In nearly 30 years as a franchise, the Minnesota Timberwolves have had more coaching changes than playoff appearances. So, more than diehards, the fan base is understandably filled with skeptics, head shakers and non-believers. Put simply, the Wolves needed to find a way to inspire everybody – both inside the organization and out – to adopt a new, shared mindset and journey forward, together.
Here are a few of the highlights from that journey: from brand strategy and creative platform to connection planning, execution and measurement.
We segmented the audience based on syndicated research and multi-channel media behavior, and applied a full-funnel approach to driving individual game ticket and multi-game flex package revenue, while also supporting season membership sales.
After our first season, we began to take the guesswork out of the marketing equation by testing different digital partners, ad units, messaging, etc., with a focus on continual improvement of defined KPI’s. In time, this improvement led to plotting “persuadability” of our different target audiences based on known behaviors from research.
In conjunction with our Audience First strategic planning approach, we spend a lot of time defining campaign KPI’s and how we will uniquely measure them. Below is just an example of the different digital and audience measurements defined for a campaign.
Archiving our measurement strategies is a dynamic marketing dashboard that captures the performance of paid media against the specific KPI’s being measured. The dashboard helps us keep our finger on the pulse of what is working, what needs improvement, and what trends to pay attention to looking forward.
Our full-funnel visualization helps to better align unique marketing strategies for each product we’re selling with paid media support, i.e. individual games, flex packs and season memberships.
Beyond measuring paid social and programmatic digital, we also overlay traditional mass media that is running as well as monitoring brand sentiment across social channels to learn how each is affecting our overall goals in producing more revenue from paid media efforts.
To remain relevant today, we believe we can align with popular culture moments and engage fans in new and different ways until a vaccine exists providing consumer confidence to return to all of the professional sports stadiums and arenas. We can track Google Trends and other technology platforms to monitor trending topics and quickly assemble and produce content aligning our sports brand with these pop culture moments in a positive way.