Leeds Rhinos: Bringing fans back to the stadium after a 5 years absence
THE RESULTS
£6.36 | ticket CPA |
3.7 | ROAS average |
£2.30 | CPM |
How do we bring fans back to the stadium?
Leeds Rhinos are one of the biggest rugby league clubs in the world, one of only 4 to win the Super League title and have consistently shown their ability to stay at the top of the game for decades.
As a figurehead of the sport, Leeds Rhinos are known for leading from the front in developing strategies to expand the sport and engage fans.
After several years of disruption to the sport and the club itself, Leeds Rhinos needed to re-engage their fanbase and bring them back to the stadium.
In the summer of 2017, the club began a redevelopment project of the stadium, improving its facilities and in particular rebuilding the famous South Stand. This naturally caused disruption to fans, reducing the number of tickets that could be sold and impacting the club's finances.
This was followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, where the season was put on hold before being played behind closed doors. This meant that come 2022 the primary focus was to get fans back into the stadium. We were challenged to do this through Paid Social, in particular Facebook and Instagram.
Using creative to target, engage and sell
The campaign evolved throughout the season as we took learnings from each game. We started with a simple plan:
- Target the full funnel - make sure we engage all fans of the club
- Be where our fans are - location-targeted based on past ticket sales
- Leverage creative messaging - focus on the experience rather than just the game using video and static images
Throughout the course of the season, we saw a huge amount of learning. Once the initial brand focussed campaigns had attracted traffic these became less effective as the season matured. This budget was then re-invested into game-specific campaigns to drive sales.
Creative messaging had a much higher conversion rate when using statics over video. The videos worked great for brand activity but failed to drive ticket sales in the same way. Again as the season went we refined the messaging through A/B testing to find that short-form copy and static had the best ROI.
Finally building the audience by leveraging 1st party data was crucial. This was introduced mid-way through the season based on previous ticket sales. As soon as it was introduced we saw performance ramp up.
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