Published by isobel.regan@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 15.09.2022 
Whatever your business or market, growth is vital. And preferably it should sustain, instead of being temporal. We are Fingerspitz and our goal is to take a small step forward every week, which adds up to giant leaps. Together with our clients we ensure that they achieve their goals, and therefore grow sustainably. We achieve exceptional results by getting the most out of online channels.
The challenge
And that is what we did for RacingNews365. Just like Max Verstappen, Racingnews365 has made its mark within the Formula 1 in the Netherlands. Every month the news platform reaches millions of F1 fans in the Netherlands with unique content that is always hot off the press. The editorial staff consists of real racing fans who share this news out of personal interest.
In the Netherlands Racingnews365 already leads the championship, but our ambitions drove us to look abroad. As a publisher your income mainly depends on the number of page views. So how can we expand our reach and revenue in other countries with a small budget?
What we did
Through preliminary research, competitive analysis and forecasting we first examined the potential for the UK and US. The UK appeared to have the most racing fans, but many established competitors. And the US proved to be a growth market with less competition. We also learned that we could beat the competition on user experience and visitor loyalty.
Together with RN365 we set the ambitious goal to reach 1 million page views per month before the end of 2021. Racingnews365.com was scheduled to launch (and did launch) on January 18, 2021. So we speeded forward to capture enough points to finally win the championship!
But… achieving organic results is hard. Especially as a ‘new driver on the grid’. Companies often simply copy, paste and translate their website. But we knew that a good plan would eventually pay off. We used our very own TAC-framework to create the right content and set up automation workflows together with TDE to publish this content and news updates automatically.
Attracting a following was our main challenge at first. Our preliminary research showed a lot of the conversations around formula 1 were happening in Facebook groups, so we used our media budget and smart email templates to acquire lots of them.
Pushing out content and timely news at a high pace is essential for a racing news publisher. We needed passionate native writers. Luckily, the RN365 owner has a large network, so he took care of that. We then needed to enable the NL and EN teams to work in tandem. Leveraging each other’s work all the while still appealing to local readers. Templates and automated publishing helped to grow the content quickly.
The results
On January 18 we went live with the platform and the campaigns. We attracted 33,147 fans in the first month. Pole position! The race is on! It’s lights out and away we go!
By continuously publishing high quality content using our TAC framework we collected valuable links and our domain authority reached 56 in no time. Organic traffic share grew exponentially and is currently 16% in the UK and 20% in the US. We obtained a top 3 position in Google Organic for over 2,200 keywords.
Much sooner than expected we reached the finish line in July with over 1,000,000 page views in that month. On to the next victory! And we succeeded… We closed the year phenomenally: with 2,675,303 users and 7,580,186 page views in December!
SEMrush: US organic traffic trend in RN365.com its first year
2x in the Global Digital Excellence Award shortlist
We are honored that this case is shortlisted by the Global Digital Excellence Awards jury amongst 2 other global cases within the BEST LOW BUDGET CAMPAIGN (SEO) category. And to be nominated in the SEO CAMPAIGN OF THE YEAR – B2C category as well. Lots of hard work went into preparing the launch of the new RacingNews365.com platform and growing it way beyond the initial expectations.
Most of all, our client deserves the recognition for all their effort and in depth knowledge and network within formula 1 racing. Also, we would not have been able to achieve these results without the bright technical minds of our TDE colleagues.
