Turning social media marketing over to the fans
How a mid-major is shaking up the marketing game
The MAC isn’t a conference really known for innovation. That’s usually kept to the bigger schools - the Ohio States, the Michigans, the Georgias, the Oregons. But mid-major MAC schools can innovate too, right?
The University of Toledo thinks so and just announced a first of its kind program to convert fans into social media ambassadors on Thursday, June 27. The program, in partnership with AI data collector LunchTable, seeks to convert social media engagement into new marketing pathways directly through fans. According to my sources, there are other schools, including at least one Power Four school, working on launching similar programs, but Toledo’s was the first to go fully live.
I sat down with Toledo’s Coordinator for Marketing, Sales and Fan Experience, Harison Bhanoo, now Assistant Director of Marketing at Ohio State, to talk about the program and how it’s designed to help the fans and the team grow together.
Toledo is a place that’s focused on growth. Whether that’s growing their fan base, growing attendance at each and every sport, or growing their resources for student athletes, the Rockets have been implementing a massive growth mindset since the appointment of athletic director Bryan Blair in 2022.
With that said, the Rockets possess one of the MAC’s biggest brands on social media, ranking second in the conference per SkullSparks’ most recent 2023 rankings. Since May 2020, Toledo’s follower base across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook has increased by 6.5 percent, a very sizeable increase for a brand their size.
Toledo also enjoys a rabid fan base that has only grown in size and fervor the past few years. College Football Network ranks the Rockets 95th in attendance and top in the conference - averaging 15,948 fans in the Glass Bowl each game, which is 60 percent of the stadium’s attendance. The Rockets’ men’s basketball team averaged 4,829 fans for their home games in the 2022-2023, again top in the conference. The women’s team ranked 28th in the nation in attendance for the 2021-22 year - the most recent records on the NCAA website - with 3,351 attendees.
How does this look for fans?
When I talked to Bhanoo, he explained a program that’s designed to turn each one of those fans into a marketing piece of the puzzle. Toledo, like many athletic departments, uses a collaborative approach to marketing. A vast majority of it is done by marketing, SIDs control a lot of the team-specific social media content. Ticketing does a bunch of email marketing to sell tickets. The marketing team creates a ton of content both in-game with half-court shots where fans can win $5,000 (don’t bring up the end of the 2022 season to people in Toledo’s athletic department when the promotion almost went on pause because fans got on a hot streak of sinking half-court shots and breaking the bank), to print and visual materials, to the website and much more. But what if you could activate the fans to assist on that?
Enter LunchTable, a relatively new company to the AI data collecting space that seeks to answer the same question. Bhanoo stated that, through pitch conversations with LunchTable, they feel like they can convert around 10 percent of their followers into social media ambassadors through the new program. With a following, according to SkullSparks, of 82,057 across the three major platforms, that leads to over 8,000 new marketing leads.
But what do these ambassadors do? The process really is simple. Fans can navigate to the Toledo website and opt-in to become an ambassador for free. They give access to LunchTable to post directly to their social media accounts, and boom. It’s all set and ready to go.
For what it’s worth, I did ask Bhanoo about privacy concerns about sharing account information. He put those to rest easily, saying that LunchTable’s software serves as a one-way pathway of sorts. Information is sent to the social media account from the ambassador program, but nothing returns.
“We know that they’ve connected their account, what their account name is, and the reach of that post,” said Bhanoo. No other user data travels to either LunchTable or Toledo’s marketing department.
From there, content is generated one of two ways. The first is user-generated, where fans essentially operate the same way they are now. They take pictures, make posts, and just share content through the platform. They also get access to some generalized marketing assets. Bhanoo made the example of a fan in the stands trying to take a picture of the team running out through the smoke clouds and pyrotechnics. They can share that picture, or they can log into LunchTable and grab the photo the official on-field photographer took that’s framed and edited to make everything sharp and clear.
