League-wide training to stimulate better matchday marketing

Challenge

Maximising match day revenues is as challenging as ever for many professional football leagues in Europe as clubs face increased competition for the attention of their fans.

And though average attendances for Conforama Ligue 1 football matches, the top-tier of French football, rose by 4% from 2010/11 to 2016/17, average occupancy fell over the same period to below 70%.

Insight

French football clubs have largely acted individually in their marketing strategies, with limited opportunities to share best practice in how customer insight and data-driven marketing can drive general admission ticket and hospitality sales.

Solution

The Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), which runs the top two tiers of French club football, could better support clubs by disseminating league-wide expertise – and supporting in how best to use data-driven marketing techniques – to give them the insight and tools required to improve their commercial match day strategies.

Action

Two Circles worked with the LFP to co-create a series of learning platforms to spread the techniques of data-driven sports marketing across the league, with content created using Two Circles’ expertise in growing match day revenues for leading rights-holders since 2011.

In March 2018, Two Circles hosted a two-hour ‘personalised and interactive’ keynote at the LFP Club Seminar, outlining how data and digital will be the drivers of growth for French football clubs. This was supported by day-long training sessions, personalised by club, covering three topics: ‘Growing Ticketing Revenues in France’, ‘Growing Hospitality Revenues in France’, and ‘New Trends in Football and Digital’.

Each training participant left having designed their own ‘Digital Growth Roadmap’, and received a personalised training booklet with each topic covered. Post-training surveys were then deployed to understand the biggest learnings and areas to prioritise future training.

Two Circles then continued to provide clubs with insights through a monthly digital newsletter, which built on the training sessions by providing inspirational case studies of successful data-driven sports marketing.