Blazers' Best Practices for
Fan-Based Marketing in 2017
Best Practices
“The customer experience is a central tenet of our marketing platform and Tradable Bits is a great partner for helping us deliver on this promise. The importance of presenting our customers with information personalized to the experience they want to have with our brand cannot be understated.”
Dewayne Hankins
CMO, Portland Trail Blazers
What is fan-based marketing?
Why is it important?
Fan-based marketing is the opposite of broadcast marketing. Rather than blasting general messages as far as possible, you use social data to reach fans and their friends with targeted messages. We execute this strategy with our partner, Tradable Bits.
This marketing method helps our bottom line by reducing ad spend and increasing conversions. But even more importantly, it’s essential to the personalized experience our fans have come to expect from us as a team.
How are you tracking the fan journey across digital
touch-points?
We already have a loyal fan base that loves to flaunt their #Ripcity pride. We just needed the technology to capture these fleeting interactions and channel them into sales. That's why we partnered with Tradable Bits, the leading fan-based marketing platform for sports.
For sponsorship, we spread awareness for Alaska Airlines with the "Wear in the World" fan post contest we created on the Tradable Bits platform. Fans publish jersey selfies while on vacation to their favorite social network, and we use Tradable Bits to automatically collect, moderate and publish their posts into the contest.
From our fans' perspective, the campaign is just a simple way for them to show off their pride and interact with other fans across the world. Behind the scenes, we're collecting data about our fans every time they post or vote for an entry. Armed with this insight, we can offer more personalised experiences to fans and prove exactly who our sponsors reaching by partnering with us.
For ticket sales, we engaged with fans through campaigns like our "Toyota Play of the Month" video poll (built on Tradable Bits). Just by selecting their favourite play, our fans provided insight into their interests and friends networks that we stored on their fan profiles in the Tradable Bits Fan CRM.
Now, when we run social ad campaigns to sell tickets, we can use Tradable Bits to target clusters of friends with relevant messages, rather than just broadcasting by region. Once fans buy, we can stop targeting them immediately because our ticketing, contesting and fan data platforms are all integrated in real time. This seamless flow of communication improves our fan experience and our social ad conversion rate.
Dewayne Hankins (CMO) and TJ Ansley (Director of Digital Experience) from the Portland Trail Blazers (NBA) share how their team turned fan data into more ticket sales and sponsorships in this exclusive interview.