MLS Data & Digital Goals for Success #MLSisBack

As the MLS season starts, Sports Geek asks what are the club's digital and data strategies for the season ahead. We've asked some of our friends in the league this captivating question just before the season began:

“What are your digital & data goals for upcoming MLS Season?”

Here are their answers:

Our digital goal for the 2018 are plain and simple, grow. We’ve set an ambitious internal goal of doubling our numbers by the end of the calendar year. Now, in order to do this, our digital team plan to flesh out all of the features on our CMS and on each social platform. We are looking to engage with our audience over these platforms. Engagement provides us with honest feedback, that we use as inspiration. In terms of content, our young, fearless, challenger brand has seeped into our digital plans for the year by developing our own unique Philadelphia centric personality. All of our content is made with those brand elements in mind, such as our chief tattoo officer, custom cleats by Kickasso, and, most recently, our Levi’s partnership.

Connect with Andrew Zwarych on Linkedin

At the macro level here’s what I’m trying to accomplish this season:

• Engage, inform, and entertain our fans.
• Provide value for our partners.
• Drive revenue for our Club.

Connect with Colin Kelly on LinkedIn

Our biggest focus for the upcoming season is to use our app to tighten the connection between our fans and our club.

The major tactics we for the year will be adding more Utility and Entertainment so not only a must download but the usage rate is higher.

• Utility
  • Mobile ticketing through ticketmaster integration
  • Wayfinding
  • Integration with Uber  
• Entertainment
  • AR Content
  • Exclusive Contesting
  • Gamification

Last year we saw a 400% YOY increase on our MAU during the playoffs, and we believe with adding these functionalities can continue to that trend.

Connect with Sean Keay on LinkedIn

From a data perspective, we’re looking to utilize new ways to capture the information of the fans in our stadium. We’ve just launched Flash Seats which is a digital ticketing platform that will be the primary distribution method for all of our tickets this season. This platform gathers the name, email, and phone number of every ticket that’s transferred through the platform, whether it’s a season ticket member sending his tickets to a co-worker or a group of 100 people passing out tickets in the platform. Not only will this be useful for marketing purposes but also appending demographic information to these newly found fans in order to give more clarity to our fan profile.

Along with this, we’ve partnered with StubHub to get access to their secondary market buyers and our sponsors who capture data throughout the stadium to help give us as much data on our fans as possible.

We also would like to increase the level of targeting with our digital advertising campaigns. In the past we’ve used very large and generic lists for our audiences but we’re looking to use both demographic and purchase data to deliver digital and social ads that are tailor made to more targeted audiences.

Connect with Spencer Horner on LinkedIn
Listen to Spencer on Sports Geek

One of our largest initiatives in 2018 is to increase and deepen our content across all of our platforms be it digital, social, video and everywhere in between. We have an incredibly active supporter base that we want to engage with while also aiming to broaden our reach into new areas. The new eMLS esports platform is also a new frontier for us and one that we feel could present some exciting new areas for fan development and growth.

Connect with Brian Costello on LinkedIn
Listen to Brian on Sports Geek

Listen to Charlie Shin discuss the MLS CRM Journey in this podcast