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| Arsenal Mumbai Supporters Club |
The sporting industry involves passion and lots of money. For everyone involved in the industry, either you love it or don’t. In such a high involvement industry, the stakes of planning and implementing a successful engagement strategy is always high. The need of the hour for large sporting clubs is to engage not only with fans in a 100 mile radius of the club, but also reach out to fans in every part of the world.
Like Mc Donald’s changes
its menu in different parts of the world to suit the audience, it is important
that sports clubs and organisations also change their engagement strategy in
different parts of the world.
Take for example the
English Premier League. The world's most watched soccer league with majority
fans that are based outside the UK & probably outside the EU as well.
To cater to this huge global interest, the Premier league has done well
by using strategies like -
Ø
early
kick off so that the games can get higher viewership globally
Ø
staging
the international cups where some of the teams travel other continents to play
live in front of fans
Ø
initiatives
like the fans parks where huge live matches are shown is huge screens
All this has helped the Premier
League become as successful as it is now. But the main area of interest for
fans in a league is the club & its players. While many players have
constantly kept engaging with their global fans, not many clubs have managed to
use social media to its potential in reaching out to fans across the
world.
I got an amazing
opportunity to work with Arsenal FC's content team and chalk out a fan
engagement strategy for the club. The team at Arsenal was impressive and open
to try out new things. This is something which other clubs and organisations
should also do more often.
Like any social media
campaign, we kept working on weekly content plans and set up a calendar of
important events both from Arsenal's perspective & from the global fan's
perspective.
The first successful
strategy that we implemented was the Diwali feature. The idea was to use the
theme of a festival which was celebrated by a large number of the club's fans
from a particular part of the world. The feature aimed at not only wishing the
fans but also showing the Arsenal first team members celebrating the festival.
The idea was very simple but still for some reason was not tried out by any of
the clubs at this level.
Arsenal
Diwali Feature 2015
The video received an
encouraging response by the fans with over 1.5 million views just
over a few days. Although other English clubs did post messages wishing their
fans, Arsenal was the only club that did this in such a grand scale.
Key learning - One of
the main reasons why this feature received a good response was the feature went
live in the target market's time zone. Since India is 5.30 hrs ahead of the UK,
posting the video in the Indian standard time was very important. Otherwise the
video would be live when majority of the fans were asleep.
After this experience,
the team tried out similar strategies targeting different markets.
Chinese
New year feature by Arsenal FC
The response by the
global fans was tremendous. As a result of this, the club also start looking at
creating regional specific content more often. We are now working with people
from different parts of the world who are equally passionate about the club and
want to build innovative content to engage with fans globally.
The latest feature was
launched only couple of days back for the festival of Holi. It has already
received over 80,000 views.
Arsenal
Holi feature 2016
It will be interesting
to see how other clubs tweak their social media strategy to engage with their
global fans.
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