Key To Revenue- Generating Digital Strategies: Grow. Engage.

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1 Key To Revenue- Generating Digital Strategies: Grow. Engage. Transact. By Dan Migala Chief Innovation Officer of PCG In 1999, I was honored to be leading a workshop at NACDA in Reno to outline innovative strategies for athletics departments to sell tickets via the Internet. At the time, I humbly remember our session being a more intimately attended breakout discussion because monetizing fans through the Internet was very much in its infancy for our business. For those that were there, the message was simple: electronic channels provide the most cost-effective, results-driven and efficient way to monetize fans and our eyes were open to new possibilities. In the questions and conversations that followed, I marveled at discussing the session with then University of Notre Dame Sports Information Director Roger Valdiserri and University of Texas Women s Athletics Director Chris Plonsky and their curiosity to the new frontier of selling tickets, engaging fans and growing a collegiate athletics department s brand in innovative ways through electronic channels. I also remember the understandable level of apprehension of more senior executives to embrace these new concepts in favor of what we ve always done. As I look back 15 years later and reflect on Reno and other NACMA workshops through the years, those ideas seem elementary to all of us now through the current lens of a faster-paced digital world but the desire for athletics departments to create opportunities, incremental revenue opportunities and new processes to engage with fans through electronic channels remains the same. The objective of this report is to provide veteran and younger collegiate administrators an overview into how to use digital tools to design a world-class digital strategy. The results will create a larger data pool to better understand, engage and monetize fans. ATHLETICS ADMINISTRATION NACDA 57

2 Put more specifically, the goal in 2015 for any athletic department s digital strategy should be to simply Grow. Engage. Transact. Grow: The process begins with how an athletics department can establish, build and grow a digital fan base. In 1999, the primary focus was about building an database. That strategy is, well, so 1999 as it is increasingly difficult to break through the clutter of an inbox to engage and transact with fans like it was 15 years ago. In 2015, the first step to establishing and growing an athletics department s digital fan base all begins with a pixel tag and cookie strategy. This simple tactic allows an athletics department to capture data of any fan that visits their website and use that information to learn more a b o u t t h a t f a n s o n l i n e behavior and eventually message them on any device or anywhere these fans go on the Internet. Formally defined, a cookie is a small piece of code that a website can drop onto a visitor s device browser. A cookie acts as an anonymous tag that identifies your fan s computer, but not them. Cookies have the ability to gather information about web pages viewed and the advertisements viewed or clicked. This is important to understand because as any school builds its fan base there is no better channel to do this through than a pixel. Pixels can be matched with third-party data on these fans to build insightful profiles on fans. The data is segmented based on common parameters like household income, geography and age brackets that serve as valuable demographic information to use in ticket sales, fundraising and merchandise efforts. The bigger the audience, the more the digital fan base grows as does the opportunity to eventually engage and transact. A textbook example of how an effective pixel tag strategy can be done in college athletics is to examine Mississippi State University s (MSU) digital strategy headed into the 2014 football season. The university began pixeling their athletics department website in August when its football team was not nationally ranked. Within five weeks, the Bulldogs became the first team in the AP poll's 78-year history to go from unranked to No. 1 in five weeks. While this achievement was impressive on-the-field, the marketing department deserves similar accolades for its off-the-field tactics. MSU likely also became the first team to create audience profiles and segments of more than 500,000 fans in that same time period. Attendees of my 1999 NACDA session should take a moment to comprehend this. In 2015, the Bulldogs were able to collect fan profiles of more than a half of a million fans in less than two months. This realization should be setting off alarms to all athletics directors, associate ADs of marketing, development and external telations to seize on these opportunities to improve fan relations through digital platforms. While on-the-field success like Mississippi State can drive traffic to a site and grow the data pool to build from, it is not essential. Schools and professional teams of all levels can learn from the Bulldogs example as fans need a reason to visit a school s website. In the case of the Bulldogs, winning was the d r i v e r. I n o t h e r c a s e s, compelling content, features and promotions serve as the driver of attracting fans to a school s website. The more reasons or content an athletics department give fans to visit their website, the greater and faster the ability to grow a digital fan base. Engage: It is great to have a high volume of fans in a digital fan network but it means nothing without a strategy to engage with them. There are two keys to a successful fan engagement strategy that all college marketers must understand to achieve deep connections with their fans through digital channels. The first is to understand the device fans are using to interact with your school and how that impacts their engagements. Results from SportsDesk Media campaigns in 2014 on digital ticketing campaigns of professional and collegiate sports teams found that 45 percent of fans visited team sites via a computer, 32 percent on a smart phone and 22 percent from a tablet. This matters to collegiate marketers because the device impacts their ability and desire to engage with specific ticket offerings. For example, fans logging in on a laptop are more likely to buy season tickets or mini-plans than a fan on a mobile device. However, fans on mobile devices are more likely to engage on a smaller transaction like a single game purchase. For development officers, this is also important because mobile is a terrific device to secure small donations. For example, celebrating a birth in the Sweet Sixteen and encouraging the thousands of fans in the digital network to use their smart 58 NACDA ATHLETICS ADMINISTRATION

