When it comes to sports, I’m not a full-on jock. I follow my favorite underdogs—the Chicago Cubs, the Seattle Sounders, and Indiana University Men’s Basketball—and I enjoy a few games each season based on my team’s performances. As far as sports go, one thing is for sure—people love their teams. They express their loyalty through clothing and other merchandise, they schedule their nights and weekends around their sports heroes (or villains!), and many fans want to be looped into their team’s latest news as much as possible. In a quest to better understand how a variety of channels operate their marketing programs, I’m using this blog series to dive into the exciting world of sports marketing.
I began exploring the sports marketing industry by opting into all of my teams’ channels—and in doing so I’ve noticed a major trend: the single sign-on. This approach is less common in travel and retail channels, but for sports teams it’s a logical, brilliant option for making the most of your marketing strategy. The single sign-on lets sports organizations learn more about their customers through information like birth date, gender, and current and hometown location, and allows them to access more information about customer interests through mining social media data. From a consumer perspective, I’m willing to provide information about myself through a single sign-on, because I want to ensure that I’m looped in on all the best game-time updates, photos, and other sports news available.
Now that my loveable underdog teams are familiar with my likes, interests, age (yes, I promise I am over the age of 13), and more, let’s begin the journey together to see how they use this data in their marketing strategy. How will my teams leverage my Facebook and other social media data in the email channel? How will they adjust Facebook posts based on user criteria? How will they listen in on game days to see if the bulk of fans are celebrating a win, and using the appropriate hashtags? And how will my Facebook data affect brand marketing on Instagram, and beyond? Over the next 5 blog posts, we’ll explore all this and more. Join me in rooting for the lovable underdogs and favorites, and learning how sports organizations mine user data to knock lifecycle marketing out of the park.