The untapped commercial value of the sports audience
We know that the brands that are winning big in this game and are producing year-on-year revenue growth, are the brands that understand their audience the best.
We’re able to see this as we peek through the shop window of their marketing output.
What you can’t see is that these brands have undertaken strategic and analytical work to distinguish both who their audience is, and what is its commercial value.
For some, this process may be complicated. So let’s make it uncomplicated.
Defining the value of your audience ahead of monetisation
At WePlay, our process for defining the value of an audience is four-fold:
- Define the Scale – we can measure this through a variety of metrics, like impressions, reach, and the overall audience volume across digital and linear channels
- Understand the Coverage – measured by geography and market penetration, demographics, and gender
- Determine the Intent – measured by important engagement metrics such as dwell time, watch time, time on site, average pages per visit, click-throughs, and conversion rates
- Time (lifetime) – measured by the age of your audience, their motivations and reasons to engage with you, the average revenue per user (ARPU), and the customer lifetime value (CLV)
This critical information is used not only to identify the current and future commercial value of your audience but also for forecasting exercises, such as Demand Generation.
Setting objectives for increased audience and revenue growth
Once we’ve got this information to hand, we can focus on two growth objectives.
- Audience Development – increasing each of the four core metrics above: scale, coverage, intent, and time
- Audience Monetisation – activating new and existing audiences to generate more revenue, improve efficiencies, and reduce overall OPEX
It is time to monetise: Introducing the Growth Engine
With a commercially viable audience, revenue generation can be accelerated – provided you have a viable model.
The WePlay “Growth Engine” is a commercial marketing model that we designed exclusively for the sports and entertainment industry.
It enables brands to accelerate the growth and monetisation of their audience.
In its most simplistic form, the Growth Engine is about outputs and outcomes.
Outputs and Outcomes
The outputs are the services that we (WePlay and our clients) deploy to engage with the target audiences.
We act as a marketing extension to our clients, wrapping around their commercial and marketing teams, and powering them with knowledge, expertise, and insights.
It’s a collaborative approach. We’re sometimes even white-labelled as their internal team.
We deploy our full-service provision of strategy (and business intelligence), communications, creative production, media planning & buying, and technology to turbo-charge audience engagement, which is then primed for monetisation.
This isn’t a vanity exercise either. An engaged fan, which is someone who visits your website, signs up for a mailing list, follows you on social media, or has interacted with your content, is TWICE as likely to buy from you versus someone who is not engaged.
Furthermore, an engaged fan also spends twice as much money.
An engaged audience is not only twice as likely to buy from you, they also spend twice as much money.
Now we have our audience primed. Our next step is to activate.
Across a plethora of channels – from organic social, paid social, PR, and influencer, to organic and paid search, programmatic, editorial, email and analytics – our output deployment utilises the full strength of today’s modern marketing mix.
It is designed to guarantee that our engaged audiences receive the right message, at the right time, on the channel they’re most likely to engage with us on.
The outcomes are then defined as where the action/transaction takes place:
- A ticket or hospitality sale
- A streaming subscription or PPV purchase
- Engagement with a sponsor
- Registering to take part in an event (running, swimming, cycling, or triathlon)
- Buying a retail product from a store
- Engaging with digital advertisements
- Purchasing a membership
- Downloading an app
- Signing up to a mailing list
- Buying a collectible
As mentioned earlier, the brands that are winning at this game are able to monetise their audiences across each of these verticals, year-round.
Don’t worry if you do not have an active strategy for the monetisation of your audience right now.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes time to create great things.
You can also accelerate this process by contacting WePlay. ☺️
So, if you have gotten this far, you may be wondering what the main takeaway is.
It is this.
If you are a brand and you have an engaged audience, or you have the capability to build an engaged audience – then you have the opportunity right now to generate increased revenues and profits for your business.
And while this is a remit that WePlay is known for, I believe that the plethora of great marketing agencies in our industry also have a crucial role to play in enabling the economic growth of our industry.
