This year, there’s no doubt that football has been top of mind in Australia. Sydney FC has achieved immense digital transformation as part of its strategy to boost fan engagement, leveraging Storyblok’s CMS to build winning digital experiences that reignite fan enthusiasm and boost match day.
The club is now kicking some serious revenue goals, boosting match day revenue by 370 per cent and increasing attendance by 228 per cent.
The journey began back in 2018, when Sydney FC decided to embark on a 4-year play-off at different sites across Sydney, so the Allianz Stadium could be rebuilt from the ground up. This was exhausting for the team and fans who missed having a stadium of their own.
As the end of construction approached, Sydney FC knew they needed to do something special to build enthusiasm for the team’s return to the new stadium. They decided to leverage Storyblok, the content management system (CMS) category leader, working closely with with Herbert Digital, a Storyblok Certified Partner. Together they built an exciting digital stadium experience in just 4 months.
Along with being the main source of content for everything about Sydney FC, the website features an Experience Selector that enables fans to pick the best seats for their circumstances and the atmosphere they want to enjoy.
Jeremy Butler, head of consumer business, marketing & content at Sydney FC, said, “We were under intense time pressure to create relevant content for the website. The intuitive design of Storyblok was effective in allowing our content team to approach the project with minimal training. We, as marketers, can independently change the content without having to involve developers. This, combined with the ability to view changes in real-time, allowed us to achieve our objective ahead of the deadline.”
Thanks to Storyblok’s visual editor, Sydney FC was able to create all of the content in the CMS in just two weeks. When it launched in 2022, the website had over 1 million page events. Match day revenue skyrocketed by 370 per cent, and attendance increased by 228 per cent year-over-year.
Sydney FC only planned to use the website for the initial return to the stadium, but after seeing this success and experiencing how easy and cost-effective it is to manage content with Storyblok, they decided to continue using it as their primary membership hub.
Dominik Angerer, co-founder and CEO of Storyblok, said, “Great digital experiences generate excitement far beyond the devices that they live on. Sydney FC has been able to use compelling content to drive action by their fans, leading to record revenue and attendance. This is a winning strategy, both on and off the pitch.”
