Sports organizations today are part of a fast-evolving sports technology ecosystem, where innovation drives deeper fan experience and monetization. The fusion of technology in sports and human emotion is redefining how teams build value beyond the game.
Sports organizations have a mutually beneficial relationship with their fans. Fans experience a suite of emotions and enjoy their team’s journey, and teams use their support and the reach it provides to drum up the resources they need to finance their operations and clear the path to sporting glory. In times past, it was enough to do your best, garner support, sell media rights, and collect and use those revenues appropriately. Nowadays, that is not enough.
In a world of hyperpersonalization and short attention spans, teams need to be able to single out fans and show them what they want and need at each moment to keep the relationship alive. In a time of ever-present short vertical videos commanding people’s attention, competing for a fan’s time can seem like a near insurmountable challenge. With careful consideration to each individual’s preferences, teams can still create excellent and personalized experiences that will blast through modern attention barriers and reignite fan passion, and do so at scale.
Why should sports organizations even care to make the effort? You ask. Because everyone wins when they do: teams, athletes, leagues, fans, and sponsors. In this article, we focus on fans’ value to their teams and how to unlock it. Here are some key insights.
1.How much are your fans worth?
Let’s think about this. Fans purchase tickets, merchandise, TV/streaming subscriptions, parking, hospitality packages, food & beverage packages, etc., so we could measure a customer lifetime value IF we had data. Fans are also reachable because of their relationship with the team, so they could be a source of leads to be monetized, IF we could identify them. To unlock this value or understand how much they can bring to sports organizations, fans must be identified, and their interactions must match that fan identity to build a worthwhile profile.
Understanding fan value requires data-driven insights, something sports consulting and sports marketing data can help unlock. When teams combine emotional loyalty with digital behavior, they transform traditional fandom into measurable sports fan engagement that fuels sustainable growth.
For those sports organizations that succeed in this identification game, the value of a fan in CLV and as a lead can significantly exceed traditional expectations. For one of our clients, the value of their fan leads skyrocketed more than 10x, from a baseline of around $20 when they only had registration data, versus when more than two extra touchpoints were added and permission to receive marketing communications was granted. Imagine what they could be worth if your organization curated more than 100 attributes for each fan.
2. The key lies in building first-party relationships
We live in a post-cookie world that significantly limits traditional ways of profile building, fan understanding, and targeting. Organizations must build first-party relationships with their fans to circumvent the current hurdles and provide a personalized experience. Since no one will hand over their data for no reason, organizations have to create experiences that entice them to do so.
For another of our clients, we built a fan-first ecosystem that evolved their new arena into a fan engagement platform. From account registration to a branded ticketing experience, to parking arrangements, venue access control, and frictionless retail and food and beverage, to gamified loyalty with real-time response and rewards to interactions, to integrated payments; all managed through a single Fan App, our client was able to collect and curate enriched fan profiles with upwards of 100 attributes. This allowed the organization to develop fan understanding previously unheard of in the industry, resulting in engagement and monetization opportunities.
3. Yes, it’s cheaper than you think!
Achieving those results requires a carefully integrated ecosystem of technologies that is properly deployed and managed. But you don’t need to go big bang with it, though you certainly can. A series of well-placed and timed smaller investments can create a self-sustaining innovation investment cycle with immediate ROI, where the first investment is easily recovered and further pays for the next series of investments required to take your organization to the next level of phygital experiences and interactions with your fans.
Starting with a Fan App, modularly built to allow for feature and interaction scalability, a team can start with minimal investment and build a fan database just with the account creation process. Adding a bit of gamified experiences, like Globant Sportian’s Fan Voting System, would encourage fan interactions and begin to provide revenue in terms of lead sales. Lay all of these, and more, on top of a strong customer data platform, augmented by Globant Sportian’s Minds, and the road to an enriched fan profile and experience opens up in front of your eyes.
Globant has provided clients with these things, marrying digital and physical experiences, also known as phygital experiences, to ensure they result in higher fan interactions, more resilient relationships, stronger loyalty, and increased team support. This has led our clients to monetize fans better; by understanding fans deeply, the team can encourage them in their support and continue on the road to the ultimate goal: a championship.
4. How owning the ticketing experience can help you
The world of sports and events ticketing is full of companies offering the service and doing a good job of it, too. They help teams and venues manage ticket inventories, primary sales, and, in some cases, even secondary sales. This definitely reduces operational headaches for sports organizations. The downside is that traditionally, they keep all the fan data or only give some of it back, but at a price.
So ask yourself, how could your organization change that, and why should it?
Deploying your own branded ticketing hub, leveraging Globant Sportian’s white label ticketing experience, and your current ticketing engine. This would expand your ability to identify and recognize fans that actually go to your games, keep more ticketing revenue, and increase conversion, while reducing operating costs. One of our clients saw a nearly 4x jump in the conversion of ancillaries (parking, premium hospitality, food and beverage packages, etc.) when they implemented our solution and changed how the checkout process worked.
Tying tickets to fan profiles also unlocks information previously unavailable to teams. It is not the same as knowing that your stadium is 90% occupied for the next event of the season, rather than knowing exactly which fans have purchased those tickets. Imagine the fan engagement opportunities.
As the sports entertainment industry continues to evolve, success will depend on blending creativity, technology, and emotional connection. From augmented reality sports fan experiences to gamification of user experience and personalized customer experiences, the future belongs to organizations that treat fans not as spectators but as partners in a living, digital ecosystem of passion and engagement.
Learn more about how Globant’s Sport Studio turns opportunities into results here or contact us to discover how Globant can help your team win beyond the game.
This article marks the first in a series on technology-enabled fan experiences. Stay tuned for more insights in the coming weeks
