Integrated marketing and communication processes for FC Luzern

At a medium-sized soccer club like FC Luzern, efficiency issues are omnipresent in day-to-day business. Enabling tools and cross-functional systems are the key to integrated marketing and communication processes. Today, FCL can use the available human resources to achieve a higher frequency, reach and activation power of its own content in a targeted manner and thus bring the necessary news and interaction power to the pitch.

Challenge

As an ambitious Superliga club, FC Luzern is one of the league’s flagship clubs and can count on the fan base of an entire region. At the same time, however, as a Swiss sports club you are also fighting for long-term relevance and find yourself in a relatively tight resource corset. This is the ambivalence in which many small to medium-sized sports clubs find themselves – not only in Switzerland, but also in top European leagues with an existing club divide.

It is therefore not surprising that efficiency and flexibility issues play a central role at FC Luzern – especially in operationally high-frequency areas such as marketing or fan communications. For an association with limited financial and human resources, it is essential that the processes in such central areas are solved in an integrated manner. But what does that mean exactly? And what is the specific challenge in the operational business? To do justice to this question, there is no getting around a closer look at the Fan Journey.

1. For FC Luzern, the upstream phase is about generating a preference for the club, its various teams, match days and sports-related offerings. Content is the central key to this. But how do you manage to satisfy the fans’ huge hunger for information with a content team of 1-2 people?




2. Fan communication is successful when it is reciprocal. How can Leuchtenstadt not only communicate, inform and entertain with its own content, but also generate targeted interactions and micro-conversions (subscriptions, shares, sign-ups, donations, etc.) at the various touchpoints?




3. FCL was repeatedly confronted with a limited scope of action for various marketing and communication topics and had to resort to external partners even for smaller things such as setting up new website forms. So how can an association empower itself to react more quickly and flexibly to situations in the fast-paced sports environment?




4. Everybody wants analytics data, but concrete actions are often not taken because the figures are too general. Sports clubs increasingly want to understand the behavior of their fans, segment individual users based on specific activities, and trigger targeted follow-up communications. But how can Lucerne capture such fan interaction data centrally and across different touchpoints?




5. Fans, sponsors, members and employees interact with FC Luzern at various touchpoints along the journey. How do you manage centralized permission handling and consent management across all tools (subscriptions, forms, votes, etc.) and contact points, especially in view of the tightening of data protection?

Solution

The five challenges addressed can all be addressed and solved within an integrated marketing and communications process. But what does that mean exactly and when does the word “integrated” deserve its name? In a sports organization, one can speak of an integrated process if all steps, from the cross-channel creation and playout of news to the targeted and, if necessary, automated follow-up communication after an interaction has taken place, can be linked together in an orderly and coordinated procedure.

Software can form the connecting layer that links the various sub-processes. The sum of the individual processes makes up the overall complexity. Between the above-mentioned news orchestration and follow-up communication, there are countless other individual processes that trigger marketing and communication measures and are part of the overall process of a sports club:

Let’s look at the points described above using three specific examples.

Example 1: Cup Winner Jersey

May 24, 2021 – a day that FCL fans have longed for for so long. FC Luzern’s cup win ended a 29-year drought without a title. This also explains why a large number of fans wanted to secure a souvenir of this special day. FCL recognized this and tried to satisfy this need with a jersey made especially for the final. Directly after the final whistle, the involvement level of a group of supporters is demonstrably at its highest. The post-reporting a few minutes after the victory is therefore the most subliminal and effective way to generate targeted (micro-)conversions. Thanks to flexible and self-configurable interaction tools, FCL was able to offer its supporters a way to interact directly on the victory news – and thus react to the situation that had arrived within a few minutes.

Through the share tool, fans were able to share the success message directly with their personal environment. And with the payment tool, the city of lights enabled its fans to get their hands on one of the coveted Cup Final jerseys with just a few clicks. FCL only had to set up a form with certain mandatory fields, provide a suitable image and define the price. The Blue and Whites did not have to worry about the payment process thanks to the directly connected Stripe service. With the cup winner jersey alone, the Lucerne team was able to generate a considerable turnover during a few hours without depending on third parties.

All interaction data, the obtained permissions and the contact data of the buyers are automatically played into the contact management. This allows the FCL to centrally manage and control the conversions that have taken place. The individual fan contact is also directly enriched with the interaction data obtained. With the Marketing Automation Suite, FC Luzern also has a tool to trigger targeted follow-up communication with the fan contacts concerned with manageable effort.

Example 2: Fan voting

Fans love to participate in their heart’s club and express their opinion on certain club issues. Voting, fan decisions and feedback surveys are perfect ways of gathering fan opinions. FC Luzern practices this gamification approach primarily in fan voting such as “Player of the Month”, “Goal of the Month”, “LUKB Best Player of the Season” or result tips for selected matches. Within a few steps, the FCL can design the “voting theme” (images, colors, buttons, etc.), design the welcome and closing interaction, define appropriate questions and answer options, and turn lead generation (mail address) on or off.

These votes can be packed directly onto a news item by FCL as an interaction tool or, thanks to the flexible configuration options, can be disseminated as part of a presentation together with a partner or sponsor (Luzerner Kantonalbank (LUKB), zentralplus, Radio Pilatus). There is also the possibility to drag publications with such a voting directly into the liveticker to enable fan voting and predictions even during the game. In the Voting Cockpit, all responses can be viewed and evaluated quickly and easily via a dashboard.

Certain votes reached over 1,200 feedbacks, which ultimately not only enabled broad-based fan participation in certain issues, but also generated valuable fan data for FC Luzern. With every single vote, FCL can activate its blue and white supporters on the one hand and on the other hand win new fan contacts including the corresponding permission. This subliminal lead generation then forms the basis for future fan contact enrichment.