

80K+

Engaged audience growth

81m

People reached globally

Understanding The Challenge

After providing training around international social media strategy, we were asked to manage social media engagement strategy, reporting and digital advertising implementation to drive on the ground engagement at global events as well as grow follower bases of each sailor and the team. Our primary aim was to massively scale up the engaged audience following the race to support sponsorship tracking. KPIs were based on awareness: 30 million reached, 3 million engagements, 2 million full video views, audience growth of 24,000.

Our Approach

We researched the existing digital audience and worked up seven international customer profiles based on the event course. We identified groups of audiences in each region with similar sporting and technology interests that could relate to sailing, sustainability and the sailors themselves. We guided the sailing team's content and marketing team on creative needed to tell stories based on continual testing in each region to global audiences.

Capabilities Deployed

Digital Marketing Training
Social Media Marketing
Digital Media Placement
Social Media Advertising
Content Consultancy
Audience Research

Learnings From Project

This project demonstrated that efficient budget management can deliver exceptional results. By exceeding all targets while coming in significantly under budget, we enabled the client to redeploy 30% of their budget elsewhere while still achieving awareness and impact targets for their sponsors.

Client Feedback

“The training the Teylu team gave us, and the efficient way they then used the budget we gave them to deliver paid marketing across Google Ads and Meta Suite against KPIs was truly fantastic, it gave us more budget to deploy in other areas. As a non-profit funded sports team raising awareness of sustainability via The Ocean Race any saving we could make was dramatic at improving our impact as a cause and Teylu understood that from day one and didn't push us to spend more.”

Emily Caroe

Comms Director, 11th Hour Sailing Team

Teylu Insight

“Working with Emily, Amy and Harry at the 11th Hour Racing Team was an absolute blast. Together we dissected what made the amazing event that is the Ocean Race interesting to a broader audience and cross pollinated that with the amazing mission of the 11th Hour Team. All that insight was focused on highly optimising content for social media across YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to tell the story of the race globally. We had tough targets to meet, but our paid media campaign came in well under budget to allow the team to deploy that money elsewhere whilst still hitting impact and awareness targets for their sponsors.”

Sam Shrimpton

Founder, Teylu and Partners