#64 The secret weapon to growing your supporter base, continuously - GAMIFICATION

Grow your supporter base continuously 

Sports clubs are one of the most followed accounts on various social media platforms. That’s because fans are hungry to keep up with their favourite clubs. Fans want to see what their favourite players are up to. A great example of this is how Al-Nassr FC gained over 2.5 million new followers in a matter of hours following the announcement of Cristiano Ronlado’s transfer to the club. This was a 400% increase from the 834 000 followers they had prior to the announcement.

Having a huge follower base on social media is great. But do you know what’s even better, turning those followers into known contacts in your database? This will help you understand your supporters better. From their preferences to the ways they engage with your club in terms of purchases and web behaviour, to name but a couple of examples. Once you know your supporters better, you can send them the right ticketing and merchandise offers in a way that they can really appreciate instead of sending out generic offers in the form of standard social media posts.

So how can you turn your social media followers into known contacts in your database? Remember I mentioned sending out offers in a way that supporters will appreciate? It’s really vital that however way you choose to grow your supporter base, you ensure that it’s in a way that your supporters will really appreciate. One such proven way of doing so is gamification. Gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing to other areas of activity. Elements such as point scoring, competition with others, and rules of play. This is done as a powerful online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service. In our case, you would be doing this as a way of encouraging your supporters to submit their contact information in exchange for playing the game, so to speak.

Gamification is something that fans really appreciate. For example, score predictions are particularly popular. Fans always jump at the opportunity of predicting which team will win and how many goals they will score against the other teams. This builds anticipation, excitement, and friendly competition amongst different fan groups. And it also gives the individual supporters predicting the scores a feeling of intimate involvement and raises the stakes a little bit for them. Meaning that they will be more invested in the game that they predicted the score for hoping that they are correct and sometimes hoping that their fellow fan group members are wrong. 

This is so powerful that 3 000 supporters of one of our customers’ rushed to predict scores of the club’s upcoming game within a space of 24hrs. This was the very first time that our customer had used this gamification tactic and supporters were filled with much anticipation and excitement. Of the 3 000 that signed up for the score prediction, about 60% were engaging with the club for the first time. Meaning that the club managed to successfully grow its database using gamification.