Pittsburgh Riverhounds Digital Strategy

By Wyatt VanDyke

Riverhounds play a night game in front of the Pittsburgh skyline.

Background:

The Pittsburgh Riverhounds have reached out to Pursue and Persuade to develop a digital campaign to increase ticket sales among those within 50 miles of the Pittsburgh area who are currently not purchasing tickets. The Riverhounds are a member of the USL, a soccer league one tier below MLS, America’s top soccer league. USL is effectively a minor league, which forces the Riverhounds to think outside of the box when it comes to how to drum up ticket sales, thus the help of Persue and Persuade.

How Do Professional Teams Sell Tickets?

According to the Sports Business Journal, the sports ticketing industry has changed greatly following the pandemic, similar to most other industries. There is a growing gap in ticket interest between high-interest events like playoff matchups, championships, and rivalry games, and lower-interest games like regular season matchups that have no specific rivalry. In order to remedy these issues, sports marketing departments have to get creative to drum up purchase interest in these lower-interest contests. Most notably, flash sales have seen a large uptick in usage per Techcrunch.com to rid of excess inventory of tickets.

What Are Flash Sales and How Can The Riverhounds Use Them?

Flash sales are timed deals usually emailed or texted to fans that details a promotion often tied into a stat/fact related to the team as a means to sell tickets quickly. A prime example of how the Riverhounds could use this is a deal celebrating the team’s league-leading 19 wins during the USL regular season last year. “$19 for 19” Not only celebrates a team accomplishment but also could be used to generate quick ticket sales and generate an atmosphere that may be conducive to getting fans to return to the stadium in the future if they enjoy their first trip.

Targeting the Student Demographic:

StudentBeans.com, a website that develops discounts and promotions targeted towards college students makes a great point when it comes to the benefits of targeting college students in marketing campaigns. Students are at the point where they are developing relationships with brands and starting to become informed consumers, so developing a program that targets students specifically would be very beneficial for the Riverhounds. The student rush discounts work extremely well for the Penguins, so if the Riverhounds implemented something similar it would likely be a smashing success, especially with tickets for the Steelers and Pirates still sometimes significantly too expensive for the college budget.

Theme Nights:

With the USL having a relatively long season of about 30-ish games, targeting groups and demographics is a great idea to generate group tickets sales during the dog days of the season. Looking at the Pirates promotional materials is a great example of why theme nights are successful, whether it be faith night, Star Wars night, university days, bark at the park, nearly every single game has some sort of event that targets a specific group in Pittsburgh and offers a reason to celebrate that given group. With as multicultural a city like Pittsburgh is, there are so many cultures and groups to celebrate while also simultaneously drumming up ticket sales. Per MorningConsultPro.com, theme night ticket sales can generate as much as 15-20% of ticket sales for a team on any given night.

SMS Messaging:

Developing and fleshing out a personal messaging marketing campaign as opposed to an email one is another idea for success, as texts are more likely to be read than emails when they are promotional material, and especially less likely to be filtered out by any sort of junk mail section. Per Textline.com text-related deals are likely to generate quick responses and action from consumers, and if there are human operators running those message lines, something that would be very possible at the scale of the Riverhounds, questions can be addressed quickly and leave fans with a good lasting impression of the Riverhounds brand.

Conclusion:

If fans have not yet bought tickets but are within the boundaries of the Riverhounds market, there’s a reason for it. These fans need to be sought out and made interested by means of catering to them, whether that be through themed events or lower ticket prices. If you can get fans attention by means of text messaging ads, and then have something that catches their eye right off bat, that might be enough to get them in the door the first time, which will likely lead to successive visits in the future.