“Our ambition is to become global leader in sports audio,” says Voiceworks Sport MD Sophie Hind

Voiceworks Sport, a growing business of sport audio experts backed by media holding company Communicorp UK, has seen a 288 per cent year-on-year growth in revenue.

The company was set by MD, Sophie Hind in 2020 to help sports brands and rights holders including  national governing bodies, teams, competitions and individual athletes to engage more deeply with fans and reach new audiences through the power of audio.

Sophie, who has worked in media for 30 years, saw an opportunity a few years ago with the explosion in podcast listening, new shorter forms of audio coming in and the advancements in voice technology.

“I saw an opportunity for audio production married with using new channels to deliver that content,” Sophie told PodcastingToday. “Because my background is in marketing and commercial, I wanted to create a business that looked at the whole journey – as in my radio days, you start with the listener in mind, then work back and think about what’s the right content for them, how do you reach them and what are the commercial integration opportunities? That’s where we started with Voiceworks.”

Because of her passion for sport, Sophie soon came to realise that sports rights holders and organisations could be helped to reach their huge engaged fanbases around the world through audio. She believes things have changed with a new generation of fans, who don’t necessarily want to go to a 90-minute game or four-day Test Match, but to hear short, quick bite-sized information.

“What fans want from sports clubs is that kind of intimate, behind the scenes information, and for me, audio lends itself perfectly,” says Sophie. “You’ve got organisations with huge, engaged audiences, big social followings that they can market content to, but when you look at their business model, they mainly rely on short social videos, digital strategy, websites with lots of long read articles and very little audio.

“I found that quite baffling at the time because there’s a huge opportunity here – they’ve got people that are hungry for content, they’ve got content coming out of their ears, so they can use audio as a very cost effective and fast way to get that content to these people.

“That’s where I saw the huge opportunity and the mission I’ve been on, particularly over the last two years in the sports side of the business,” she adds.

Since launching two years ago, the company has worked with some of the biggest brands in sport, including ParalympicsGB, EuroLeague Basketball, Goal, The FA and Sports Direct.

With a 14-strong team based across Manchester and London, Voiceworks Sport has ambitions to double revenue over the next 12 months and grow the team by 25 per cent.

The organisation is both a content maker and delivery platform, as Sophie explains: “Think of us as an independent production company taking care of all the audio and last year, we also launched our own podcast network purely focussed on sport – the Sport Social Podcast Network – similar to an Acast or Audioboom but offering more than just hosting or monetisation.

“Our ambition is to become global leader in sports audio – I can see the value of sport audio and I know that advertisers want to be in that environment with engaged sport audio listeners.

“When we launched Sport Social, we provided a hosting service for lots of existing sport podcasts, but we work for rights holders, we will host their podcasts or audio and distribute them to all the major platforms.

“We also advise on marketing discoverability, so we can do social and digital campaigns for them, and we take care of the monetisation, if required. We’re like a perfect one-stop shop and that’s what I think is unique about our offering.”

Working with clients involves a couple of different approaches, one of which involves taking their existing content, usually video, and repurposing it to be useable as audio. With programme making, such as a documentary series, they work closely with the client. This may include things like being given access to players or ex-players, attending press days or travelling with teams to do recordings.

“It’s about telling stories, rather than doing commentary or things that are served elsewhere, it’s that behind-the-scenes content that people really want to know about – conversations in the dressing room, interviewing the groundsmen, wider personalities in the club, talking to young athletes to understand their journey and what music they’re into – so it’s more personality led and understanding the science behind the sport,” explains Sophie.

Many rights holders are interested in what Voiceworks Sport offers, by developing audio, it opens a new rights channel for them because they are always looking for new ways to create inventory.

The company sees big opportunities in other European markets and English-speaking markets around the world where audio listening is not as well developed as it is in the US and UK.

“We’re already doing some work outside the UK and in the US, but we have a very aggressive five-year business plan, and we intend to open up officially from next year,” says Sophie, “With Australia and the US very much on our radar, but not just English-speaking countries.”

Voiceworks Sport has a clearly visible passion for sport under the leadership of Sophie, they have a lot in the pipeline including working with one of the top six Premier League football clubs to be announced soon and just recently Sport Social agreed a partnership with Crowd Network to support two of its podcasts – The Joe Marler Show and Geraint Thomas Cycling Club.

You can find out more at the Voiceworks Sport website.