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One of the best parts of marketing a professional sports franchise is that you undoubtedly have some die-hard fans and as such brand advocates. You also have an emotional connection between fan and brand which can easily be combined with the abundance of video, audio and digital content that is naturally produced through sports broadcasts and media. However sports marketers like all others are looking for ways in to not only share that content with fans but to really engage those fans and create a dialogue where the most passionate fans help spur on other fans and at the same time feel that their voices/opinions are being heard and acted upon by the franchise. It would seem a perfect marriage for social media marketing.
There are however only a handful of sports teams that you can point to who are really taking advantage of the content, the advocates and the new channels available to them via social media and Social CRM. One team who seems to be getting it right is the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. The Warriors won a 2011 Gartner and 1t01 Media CRM Excellence Award for their work on the “2010 Warriors Draft Challenge.”
The Warriors were to unveil a new logo for the 2010 season and instead of just calling a press conference and having a player wear the jersey they decided to use the spotlight of the NBA Draft Lottery to create a nine day contest for their fans which would be not only promoted on social media but where the answers to each day’s challenge could only be found by visiting one of the Warriors social media properties. The campaign did not stop with simply delivering clues and answers on social media, each challenge was a chance to engage fans in a dialogue, to bring them into an automated marketing campaign (run in conjunction with Eloqua) where there was lead management, nurturing and reporting capabilities.
In order to fully commit all channels to the promotion of the contest the team utilized email, sms, third party sites, traditional pr and even went so far as to temporarily take down their normal homepage and create a single landing page which gave a primary focus to the contest. The Warriors not only wanted to engage fans for the contest, but they wanted to be able to reach these fans again through multiple social media channels so the initial focus of the contest was on gaining new “likes” on Facebook, gathering new “followers” on Twitter and having people “subscribe” to the team’s YouTube channel.
The team collected email addresses from each entry and then leaned on Eloqua to ensure that they made each fan feel like they were receiving personalized communications based on the actions they had taken on social media.
And it worked!
- The Warrior’s Draft Challenge campaign netted 2,500 new Facebook fans in two weeks
- The Challenge page itself received 900 likes in two weeks
- 1,500 Twitter followers were added in two weeks
- 12,000 views of two related YouTube videos in two weeks
- The day of the logo unveiling and the following day accounted for the highest two-day traffic total in eight months
But what about the bottom line you ask?
It worked out pretty nicely there as well, the Warriors reported more than $440,000 in ticket revenue generated from contest registrants with 102 new season ticket holders and 291 new mini-plan ticket holders added.
While it is easy in the NBA to just say that ticket sales are related to the team’s performance, it is campaigns like this one that prove there is an ability for forward thinking social media marketing to make a bottom line impact.
What about you, do you have any good sports marketing moments to share?
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