Special Report: Discovering clubs’ anonymous fans

In the old days of sport, fans were easy to spot.They were the people who sat in grounds and bought your merchandise.

But now in the modern era, a ‘fan’ is more difficult to quantify. While the hard core fans will always be easy to engage with, there are thousands of other people who may have an affinity to the club,but have never engaged with them on a meaningful basis. These are ‘anonymous fans’ – a group of people marketing brand Epsilon help find. European CreativeDirector, Mark Fiddes, explains how clubs can start to tap into that fanbase:

“It’s very hard to describe what an anonymous fan is, because they may not have even self-identified as a fan yet. On the one hand a very obvious fan would be an Arsenal aficionado, who grew up around the ground, who is now living in Paris,who wants to stay in touch with the club any way they can, and will seek out any online content you have available. To go to another extreme, you may have a soccer mom in the mid-west. She has no affiliation with a club yet she wants the opportunity after school to get her kid into an academy, run by a known brand like Arsenal. She starts to develop a preference for Arsenal through taking her kid through basic soccer coaching. Fans could come from anywhere.The other thing about them is it could be an emotional bond that brings the fan in, or it could be a very rational, functional one, like our soccer mom who wants to train up her kids. Likewise it may be emotional: ‘my grandfather supported Fulham, so I will too.’ Fans can come from either base.”

Fiddes in particular looked to football clubs to engage with their local community by thinking outside the box. Traditional marketing and revenue streams have always come from the match day experience,but Fiddes thinks fans can be picked up from tapping into what is going on around the club:

“You have to go beyond the game.” says Fiddes. “Fandom, whatever temperature it is, burning hot or just vaguely interested, will be developed by different ways of becoming involved in that club. As an example, every year Fulham FC take advantage of its fantastic stadium. Interestingly, with Fulham a lot of emotional connection there is with the ground, Craven Cottage. (There uproar around the rumours of a move.) But the thing about that ground is that it offers a fantastic view of the river.What a fantastic place to see the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race every year! So what Fulham have done is open up Craven Cottage to be a premier venue to watch the boat race, then hosting the Oxford-Cambridge Varsity football match afterwards. Thinking imaginatively and thinking on your feet about how you can involve more people is important, in that case based on your real estate.

“I’m also interested in areas where clubs can reach out and take their mission beyond the game.Barcelona is ‘Més que un club’ – more than a club. The training system at LaMasia is world famous. There’s a brand in that. How they take that product into the wider world is fascinating. It will make football better. But it will also be great business for Barcelona. These are the areas we have to step into:getting beyond the obvious, seeing what else clubs can do. I see our role as being the trusted advisor,to try help enlighten and enliven those club. Clubs are realising that the assets they are sitting on is more than just shirts and players, it’s not just 30,000 seats on a Saturday, there are a lot more opportunities to go out and connect and to explore what fandom is.”

At the heart of Epsilon achieving this, is their data. It helps them discover who clubs could be talking to, but aren’t. But also it identifies which of their fans they are talking to are listening, and why. Data, for Epsilon and Fiddes, is key.

“There is so much which is untested. Every day we are finding new ways of connecting, and new combinations of connecting. One of the interesting learnings we had from recently moving Wasps Rugby Club from Adams Park up to the Ricoh arena, was the combination of different media that enabled the whole thing to happen. The gates went up from 5,000 to 19,000, that’s because they weren’t just using digital media, banners and emails, but they were also relying on traditional local media like posters, press ads and radio – all together in an integrated package to create a dynamic engagement. We’re learning all the time.”

“The other thing that our colleagues in the US have been discovering is that tendency to get involved will depend massively on factors like the time of day, and the device you are on. For example, we have noted an 87% difference in engagement rates between different devices at different times of the day. There will be an optimum time if you want to hit someone on an app, on a tablet, compared to hitting someone on a mobile. These are all learnings that we are feeding back into the database, that allows the targeting to be more effective, the messaging to be relevant, and to prompt real engagement.”

The message from across the industry is clear:data drives everything. Without it, the internet is a very big place, and the odds of getting noticed diminish rapidly, when data analysis isn’t focusing your marketing. One area in particular that stood out for Fiddes, was the lack of understanding on what makes a video go viral:

“A lot of marketing is just yelling to people who aren’t necessarily engaged. That’s where you are going to have very limited appeal. The internet is littering with failed viral ads. The first thing a new client will often say to you ‘I want a successful viral commercial!’. But they don’t happen to order. They catch fire. There are things you can learn about how you can make a smart viral, but you can’t make clear predictions. If it’s relevant and timely, and this where the data comes in and if it’s on the right platform, it has a much better chance of being engaging.Without that data it’s hard to make confident judgments.”

Fiddes and Epsilon are playing a leading role in how the next generation of marketing is operating. Searching even deeper than before for new fans, and speaking to them in a more precise way than ever before.

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