How to Boost Fan Engagement - A Formula 1 Heineken Dutch Grand Prix Use Case

5 Tips on How to Enhance Fan Engagement Before, During, and After a Sports Event

1. Fan Engagement Goes Beyond the Event

Did you notice the ‘before, during, and after’ in the title and introduction of this blog? Sports organisations must recognise the importance of engaging with their fans year-round. Even if the event is only held once a year, like the Dutch Grand Prix. If you want to build a meaningful relationship with your fans, you can’t stop engaging with them at the end of the sports season.

In times of clutter and information overload, being relevant for each fan is perhaps one of the biggest challenges in marketing. You can complete the puzzle only by targeting the right audience with a meaningful message.

Year-round communication might sound more complicated than it seems, as long as you’ve got the right tooling. Great marketing automation tooling makes connecting with your fans any time of the year a piece of cake.

Ensure it is built around a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to store first-party fan data and create meaningful fan segments. These segments are the basis of your communication, ensuring every segment gets the right message at the right time.

2. Take a Holistic Approach

The yearly Dutch Grand Prix at CM.com Circuit Zandvoort is the focal point for fan engagement. The challenge is to get fans to see what lies beyond this experience. By taking a holistic approach, the Dutch Grand Prix takes its fans on the yearlong journey surrounding the event. Storytelling is a great way to do so.

However, telling stories is just the start. The media and channels you use to tell your story and share it with your fans make or break it. Use a good mix of channels to ensure every favourite channel of your fans is available.

3. Know Who Your Fans Are

As mentioned in the introduction, there’s no more diverse group of people than a group of sports fans. Targeting everyone might result in reaching no one. Hence, the need to create different fan segments. To do so, you need to know who your fans are: from demographics to purchase and behavioural data.

At the heart of this data is your CDP. Here, the Dutch Grand Prix stored all data to segment based on relevant metrics. Collecting data was simple, as the Dutch Grand Prix integrated their tooling with their CDP.

4. Personalise Communication

A common statement regarding communications is speaking to everyone holds the risk of speaking to no one. That’s why personalisation is of utmost importance.

Collect all purchasing and behavioural data in a CDP to create fan profiles. Based on these profiles, relevant segments can be created to send personalised communications to every segment.

5. Reward Your Biggest Fans

All the fans’ relevant touchpoints are stored in a CDP. This helps the Dutch Grand Prix identify its biggest fans. If you want to take fan engagement to the next level, rewarding your biggest fans is a logical next step. Personalised communication based on your fans’ liking rewards them with the best possible experience. However, there are many more ways to reward your fans’ loyalty.

Take the learnings from the Dutch Grand Prix for your sports event and think of how you can reward your most loyal fans.

Enhance Your Fan Experience with CM.com

Did you know CM.com offers all these solutions? The Dutch Grand Prix does. With the Mobile Marketing Cloud and Appmiral’s event app, they can engage with their fans year-round.

The heart of our Mobile Marketing Cloud is the CDP, and also the Dutch Grand Prix event app is connected with the CDP. With these solutions, you can collect relevant data points as well as use the data to improve fan engagement.