The year 2020 has presented a fair share of challenges for fan-based industries, forcing organizations to move their fan engagement strategies into the digital space and reimagine their existing campaigns. Survey results from PwC show that due to COVID-19’s disruption of the industry and impact on projected growth, sports leaders believe that the fan’s digital experience is a top priority.
The Covid-19 pandemic has provided a push that many companies needed to embrace digital activations. However, the influx of people jumping online has made it increasingly difficult to present innovative campaigns that will keep fans excited. It is for these reasons that bringing live activations into the digital space requires precise planning to implement them successfully. We've put together four tips for sucessfully transforming your live activations into digital campaigns:
1) Create Data & Insight-Driven Campaigns
Transitioning your in-person activations to digital opens up a whole new world of targeting and segmentation options through fan data. Ensure that your activations are capturing your data in an effective way so that you can better understand and serve your fan’s needs in the future. Determining what information you need and building your campaign with the intent to capture it can result in a clearer focus. Whether it’s email database growth, understanding purchasing behaviour or collecting leads for your partners, the data that you capture could shape your future marketing initiatives, partner relationships, and sales.
2) Optimize Fan Engagement
Studies have shown that simply increasing your number of fans or followers has a small impact in revenues overall. In fact, it is boosting engagement that truly drives commercial value. The challenge with digital activations is their lack of connectivity and interactions between fans. However, when done correctly, there are many options for digital campaigns that allow you to strengthen your engagement, and even widen your reach.
3) Innovate!
With everyone stuck at home on their computers for the indefinite future, a fan is inundated with hundreds of ads and campaigns a day. The rapid need to transition in-arena activations into the digital space and stand out within the industry has forced businesses to formulate creative and innovative ways to keep fans engaged without being able to attend games or shows. Campaigns deployed by our partners include everything from 8bit games, to AR filters, to live trivia; which are not only engaging but effective in capturing valuable data and incentivizing fan interactions.
4) Align with your Partners
Partnerships today have become the main revenue driver for businesses. However, a good partnership requires alignment on digital/social teams to ensure a smooth and collaborative relationship. In the age of Covid-19, there is an increasing need to fulfill partnership deals in an innovative and creative way, especially when moving your in-arena activations into the digital space.
When you set out to build your digital activations, you will first need to determine what challenge you are trying to solve. Ensure that your partner aligns with you on your goals and KPIs so that you are both on the same page moving forward. From there, you can choose an activation that meets the parameters above and lets you execute it in a way that is authentic and personalized to you and your partner.
Digital activations are here to stay and this new normal means that departments must work closely together to achieve organizational goals. Take advantage of the resources you have available so that you can create innovative, authentic, and effective campaigns that will keep your fans entertained and deliver valuable data for your partners.
Create your own effective digital activations using fan data. Contact us today for a free ideation session.