The future of women’s football looks bright – and will shine brighter if rights holders continue to invest in dedicated content strategies for its female teams and athletes. As sports organizations place more emphasis on the women’s game, they are able to connect with a wider audience and, in turn, nurture greater engagement and matchday attendances that attract sponsorship opportunities and unlock new revenue streams.
For the first time, all 20 clubs in the 2022 Deloitte Football Money League now have a women’s team, highlighting the growth opportunities that football’s elite see across the different levels of female competition. However, the fact remains that limited sports organizations have the technology stacks or the data-analytics tools to begin developing targeted marketing campaigns for women’s football.
To help change this, there are several processes that properties can implement into their daily content output to increase engagement around their women’s product. To discuss where the industry goes next, I was invited to speak during Grabyo’s recent webinar on how digital content is driving awareness in women’s sport.
Here, we analyze five easy steps sports properties can take to optimize their women’s content strategy and how to unlock new revenue opportunities that support the growth of women’s football, in particular, as a standalone product.
1. BRING STORIES TO LIFE
Organizations should invest in their depth of storytelling around women’s sport. While men’s football, for example, usually attracts bigger audiences and broadcast fees, the women’s game grew up on digital – yet isn’t always given the same attention when it comes to the rights holder’s digital content strategy. In order for audiences to invest in the women’s game, it’s important to introduce fans to players through content that allows their personality and playing ability to shine. As women’s football grows more popular, clubs and leagues are seeing an opportunity to increase the frequency and quality of their women’s content offering, including more behind-the-scenes audiovisual content from training ground sessions and during live Q&As.
2. GO AGAINST THE GRAIN
Given the opportunity digital presents to the growth of women’s sport, rights holders have the opportunity to reinvent how their sport or team engages audiences around women’s football and the model with which they drive revenue via the club’s digital assets. For example, in the US, the National Women’s Soccer League’s (NWSL) Angel City FC – an independent, female-only club founded in Los Angeles – is incentivizing its players to create and share club content. Interestingly, the campaign launched in November last year sees one percent of the club’s ticket revenues generated go back to each player who “opts in and supports initiatives to drive ticket sales”. At the time, the club had surpassed 11,000 season-ticket holders for the 2022 season.
3. ENGAGE DIGITAL-FOCUSED BRANDS
Digitally advanced audiences put women’s teams and sports in rich territory for engaging brands moving into the digital space. As sports properties seek to diversify their digital inventory, those that embrace direct-to-consumer (D2C) relationships open up more opportunities to digitize their sponsorship portfolio by connecting company stakeholders and partners to their fan database. In return, while women’s football is still finding its voice, adopting a digital-first fan engagement strategy is an inviting prospect for brands seeking to capitalize on women’s sport and to turn female athletes into household names. Therefore, it is in the organization’s best interests to invest in the D2C space, so as to maximize sponsorship opportunities with brands undergoing their own digital transformation.
4. SPEED TO MARKET IS KEY
For digital-first organizations, speed of delivery is vital to standing out in a saturated D2C market. Although many sports properties have relied on the popularity of its men’s game to drive interest in women’s football, sport’s digital transformation is making it easier for clubs, leagues, and federations to capture and segment data for the women’s product and tailor content campaigns to generate greater interest. This presents a tremendous opportunity for club’s investing in the women’s game to convert casual fans into core supporters. In order to maximize engagement, the frequency with which you create content will ultimately decide how often you communicate with fans, provide a broader selection of content from which to personalize the fan experience, and generate more interactions from which to capture fan data.
5. TAKE SMALL STEPS TO DIGITALIZATION
As outlined above, the digital transformation of football is supporting a surge in engagement – where there is a direct correlation between the football entities that digitize their content delivery and audience interactions. While investment is necessary for digital adoption, it needn’t be expensive, however. For example, social media channels present sports properties with avenues to communicate with fans – and athletes – about the types of content they engage with and via which platforms. While a simple innovation, by engaging with fans about what they enjoy most about women’s content, you have effectively taken the first and most important step on your digital transformation journey.
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FC Barcelona Feminí’s UEFA Women’s Champions League (UWCL) victory versus Real Madrid last month not only attracted a season-record 91,553 spectators to Camp Nou, the Clásico also set a new women’s attendance record globally. Furthermore, the fixture drew 1.8 million viewers to live coverage streamed via DAZN’s dedicated YouTube channel, surpassing the media company’s previous record set during the quarter-final’s opening leg.
The feat acts as an example of how digital communications strategies can attract fans to watch women’s matches. However, the women’s game must not rest on its laurels. How the industry capitalizes on this landmark will depend on whether other sports entities invest in women’s football in a similar fashion. Building on its momentum, tickets for FC Barcelona’s UWCL semi-final home leg versus Wolfsburg on May 22nd were sold out inside the first 48 hours after being made available to the club’s “socios” members and the general public.
What’s telling about this growth trajectory is the appetite fans have for live women’s football and how a carefully constructed communications strategy can generate interest among the club’s existing members. We are seeing evidence that football fans – male and female, young and old – want to invest time and money in the women’s game. Understanding how your content is engaging that core audience gives you valuable insight into the growth of women’s football.
Although the majority of traditional football fans were first attracted by the men’s game – built of a club’s local values – nevertheless, theirs is also important data for segmenting and driving women’s content via your existing digital channels and building emotion around the women’s product.
More importantly, it offers teams yet to capture fan data on the back of the women’s game to do so via the property’s existing supporters. By leveraging readily accessible connections, a club is easily able to seed interest in their women’s product and, in turn, set the wheels in motion for further growth across the property’s women’s portfolio, as part of a diversified digital ecosystem.
To find out more about what N3XT Sports can offer your organization, please fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.