Marketing success is often determined by how well you’re able to engage with your customers, build brand loyalty and ensure you’re at the forefront of your customers’ minds when they make their purchasing decisions. Often, priority is placed on increasing the amount of customers on your database, so that you have effective data which you can use across your communications to ensure you’re considered before your competitors are.

Premier League football clubs, whilst undoubtedly very successful businesses, are presented with very different business challenges to any other sector. Their customers are fans who have bought into the brand for life, and their databases continue to grow globally. In this case, they must ensure that their focus is with maintaining brand engagement, further increasing brand loyalty, and using the data within their database to understand customers on an individual level, so that they’re able to return their fans’ commitment to their brand with personalised communications.

Currently, a third of Premier League clubs aren’t doing this effectively. Recent research by Aberfield Communications revealed that on average, Premier League shirt sponsors lost £10m per season as a result of clubs failing to engage with their fans. Clubs must therefore understand their supporters on a much more granular basis, so that their relationships with sponsors are not compromised – the results of this will not only be fruitful for the sponsors, but for the brands themselves.

The approach that clubs must take is therefore twofold. Firstly, they need to understand the power of the data they have and what it can do for their business as a whole. Data is a huge asset if it is used correctly, so they must begin by connecting various touchpoints to create one customer profile. Once this is complete, the data can be the basis of creating better marketing campaigns and personalised communications so that people packing the stands feel they are being dealt with as one rather than as a collective group. This approach will not only serve to improve engagement, it will increase fans’ appreciation for their club and potentially incentivise them to interact with other aspects of the business, make additional purchases or talk about the club on social media in a far wider context.

Uniting data is no small task and is particularly difficult for Premier League clubs who can have up to 50 million customers on their database. Traditionally, this will be kept within silos across the organisation rather than housed in one environment, so creating one central location should be the first priority. Without having effective data management, an organisation is not set up to handle these volumes of data in the right way, so their engagement is stifled.

Investing in technology and capabilities to transform the way customer data is collected and sorted is also of paramount importance. Not only will this assist with the task of sorting through up to 50 million customer profiles, it will also ensure future additions are tracked and stored in a much more efficient way. This means communications will become enhanced, presenting a solution to the notion that sponsors and clubs are wasting money by failing to personally engage their fan base.

Personalisation is a key driver for engagement. The fact that there was little or no evidence of audience engagement from the recent Aberfield study suggests that personalisation could be a considerable contributor to sustained engagement. Teradata recently undertook research into consumer attitudes which found that over two thirds (67%) would positively interact with a brand in response to a personalised engagement. Football brands therefore need to recognise that once they’ve got a solution that integrates all data and communications, they can start building consistent communications which target each fan’s preferences. Whether that’s to market a new product such as their own TV channels, announce the launch of a new kit, or a new signing, they will have a true understanding of what is important to their supporters. The benefit of this is huge for brand loyalty.

If football brands don’t have the technology and analytics to capture, integrate and analyse the behaviour and preferences of their customers they could damage potentially lucrative relatioships. Whilst their database might continue to grow, it will add no value to marketing communications, or potential sponsorship agreements, and communications will fall below the sophisticated expectations of their loyal fans.

 

By Jon Williams, Country Manager UK & Ireland for Teradata Marketing Applications. 

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