By Jim Hanauer; SVP Data Strategy & Analytics
Overview
Having the right tools to reach and engage your audience is more important than ever. From appealing to the modern consumer demanding personalized interactions to the expectation that every dollar spent on marketing is effective and measurable for ROI, marketers are reliant on powerful data to make decisions and connect with consumers.
Learfield’s Fanbase platform stands out as a powerful tool for brands, offering unparalleled access to college sports fans. College sports fans are affluent, loyal, passionate, and possess strong community connections. They are multigenerational, share their enthusiasm with family and friends, and engage both in-person and digitally, making them a key audience for brands to connect with. Fanbase is the largest database of college sports fans in the world encompassing 93.6M identified fans and the ability to reach an extended audience of over 150M. It enables brands to connect with passionate and qualified consumers, deliver targeted messages, drive engagement, and maximize revenue opportunities.
What is Fanbase?
Learfield developed Fanbase as a tool to aggregate first-party fan data from various sources, including ticketing and fundraising, digital activities, email marketing, merchandise, enter-to-win online fan contests, and fan surveys. All of these connections have resulted in 6 billion+ fan data points, which are enriched using information from various third-party data partners to create a comprehensive picture of college sports fans.
Fanbase’s advanced modeling and analysis provide deep insights into college sports fans, utilizing Learfield’s proprietary Fan Attribution Model, which covers over 700 data points that provide more context and richer insights about our fans. Unlike other syndicated research avenues, Learfield’s Fanbase data is built from fans who have purchased tickets to sporting events, made donations to their universities, bought licensed merchandise, and actively engaged with official athletics websites and other university digital platforms. This real engagement data provides the kind of rich and qualified targeting that brands seek when allocating marketing dollars, offering insights that lead to more effective strategies and a higher return on investment (ROI).
Why is Fanbase Useful to Brands?
Fanbase is a powerful tool for brands looking to connect with a highly targeted and engaged audience in college sports. Learfield’s Data and Insights team developed Fanbase to build comprehensive fan profiles based on first party fan data. Because Fanbase provides the most in-depth insights into fan behavior, preferences, and demographics, brands can leverage it to deliver more personalized and impactful campaigns.
Key features of Fanbase include audience segmentation based on detailed fan profiles, geo-targeting for location-specific marketing, behavioral insights for personalized messaging, advanced analytics for campaign optimization, and compliance with privacy regulations through innovative identity solutions. These capabilities allow brands to reach fans with precision and relevance, ensuring their marketing efforts are both effective and efficient.
Real Results with Fanbase
Fanbase is designed to help brands achieve results when investing in digital marketing. It delivers qualified, targeted audiences that are cost-effective, efficient, and aligned with your goals and KPIs. By supporting individual & multi-school opportunities, Fanbase enables a holistic digital strategy that reaches and engages diverse audiences across platforms.
These results highlight Fanbase’s consistent ability to drive engagement and efficiency in marketing campaigns.
The Fanbase Impact
Learfield’s Fanbase is revolutionizing college sports marketing by providing unmatched access to first-party fan data, gathered from a wide range of touchpoints, including ticketing, fundraising, merchandise, and digital engagement across college athletics. This extensive data allows Fanbase to deliver insights that go deeper than standard audience metrics, offering brands a more comprehensive understanding of who their fans are and how to reach them. With Fanbase, brands can leverage geo-specific insights, behavioral data, and detailed fan personas to craft highly targeted ad campaigns that resonate. This depth of knowledge ensures that brands can deliver the right message to the right fans at the ideal time, ultimately driving greater ROI and maximizing the impact of their marketing efforts.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this blog series as we explore how Fanbase helps college athletics programs engage fans and generate revenue.