The printed version of SuperBike magazine came to an end in January 2015, after 38 years of publication, when then-owner Blaze Publishing sold the title to editor John Hogan. The SuperBike website has soldiered on since, with various levels of activity, but after Hogan moved to Norton Motorcycles as head of marketing, the title needed new management, if it was going to survive and prosper.
And that management has come in the form of Nottingham-based bike-specific digital agency Digitally Charged (DC), owned by Chris Day. Together with design director Scott Alldrick and other members of DC staff, Day is set to relaunch the SuperBike website as an editorial project, with the firm’s data-driven digital know-how backing it up.
We ran a story before Christmas outlining the plans for SuperBike magazine online, but BDN met up with Day and Alldrick at The Bike Shed in London to hear more about the nuts and bolts of the relaunch. Day has been working hard over the past few months to retrieve the website’s foundations from the Amazon cloud it’s been living in, and now he’s set to soft-launch a revamped site in March, with editorial content ramping up in April at the start of the riding season.
Perhaps surprisingly, Day reports a lot of interest for a website that’s been largely moribund for several years. “When we were at Motorcycle Live, there was a lot of feedback – people didn’t know that SuperBike’s not been updated; they’ve just forgotten about it. It sort of just went off the radar. People remember what it was – we just need to start updating it.”
Scott Alldrick echoed that. “The site has got some good numbers even just sitting there. It’s like a garden that’s been left untended; it’s still fruitful, it just looks messy. It’s quite surprising how well it’s doing, even without updates. Now, it’s being redeveloped, it’s going to have a fresh facelift, and the content is going to become more regular. We’ll be gradually building traffic and content.”
But the point of the site will be advertising and marketing, of course. The plan is for DC to offer a new option to the bike trade for online advertising and marketing campaigns, using its extensive know-how in data management, together with the new editorial proposition. A ‘vertical integration’, with a new independent editorial product, backed up by the brains and financial support of the digital marketing agency side of the firm.
Alldrick again: “From an advertising point of view, people we know, and love will get on there, which will organically lead to more advertisers coming on board. And as the content grows, the numbers will grow. We want to keep it feature-rich: video content, blogs, vlogs, opinion pieces.”
And Day reckons his deep data-driven knowledge of the market will help focus the editorial direction, making sure that the site produces content that’s in demand right now. “One of the things we’re good at is we know what people are searching for. As an example, the most popular search right now is ‘motorbikes under a grand’. So a feature about that will get a lot of traffic, and in the background we can build a load of data to use for clients going forward.
“We’ll also be able to boost press releases – the release will go on the site free, but we’ll say that for a couple of hundred quid, we can boost it on Facebook. We’ll push it as far as we can – you don’t have to; it will be on the site, but if you want that bit extra …”
For the moment, though, Day is flat-out working towards the soft launch of the new site. “We’re looking at having the site revamped in a design sense, with up-to-date content, and then we’re going to activate the social channels. Then we’ll put some advertising from our current clients on there and give it a good test, and then hopefully, by April, we can turn the screws a bit and get the data out for a hard launch. It’s going to be good, I’m excited about it. And we’ve got so much motorcycle data, we can put SuperBike in front of so many people very quickly.”
Digitally Charged
01157 860680
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