The other content generation strategy is content created directly from the Toledo marketing department. I was told they have a bevy of evergreen content that can be shared at any time, but also create some content to push out in a concerted marketing effort. For example, they may have some users share content about locking in their season tickets shortly after tickets go on sale. This content, however, isn’t going to read like marketing material. Users have a chance to edit the phrasing to make it in their own voice.
“It's about supplying [fans with] the tools to share their experiences, but then also letting them have that confidence to put their own photos in their own message,” said Bhanoo.
How will this work in practice?
When I sat down with Bhanoo, Toledo had just finished up their soft launch of the LunchTable platform and had 40 users fully onboarded and into the system from Toledo’s Fan Council and test groups.
Toledo’s department has some solid goals, hoping to be at the 100 user mark shortly and they were on pace for that when I last spoke to Bhanoo. Even with that goal, you can assume that the added audience is going to be massive for Toledo. Based on projections by LunchTable and the Toledo athletic department, most users will sit around 200 followers. So if they hit that 100 user mark, Toledo’s looking at potentially 200,000 people that can see content promoting the Rockets. For a mid-major, that’s a massive potential for growth.
Bhanoo was excited for the segmentation that is provided. In marketing, especially in the college athletics world, segmentation is massive. The alumni base has vastly different social media habits and wants than the students do. So how do you cater your message to those audiences?
Traditionally, it’s based on the content and the location. Younger-skewing platforms like Instagram and TikTok get content targeted to the 18-25 demographic that makes up much of the student body. Other platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, skew older and allow the marketing team to push out more alumni-focused things like alumni dinners, luxury seating options, and NIL opportunities.
With LunchTable, though, they can engage those segments directly. The software allows the marketing department to segment their users as many ways as they want. Bhanoo specifically pointed to age and sports they’re interested in as ones Toledo is targeting. Then, they can send posts out to those segments. For example, Toledo’s baseball team plays a game each season against rival Bowling Green State University in the Triple A Toledo Mud Hens’ Fifth Third Field. The ticketing office can push out a post to anyone interested in baseball talking about already having purchased or that they’re going to purchase tickets. That would, presumably, engage each user’s friends to purchase their own tickets.
In that interaction lies the real value of LunchTable’s conversion from followers to ambassadors - word-of-mouth advertising. It’s the most powerful form of advertising, and this new marketing system is going to create word-of-mouth advertising on social media like never before.
“I think it's important to realize that just sending out information to as many people as possible is not going to get you the interactions that you want. It's going to turn some people off,” said Bhanoo. “If you'd see a graphic online for tickets starting at $99, you're probably just going to scroll right past it. But if you see your friend saying ‘I had the best time at Toledo game,’ you might be a little more likely to read it.”
Is this going to catch on?
I think a ton of athletic departments should look into things like this. As AI and technology increases, it gives athletic staffers the ability to cut down on their workload and focus on the big deliverables.
For example, when I was working as an SID, NIL databases like OpenDorse and INFLCR were gaining in popularity. These allowed us to upload an entire album of photos taken by a photographer at a game, which oftentimes exceeded 1,000 photos, and have AI tag which players were which. Their system would run through number and facial recognition to determine who was in the shot and then would tag the players so they could download and share any photos that they were in.
It made our workload considerably easier. We still had to filter through the albums and decide what we needed to use, but it became so much easier to archive everything. The autotags would let us find photos of players at the drop of a hat and we could focus on how those photos were being used instead of monotonously scrolling through and tagging 1,200 shots.
I can see this doing the same thing for the marketing departments across the nation. I’m particularly interested in the segmenting ability and the ease of controlling and pushing the narrative about events surrounding the athletic department. Coupling this with traditional marketing efforts would be a great way to activate a whole new section of people near the school that aren’t too connected with the school’s athletics programs.
For now, LunchTable is just entering the field for college programs. They do have some professional teams under their belt, and seem to be focusing on midwestern teams right now. There are some other data aggregators like LunchTable that can do similar things out there as well, and I expect to see more athletic departments rolling out programs like this in the coming year or so.
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