Does your favorite sports team have a mobile app?
It probably does.
These days, having a mobile application is a necessity, much like establishing a presence on social media was only a few years ago. These apps likely let fans browse team news, view rosters, and maybe even listen to a podcast or watch a video.
But how many team apps truly blow fans away?
How many are visually stimulating?
How many have an app that fans can interact with in unique ways whether watching a game from home or at the stadium?
How many let fans browse rosters one minute and order food the next?
Check team news one minute and buy tickets the next?
The answer, right now, is not many, and Wilshire Axon Sports is not satisfied with that answer.
Wilshire Axon has been building mobile apps across several different industries for eight years now. During that time, they’ve driven $1.5 billion in client revenue from an estimated four million people that are using a Wilshire Axon mobile app right now. Recently, they focused their efforts on the sports industry, creating Wilshire Axon Sports and interviewing team executives and fans alike to identify pain points and opportunities in the sports industry.
The result of that work is SYNERGY, a platform – not an app – that is designed to create a deeper, lasting relationship between fans and teams, generate revenue for clients, and increase fan attendance. SYNERGY uses four unique components – vendor partnerships, a content management system, data aggregation and analytics tools, and advanced geo IQ capabilities – to deliver a positive and worthwhile experience for fans and sports teams alike.
Partnership Activation
To date, Wilshire Axon Sports has secured over 70 partners for its SYNERGY platform, ranging from Google Maps, to Appetize, to Social Glimz, and Ticketmaster. Partnering with a host of companies means teams don’t need to negotiate with multiple vendors for a single team app. Since Wilshire Axon Sports secures the partners, activating a partner is done with a click of a mouse. For a sports marketer, this means faster time to market, a custom user experience, and a wealth of fan information. For fans, this means their favorite team’s sports app can be a one stop destination for team news, merchandise, game day tickets, or a hot dog at halftime.
Content Management System
When Chief Executive Officer, Laurence Sotsky, states that SYNERGY is a platform, not an app, SYNERGY’s CMS capabilities are at the core of that claim. The CMS portion of SYNERGY’s app allows sport marketers to pull content from social platforms and the team’s website and drag it onto a visual timeline for publishing and scheduling. Content is optimized for every platform, meaning that whether fans are reading team articles on an iPhone, Galaxy Note, or Surface tablet, images and text are crisp, clear, and scaled correctly. The visually appealing layout and plethora of content means fans no longer have to check in with multiple sources online like Facebook, Twitter, or ESPN to learn the latest news about their favorite team. Instead, those fans are interacting with the team app for longer durations of time. In the case of one client, the average time per user per month increased three times over, according to Wilshire Axon Sports.
Analytics
While analytics will largely go unnoticed by fans, sports marketers will enjoy SYNERGY’s more than 75 analytics partners, ranging from Google Analytics, to Salesforce, to Hubspot. “Marketers get a 360 degree view of everything they’re doing,” says Wilshire Axon Sports. That includes data like how long a fan is interacting with the team app, how much money they are spending in the app, what sponsor offers fans are interacting with, and behavior within platform partners, like Ticketmaster.
“For example, a season ticket holder who consistently upgrades their tickets might be a good target for the ticketing sales team to market better tickets to,” Wilshire Axon Sports states. “There is so much potential that the SYNERGY platform enables.”
Advanced Geo IQ Capabilities
Perhaps no area of the SYNGERY platform offers more than the Geo IQ capabilities. Within the SYNERGY platform, sport marketers can customize content and offers based on a fan’s location. That can be local; fans inside a team’s venue could receive special offers to participate in a game day contest, for example. It could also be much broader. The New York Rangers could target specific content and offers to fans in Los Angeles before a road game vs. the Kings; the Houston Texans could target content and offers to fans that live in New York City ahead of the NFL draft; or the Buffalo Bills could target fans that live near Canton, Ohio ahead of the Hall of Fame induction of Andre Reed.
As sports teams continuously strive to increase revenue, capture fan data, and put fans in the stands, many will look to mobile applications as an important marketing tool. Just like the rush to social in the last few years, however, just being in a space isn’t good enough. Today’s mobile applications need to be visually appealing, provide dynamic content, and offer value to the fan regardless of whether they are watching the game in section 101 or at 101 Main St.
With its vendor partnerships, CMS platform, analytics suite and geo IQ capabilities, Wilshire Axon Sports is betting on SYNERGY to satisfy those needs.