Sports clubs need to reinvent their fan engagement; here’s how to make it happen

Originally published by Rubén Rufo Díez , Digital Marketing Manager

In our conversations with both large and smaller clubs, we continue to find they share a common need, regardless of their level of digital maturity: constructing strong digital communities that provide returns.

Across sport and entertainment, clubs are still struggling with some topics that digital transformation should provide answers to, but for which it seems to be difficult to find the key. Every week, we are hearing feedback like:

• "User engagement depends on how the team is doing in the season".
• “During the off-season, we lose fans in digital assets".
• “We already have a large base of recurring users in our app, but we can’t monetize them”.

In the rush to adapt to the new ways fans (especially younger ones) interact with their favorite clubs, countless new digital platforms and interactive formats have sprung up to give fans access to sporting content across any channel and at any time. Engagement rates are higher than ever, so digital and marketing managers are naturally delighted. But in the long term, without the right strategy, clubs may find themselves no closer to their fans than they are currently.

In essence, the problem comes from developing fan engagement strategies that are based on live matches. To reverse this trend, clubs have a pressing need to capture more user data from the wide range of digital platforms where fans are now interacting, including the live matches themselves, to build personalized relationships and establish new revenue streams.

A generation of multi-taskers

Many of the current challenges in connecting with the fan are related to new trends in sports content consumption. During a live game, over half of the watching audience are now multitasking on digital platforms, browsing the web, exploring apps or chatting on social media. During the rest of the time when there is no live game, around 40% are consuming non-live content related to an event.

We have greater points of contact than ever before when the game is not being played, allowing clubs to move beyond live match promotion, but at the same time we have more fragmented attention than ever before during the match itself.

From all of this diverse digital activity, how much of it is your club actually able to see? Often, it is very little, meaning everything the fan is contributing to these platforms simply does not reach you.

If you’re at a more advanced stage, you may already have some owned platforms in place to facilitate fan discussions beyond the match itself. Official apps, games, or streaming platforms for example, are wildly popular. But are you able to collect data to have a holistic understanding of fans behavior? If not, you still have the same problem as before: Numerous touch points and actions from which we cannot extract actionable insights to enhance the fan experience. In this way, clubs are not actually deepening their engagement with fans, which prevents them from developing fully-rounded fan campaigns and creating the connected sense of community that sports fans crave.

Building digital communities

Over 70% of sports organizations now say that they are focused on expanding their content library beyond live events to create richer online communities. Within this, complementing the live media experience and personalizing content across multiple platforms will be key priorities to make the entire entity more attractive to fans.

Right now, clubs are recognising that the future of community building is online, and searching for technology and partnerships that can help them to construct an agile and evolving offering. We can talk about interactive functionalities (score predictors, raffles and rewards, quizzes, player of the match votes), gamification (for example fantasy gaming), or sports integration, but all of these will fail to increase true fan engagement without the right strategy behind it.

To me, the fundamental pillars for fan engagement are to attract new younger and/or international audiences, increase customer lifetime value, reduce churn and to increase recurring purchases. They sound like business goals, and they are, but they are the direct result of reinventing your fan engagement around personalized experiences, thanks to optimizing your martech ecosystem to develop a truly data driven marketing strategy.

Utilizing technology and data to generate revenue

If you’re with me this far, you’ll agree that interconnected technology, data and marketing platforms are where we build immersive experiences for fans. But to make these efforts truly stand out, we need to take a step further and optimize this technology stack for effective personalization and monetization. This means, no matter what platform you are operating, that all digital assets are connected to the same data platform, allowing clubs to carry out fan profiling, and drive personalized segmentations to marketing channels, whether paid or owned media.

This is at the heart of the ecosystem model we are designing with sports properties around the world. By ensuring the back-end connections between platforms (including single sign on, data privacy tools, data collection, etc.) we are able to provide a fan journey that feels smooth and memorable, upon which you can collect and analyze zero and first-party fan data and apply new innovations that increase loyalty and lead to new commercial opportunities.

By seeing the complete picture of which platforms the fan is using, we can more easily create personalized content offers and predict changes in behavior, like an unsubscribe or an upgrade. We can also begin to reward fan engagement with loyalty programmes that deliver points for completing new challenges or making predictions, all the while generating new first-party and zero-party data that is essential to making future decisions. For sports properties already using this kind of approach, the opportunities to make relevant, attractive commercial offers are already appearing, leading to increases of up to 220% of Fan Lifetime Value. With this approach we can cover the other major challenge for clubs: generating new sources of revenue through digital assets.

Being part of a community is at the heart of all sports fandom. Wherever we express our passion for sports, be it in the stadium or online, we are looking to expand the sense of belonging to a club to new points of contact. Moving to digital platforms does not remove that basic human need. If we focus our attention on building environments where fans can express themselves, be accepted, and receive positive feedback for their interactions, we will take this concept of digital community to the next level, creating a virtuous cycle that generates value both for the fan and for the club behind it.