Level up your fan engagement: personalization that delivers results

Sports fandom is bigger than ever. Are you ready to engage those fans?

People aren’t just rooting for their home team anymore. Many sports teams and leagues are finding audiences across the globe, with a recent report finding that the global sports market is heading toward a valuation of $1 trillion. But at the same time, sports properties are commercially underleveraging their highly energized and engaged fan bases.

This represents both an opportunity and a challenge for sports properties. Audiences have never been larger, but truly knowing their fans has never been more difficult for teams and leagues.

No matter where fans are in the world, they increasingly expect the same personalized experiences they receive from other brands:

• Custom Spotify playlists that reflect listening habits
• Product recommendations based on past Amazon purchases
• Movie recommendations based on Netflix watch histories

Capturing a share of this trillion-dollar opportunity means treating fans as individuals, not just as a number on a chart.

The personalization gap in sports marketing

Personalized messaging and experiences have become so normalized that consumers can get frustrated when they don’t receive them. This isn’t just an anecdotal observation. Research from McKinsey has found:

• 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions
• 76% have gotten frustrated when they didn’t get personalized interactions

But there’s often a gap between the level of personalization that fans expect and the level of personalization sports properties can deliver because they lack the comprehensive insights they need to turn data into actionable engagement strategies.

• Data siloed across systems
• Significant amounts of unknown fans not represented in CRMs
• Reliance on broad demographics
• Limited in-house resources for data analysis

Get to know fans as individuals with FanSignals™

With FanSignals™ from Wiland, sports properties don’t need to choose between scale and personalization. FanSignals helps teams and leagues look beyond the information in their databases and gain a more in-depth understanding of their fans. Rather than treating fans as a monolith or as broad demographic segments, organizations can leverage FanSignals to:

• Identify high-affinity audiences
• Uncover previously unknown fans
• Personalize engagement based on real-world interests and purchasing behaviors

The end result is:

• More relevant messaging
• Stronger fan relationships
• More effective marketing and engagement initiatives

Personalization that pays off

The impact of personalization on sports marketing is two-fold: it creates better experiences for fans and helps deliver a stronger return on investment that’s easier to link to specific marketing initiatives.

When decisions are informed by insights from FanSignals, the focus shifts from reaching the biggest audiences to reaching the most relevant audiences. Rather than blasting the same sponsor messaging to broad audiences, wasting spend on reaching irrelevant audiences,

teams and leagues can precisely target audiences with sponsor messaging that aligns with existing affinities, making it possible for teams to deliver multi-brand personalization at scale.

The same precision that improves sponsor targeting also applies to ticketing and upsells. Rather than treating all buyers the same, teams and leagues can use refined segmentation to pinpoint:

• Group sales opportunities
• Corporate buyers
• Fans likely to upgrade to premium experiences
• Fans likely to be interested in season tickets

Whether it’s creating more valuable sponsorship opportunities or identifying the next season-ticket holder, the throughline is the same: personalization turns audience size into audience value.

What’s next for your fan base?

Sports fandom has outgrown the tools most teams and leagues use to understand it.FanSignals gives teams and leagues the resources they need to effectively engage audiences while driving stronger sponsorships, smarter upsells, and measurable results along the way.

Ready to see what you can learn about your fans? Contact Wiland to learn more.