Pittsburgh Riverhounds Digital Strategy
By: Luke Lawton
Background of the Hounds
The view from Highmark stadium to the city of Pittsbugh.
The Riverhounds organization was founded in 1998. This is the newest team in Pittsburgh and is the smallest professional team located in the city. Highmark Stadium is beautiful and looks out over the city and the river in the background. It is an intimate experience with a stadium capacity of 5,000 people. The Riverhounds have had problems filling up those seats with people for every game.
Pittsburgh has such a rich history of sports and is world-renowned for always being at the top of their game. However, in the case of the Riverhounds, it is hard for them to get any of the spotlight when the city already has three of the four major sports teams in North America, (i.e. Steelers, Penguins, and Pirates).
These other teams overshadow them because they have more of a foothold, especially with a winning and championship culture. Pittsburgh is accustomed to these other teams and the Riverhounds to many seem like an afterthought. However, this season the Riverhounds have flipped the script and have the best win percentage out of all the teams in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh loves their sports teams especially when they are winning. Other than winning the Riverhounds need to use social media to get people into the stands to watch the team.
Digital Strategy
The first step for figuring out a digital strategy is figuring out what the campaign goal is and what the brand is trying to achieve. For the Riverhounds it would to be to get as many people as they can in the stands. Raising their ticket sales is the main goal for them. This would help them grow a stronger more devoted fan base. This will help the overall profit of the Riverhounds to skyrocket.
The next goal for building a strong digital strategy is knowing who your target audience is and how you can reach as many people in that audience as possible. For the Riverhounds this target audience would be Pittsburgh sports fans, and more specifically a younger demographic aged 12-18. If the Riverhounds can get young fans involved you will have lifelong fans, and these kids that get involved they need their parents to take them to the games. This gets two generations involved and when parents are at the game alcohol will be sold and this is a team’s money maker.
The Riverhounds logo.
The Riverhounds need to take advantage of new resources to get an edge on other teams and give them new ideas of thinking. They need to find new ways to reach their target audience. “We need new techniques, and AI is helping deliver more effective ads at scale in this new landscape,” according to ThinkwithGoogle Article about AI.
Furthermore, being creative is what keeps people coming back for new events. “Using generative AI, marketers are developing creative in ways never before possible, at speeds unimaginable just a few years ago,” said in an article on ThinkwithGoogle by Jason Spero .
Another way to boost sales in tickets is to market them as they are hard to get. Makes people feel worried they are missing out. “As long as you’re truthful about your claims (like only having 10 VIP tickets left) and use it sparingly, scarcity marketing can boost sales by as much as 226%,” according to an article by Cvent.
The Penguins are great at text message marketing. This is an effective way to reach as many people as possible to be aware that there is a game, and the discount tickets certainly help. Using this model for the Riverhounds would increase ticket sales exponentially. According to Sproutsocial article, 95% of text messages get opened within the first few minutes of being sent. Showing this is an effective way to get your product out to people. It is also inexpensive to do so. “It costs between $0.01 to $0.05 per SMS text message,” said EZ Texting.
Competition is the next thing that needs to be looked at when making a digital strategy. The Riverhounds need to look at the other teams in the Pittsburgh market online and look at the team’s website and how easy it is to get them.
For example, the Penguins to boost ticket sales have a student rush program. Having affordable tickets for college students. Also, the location of the campuses around helps the attendees. The Riverhounds did try to do this, but the location of the stadium makes it hard for college students without cars to get there. They did not promote this very well either having a few fliers at the Duquesne campus or not posting much about it on their Instagram.
The overall strategy for the Riverhounds is to be persistent with student rush tickets. Use social media that targets younger audiences like TikTok and Instagram. Use the socials to show off the stadium and promote special events for games. Also, make sure that when the team wins to push it out there on Twitter and TikTok so that people know that they are a good team and worth going to see.
Take advantage of AI to come up with new slogans and Ideas to improve the website. Make it more fun and make sure the kids know that soccer at it roots are fun.