3 A 25-year-old fresh out of college who still wants to relive his student-section glory days will get a different ad creative served to him than the 45-yearold mom with three kids phone to make a $16 donation to the athletics department to celebrate. Technology allows athletics departments to serve different messages to fans on different devices. For example, schools are using a mobile strategy to specifically target students to increase ticket usage within hours of game times. The second key element of the growth strategy beyond cookies and pixeling is a prospecting strategy. Retargeting is commonplace in most college athletics marketing efforts. Retargeting serves digital advertisements to fans that have already visited a school s website. In other words, targeting fans that schools already have a relationship with. Prospecting identifies and targets other online users that share the same characteristics of an athletics department s online fans and engages with them. For college athletics marketers, the path to engagement is to: Determine the best digital media and engagement strategy that will resonate with the target audience. Ensure ticketing products and offers match target audiences wants and needs vs. a general market offer. The path to success is to use fan data to inform an athletics department s marketing decisions and look beyond top-line demographics. The University of South Carolina digital football ticketing strategy is a brilliant case study into how to use this engagement strategy and designing an effective retargeting and prospecting strategy in parallel. The Gamecocks had established a digital fan base through a cookie and pixeling strategy. By studying the data profiles of their digital fan base, they recognized two unique key segments of fans to target: young alumni and families with children. Led by South Carolina Athletics Chief Marketing Officer and NACMA President Eric Nichols, the athletics department created a digital strategy to engage two different ticket offerings. The first ticket product was a young alumni season ticket offer that celebrated the excitement of being at a game and featured creative that showcased the fun atmosphere of a college football game. The second offering was a family-driven product that featured a parent with a child on their shoulders. The digital ads targeting parents featured copy like, You can t make a memory watching the game on the couch. Without a digital engagement strategy, these ads would be mass marketed with the message lost without the ability to target the audience within the audience. The South Carolina athletics department used the information collected from the cookies and pixels to market the offer to existing fans on digital channels through retargeting as well as prospecting to find lookalike fans that would likely engage with the promotional offer. This Predictive Fan Modeling algorithm allows South Carolina to seek out potential consumers that replicate similar behaviors as those members who already exist in their database effectively allowing them to grow their database based on a highly precise target audience. A 25-year-old fresh out of college who still wants to relive his student-section glory days will get a different ad creative served to him than the 45-year-old mom with three kids, Nichols said. Once we ve built our digital fan network, the possibilities are endless for how we can engage with fans of all segments and make them feel unique and special. From an engagement perspective, Nichols said they received up to 30 percent more interaction with their segmented advertisements served from retargeting and prospecting methods vs. simply a standard general market digital media buy. This smart segmenting leads to not only more engagement but incremental revenue because the message is customized and delivered to the correct audience. Transact: By delivering the right message to the right audience, South Carolina generated a 2,400 percent return on their digital media advertising investment and was able to quantify $922,000 in traceable ticket sales off of this campaign. The revenue success of these campaigns has spawned countless other schools like East Carolina, UCLA, and University of South Florida and professional teams like the NBA s Cleveland Cavaliers and NFL s Chicago Bears and Cleveland Browns to model their digital efforts in the same way that the Gamecocks and Bulldogs have. The key learning here for all of us in the collegiate marketplace is how a digital strategy allows us a deeper connection with our fans that ultimately prepares us to ATHLETICS ADMINISTRATION NACDA 59

4 "market in the moment," said Leah Beasley, assistant athletics director of marketing for Mississippi State. For the Bulldogs, they sold-out of three-game mini plans via digital direct response marketing and generated a 1,300 percent return on investment on their digital media spend. They segmented Bulldog fans within a close radius of their campus and used this strategy to forge deeper connections with area fans that are now season ticket customers. It s tough to find a better example of marketing in the moment than a school that comes arguably out of nowhere to become the #1 team in the country and how they can turn on a dime and use digital to their advantage to generate revenue. While marketing administrators can t control team performance, one area that can significantly impact any school s digital revenues is designing an effective landing page. A good landing page does more than just try to sell a fan. It has team content, a fan promotion, video and a product offer. This removes friction from the fan transaction and provides fans multiple options for engaging and transacting. An ineffective landing page, in the fans eyes is just a page that wants to take their money. to talk at fans. Now, these fans expect and want athletics departments to communicate with them. As we continue the endless search of innovative ways to form deeper connections with fans and incremental revenue streams, it is important to learn from lessons of past NACDA sessions and be open to new technologies and processes that allow us to communicate with fans in the way they wish to engage with their favorite schools. From my perspective, the timeless lesson to driving growth through digital is to think like Roger and Chris did back in 1999 and ask as many questions about the possibilities of the digital era and be curious about how technology can accelerate an athletics department s mission. Unlike in 1999 when digital platforms were still a novelty, it is now a critical part of business in modern times. Thankfully, in 2015, the tactics to finding answers is much easier today than it was then thanks to the templates from the success stories of the past year outlined in this report and the deeper engagements that cookies, pixels and device flexibility that the marketplace affords us now. In 2015, the answer to the question of what every school should do through a digital fan monetization strategy is: Use fan data, beyond demographics, to inform your digital revenue strategy Use prospecting and retargeting in tandem Customize advertising creative to audience targets and promote multiple games Invest in a landing page strategy Live test and learn For every administrator at NACDA 2015, the time is now for every athletics department to create a digital strategy to Grow, Engage, Transact your fans. Your fans and your athletics department s financial officer will be glad you did. T h e c u r r e n t S o u t h C a r o l i n a l a n d i n g p a g e (itsgreattobeagamecock.com) is a terrific example of an effective landing page. Just like their segmentation strategy, landing pages can be based on fan targets to more customize them which leads to greater sales increases as high as 100 percent increase in response and sales conversion. Dan Migala is the Chief Innovation Officer of PCG, a Chicago-based sports marketing consulting firm and proud graduate of the University of Missouri s Journalism School and Ohio University s Graduate School of Sports Administration. He can be reached at [email protected] In the digital world it s a great reminder for marketers that the little things matter when growing, engaging and transacting fans. As fast as a team can connect digitally with fans, those fans will abandon communications if the message is not properly targeted. In 1999, athletics departments used digital 60 NACDA ATHLETICS ADMINISTRATION

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