Case study
How KitKing signed World Aquatics and Basketball England with founder-led content
KitKing came to us to get in front of global sporting bodies. A founder-led LinkedIn strategy generated 2.3 million views and landed contracts with World Aquatics and Basketball England.
Headline figures
- 2.3M
- Views across strategic content
- 2
- Major sporting body contracts signed
- 5+
- Key accounts secured
About KitKing
- What they do
- Teamwear manufacturer
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Headquarters
- United Kingdom
- Engagement
- Content, Outreach
TL;DR
KitKing is one of the UK's most respected teamwear manufacturers, with a strong product and a solid reputation inside its industry — and no visibility with the global sporting bodies it wanted to supply. noticed. built a founder-led content programme aimed at a deliberately small list of international buyers.
- Contracts: World Aquatics and Basketball England signed, plus five or more further key accounts.
- Reach: 2.3 million views — a by-product of the targeting, not the objective.
- Method: being recognisable to a few hundred people who matter, rather than visible to everyone.
Challenge
Respected inside the industry, invisible to the accounts that mattered most.
KitKing had the product, the operations and the reputation. What they did not have was any presence with the sporting bodies making the big purchasing decisions — a small, specific population of people who had simply never heard of them.
Wanting to compete globally against established suppliers is not a reach problem. It is a recognition problem with a very short list of names on it.
Narrowing the target on purpose
The aim was narrow: be recognisable to the small number of people who sign teamwear contracts at international level.
Most content strategies are built to maximise audience. This one was built to saturate a named list. If the right forty people see every post, the programme is working, whatever the impression count says.
If you want viral content, go and post on TikTok. The value of LinkedIn is the volume of decision-makers, which only pays off if you have decided which decision-makers you are after.
- Name the buyers first, then build content aimed at that population rather than the category.
- Judge posts by who engaged, not how many. A post read by the right procurement lead beats one read by four thousand people who will never buy teamwear.
- Stay consistent long enough to be familiar, because recognition at this level is built over months, not in a campaign.
What we counted
2.3 million views is in the results because it happened, not because it was the goal.
On a programme aimed at a few hundred people, the impression count is the least informative number available. A post read by the procurement lead at an international federation and a post read by four thousand people who will never buy teamwear produce very different business outcomes and similar analytics.
- Accounts opened, named — which sporting bodies and key accounts actually entered conversation.
- Contracts signed, since in a category with this few buyers, a single signature changes the year.
- Who engaged, not how many. The useful question about any post was which of the target buyers had seen it.
Results
The views below came with the contracts rather than instead of them.
- Sporting bodies signed
- World Aquatics and Basketball England.
- Key accounts
- Five or more secured, with several further major accounts closed that cannot be publicly named.
- Reach
- More than 2.3 million views across strategic content.