Moving From Disconnected Interruptions to Meaningful Fan Engagement in the Sports Industry

We all get them – 100+ emails a day offering discounts on something – a pair of shorts, a box of frozen steaks, tickets to a midweek baseball game. At this point, we largely tune them out. They are unwanted noise - disconnected interruptions - coming from every direction. There are exceptions, though – those offers or opportunities that hit the nail on the head for exactly what we need or want.

These exceptions cut through the noise with purpose. Companies doing so have organizationally aligned themselves around the customer, ensuring that data infrastructure, marketing planning, customer engagement planning, and advanced digital capabilities are all aligned to be customer centric – not organization centric.

Getting to this point requires an organizational journey to enable these structures and capabilities. In this series of articles, I will discuss disconnected interruptions and the lack of fan-centricity in outreach within the sports industry – as well as what teams and leagues can do to move toward more meaningful engagement with fanbases.

In the lead up to Major League Baseball’s Opening Day, I eagerly awaited the return of America’s Pastime. However, I was not eager for the onslaught of uncoordinated content from the league and its teams.

Personally, I frequently engage with one team in particular (ticket and merchandise purchases, social media and mobile app engagement, etc.), more than enough to build a robust customer data profile. However, this data is not being leveraged – at the league or team level – to develop a robust segmentation to understand me, the customer, at the segment or individual level. This leads to a gap in customer understanding, preventing tailored and optimal engagement.  This gap leads to disconnected interruptions from teams, the results of which are unlikely to have the desired outcome of increased engagement and/or purchase.

These disconnected interruptions, while common across industries, risk messages being lost in the overall cacophony. Research across industries supports this; for example, ZS pharma research shows that 63% of physicians wished companies would tailor content to “make the interactions more insightful.” In other industries, that number rises above 80% among customers.

I recently spoke with a marketing executive from an MLB team who mentioned that in the week leading up to Opening Day, the average fan in a team’s CRM gets 10+ e-mails from that team – few (if any) of which are tailored to that fan’s segment – let alone individual needs. As expected, content from numerous teams that I rarely engage with began flooding my inbox and timelines, all assuming I was a fan of their team and that I was in a position to act on an offer. In one particular case, an out-of-town team offered a discounted a party suite – even though I had only purchased a single ticket once in the past.

This string of disconnected interruptions begs the question – why haven’t more teams worked to understand their fans’ needs, drivers, and differing fan journeys to enable tailored messaging? This can help achieve short-term goals (special offers, merchandise sales, etc.) while moving towards longer-term objectives (moving the fan along their fandom journey). As noted above, these teams and leagues have the data. Unfortunately, in many cases it is not organized in a way that enables efficient and meaningful analysis.

For many marketers in team front offices, the response to this flood of offers might be a shrug of the shoulders. “Why not send continual reminders, offers, and content?” Share of Voice is critical in a crowded entertainment marketplace, after all, where fans have many options to spend discretionary income to perform the job of providing entertainment (sports, movies, dinner out, etc.), and the marginal cost of sending offers to everyone in a CRM is incredibly low.

Certainly, the old standbys of Share of Voice and reach & frequency are important and across industries have long been staples for measuring activity – the share of my organization’s messaging in the market compared to competition. Strong Share of Voice should not be forgotten, but in a world where disconnected interruptions are increasingly tuned out, companies and teams must work harder to earn Share of Mind. As Leo Burnett described, “Before you can have share of market, you must have share of mind.” To capture share of mind, teams must understand fans - their preferences, their different fan journeys, and their decision drivers. When Share of Voice is the primary focus – getting the most impressions possible, the most “at bats” with fans and customers – the opportunity to engage at a deeper level is lost.

Getting to this point is a process.  Many teams will need to evolve their commercial model, not only to ensure available data is leveraged efficiently, but that the organization is aligning itself properly to use that data to meaningfully engage fans. Evolving will require four steps:

1. Create a Context Stream - Teams and leagues have access to rich customer data sets – engagement history, purchase history, demographic data, and more. Many times, though, this data is siloed. This knowledge must be centralized and streamlined to enable analysis that can tailor engagement to each individual’s needs.
2. Develop rich fan understanding - In order to activate robust fan engagement, teams must leverage the Context Stream to develop fan segments that go beyond demographics and leverage purchase history, engagement history, stated preferences, primary research, and more to better understand who the fan is, what drives their purchase decision, where they are on their journey as a fan, and what types of engagement will deepen the fan relationship and create larger overall customer lifetime value.
3. Organizational shift to customer engagement planning - Today, across many industries and companies, sales and marketing planning is done in the context of a brand’s priorities – not the priorities of the customer. This isn’t to say messages aren’t tailored to what customer insights point to as the messaging which will resonate most with customers, rather that messaging and engagement is focused on organizational needs rather than customer priorities. In the future, teams will need to pivot to marry overall customer engagement planning and execution with strategic marketing planning and execution to design for an ever-changing customer journey (vs. a static one) to hyper-personalize each interaction.
4. Enable advanced capabilities to engage fans where and how is most meaningful - Ultimately, this robust data backbone, customer understanding, and engagement planning can be combined with cutting edge AL/ML and GenAI tools to enable predictive intelligent decision-making. AI and ML-enabled algorithms can predict fan behavior and sentiment and recommend intelligent actions across channels to each segment, microsegment, or individual, deploying personalized offerings to fans.

This work is an essential baseline to shift from disconnected interruptions to a more customer-centric approach to engagement, one that meets each fan where they are in their journey, and ultimately drives organizational goals by deepening fan relationships, creating stronger Share of Mind and share of market. As Michael Rubin put it recently at the CAA World Congress of Sports, speaking about the ethos of Fanatics, Inc., the goal should be to “Enhance the fan experience with everything we do.” In my next few posts, I will dig into these steps, further discussing how teams can achieve this overarching goal of enhancing fan experience.