5 Ways UMPIRE Helps to Boost Fan Engagement

Fan Engagement has a direct, massive impact on your organization. It significantly influences both your image and finances. You need to provide your marketing team with the best possible solutions to win the hearts of your supporters and motivate them to be more active. We offer a tool that will facilitate you to be the best among your competition – UMPIRE, a CMS for sports clubs. It allows you to build content easily by adding various forms of entertaining features – videos, photos, podcasts, articles, events, live updates, polls, interviews, and more.

WHAT DOES UMPIRE OFFER TO SPORTS CLUBS?

#1 POWERFUL ENTERTAINMENT FEATURES

UMPIRE allows you to leverage the power of emotions by offering easy-to-use tools that help to build entertaining and interactive content. There are two crucial elements that significantly influence your fans’ engagement on a daily basis – Match Day and Player Profiles.

A) MAKE YOUR MATCH DAY A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE

With the help of UMPIRE, you can create a Match Center with exclusive materials from the game as the action unfolds on the pitch. It offers you a possibility to perform a coverage of the competition using the necessary components for its visualization:

• Comments
• Match statuses
• Live updates
• Graphics and Photos
• Videos
• Polls
• Advertisements
• Social Media posts (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)

The Match Center is displayed on the website and in the mobile application in real-time. Thanks to it, you can let your supporters enjoy a matchday in a completely new, unique way.

B) CREATE TEAM ROSTERS AND PLAYER PROFILES

By using UMPIRE, you can create players’ profiles which will contain all the essential data about them, including their league statistics. That’s how you will be able to create emotional ties between your sports athletes and supporters, simultaneously offering them a gentle and appealing design of your website.

#2 VARIOUS AND HIGH-QUALITY VIDEO CONTENT

UMPIRE as a CMS supports different video formats ensuring the highest quality viewing over a variety of devices. That’s pivotal as video is the most engaging type of content, especially in sports. Essentially, video brings together two things that catch our attention: movement and noise. That’s what makes it so tempting for all football fans to keep watching video content. Why? Since they’re expecting the same from the game – quick movement of players and supportive noise from the tribunes.

Video may encompass various emotions by including all content types such as text, music, photos, graphics, links or figures. The way it emotionally affects our brain is very similar to what you’re used to while watching sports’ competition and supporting our favourite team. You need to be able to provide high-quality video content in order to engage your fans on a higher level.

#3 PROFESSIONAL LIVE-STREAMING OF (FRIENDLY) GAMES

Even though the majority of your competitive matches might be blocked from live-streaming due to broadcasting rights, your fans might desire a possibility to follow the friendly games as well. In 2019, Consumers spent almost 85 minutes per day consuming digital video. Experts indicate that by 2022 live-streams and video will make up about 80% of all mobile traffic!

That’s a tremendous change that will quickly make people move from TV to their computers and mobiles. Even if you don’t begin to prepare for live-streams now, you’ll have to do it soon to stay in the game. It’s always better to be a pioneer and get ready for innovative changes as early as possible.

That’s why UMPIRE offers you a special tool which will facilitate live streaming of all the games no matter where they take place. For instance, in the case of Legia Warszawa, we introduced it to their winter grouping in Belek, Turkey. Streamings were available only for logged-in users to improve fan engagement and increase interest in the exclusive contents of the application and web platform.

We transmitted four sparring games where Legia opponents were Dynamo Kyiv, FC Botosani, FK Vozdovac and FC Kairat Almaty. We managed to significantly raise interest in them by providing high-quality live-streams and gating it as premium content.

#4 GATING PREMIUM CONTENT  ⇒  BUILDING A BETTER RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR FANS

UMPIRE gives you the option to gate premium content. This leads to a user base creation as your fans need to register to access the exclusive materials. It facilitates a better personalization of the content published to your supporters. That’s how you can build a closer relationship and, then, carefully analyze your audience. Check how they interact with your content, what they like the most, and what isn’t as crucial for them as one could expect. In this way, you will be able to prepare a better marketing and sales strategy in the future.

However, it would help if you considered that some supporters might mistakenly treat gating content as an additional obstacle for them. Take some time to explain to them why you’re taking such a step. Show them the advantages that are following this move. Create an understanding among your fans so that they join your vision with a full awareness.

#5 OPTIMIZED MOBILE EXPERIENCE

UMPIRE, as a CMS for sports clubs, supports both websites and mobile applications. That’s how you can make your fans spend more time on digesting content. UMPIRE is better for user retention as it’s structured appealingly and responsively. According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they didn’t like or had trouble accessing. Companies that make their websites responsive to mobile application standards tend to have their conversion rate and user retention greater by 65 and 24 per cent, respectively.

Imagine you’re a football fan watching the game on TV. You’ve noticed that the left defender isn’t helping as much in the offence as he should. An incentive has appeared – you would like to check his statistics from this season to prove your thesis as commentators don’t mention anything about it. You go to the mobile application because you expect the top-quality information presented in an aesthetic way there. What you see meets your demands. What happens next? You keep visiting the mobile app of your club regularly.

Now the situation has changed. You are in a car with your son on the way to the football stadium. You’re going to watch your favourite team. Soon you will be meeting more of your colleagues from work as they’re also supporters of the same club. When you get to the parking lot, there’ll be many discussions about the upcoming match. You ask your son to check the mobile application and share with you what’s essential concerning this game.

He opens the mobile app of your favorite club, goes to Match Center and quotes to you all the Twitter, FB, and Instagram posts published by opinion leaders. He checks recent statistics and discusses his predictions with you. Then, you are able to share your knowledge with your colleagues. You become the opinion leader yourself on that day. What happens next? You keep checking the mobile application regularly.

CONCLUSION:

UMPIRE seems to be a perfect solution for anyone who wants to take the marketing of a sports club to a higher level. It’s a CMS that allows you to create an appealing and responsive website which will be well-suited for both websites and mobile applications. If you’re interested in applying it to your business model, contact us.

***

Are you looking for more information about digital transformation in the sports industry? Visit our website to learn more about dedicated products and innovations designed for sports. To find out more about how TISA can help your organisation thrive in the digital world, contact us directly – we will be happy to talk about your case. And if you’d like to join our team and help us create the best digital solutions for the world of sports, check out our current career opportunities.