Objective: As a new sponsor of the Premier League team, Manchester United, we needed to insert ourselves into the football community in an authentic way. As a new sponsor of a storied English football club, and the sizable sponsorship price tag, we thought many fans may be concerned that we were only about the logo on the jersey. We knew that we had a responsibility to connect to the fans, bring them closer to the club, and give them a platform to share their voice.
In our first phase as an official sponsor of the club, we wanted to utilize the partnership of Manchester United to;
1. Grow our audience/fan base
2. Gain positive engagements and authenticity within the football community on our social channels
3. Connect with fans
Strategy: Enter, the #AskManUtd video series. From a content perspective, we wanted to offer exclusive access to the club that fans couldn't get anywhere else. We also need a way to aggregate conversation surrounding us and the club.
Outcome: Leveraging our owned channels we successfully launched the series and have followed up with two more series "episodes." We've also incorporated Manchester United's social media channels to bring incremental awareness of the series and hash tag. Following our second episode, two big names at the club shared our content on their official social media channels, which put a "stamp of approval" on the content and us as an authentic sponsor.
One major insight that we learned from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is that social conversation is stronger than ever. And an extremely useful tactic to start and join conversations is hash tags. Especially on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which are three of our strongest platforms.
Objective: As a new sponsor of the Premier League team, Manchester United, we needed to insert ourselves into the football community in an authentic way. As a new sponsor of a storied English football club, and the sizable sponsorship price tag, we thought many fans may be concerned that we were only about the logo on the jersey. We knew that we had a responsibility to connect to the fans, bring them closer to the club, and give them a platform to share their voice.
In our first phase as official sponsors, we wanted to utilize the partnership of Manchester United to;
1. Grow our audience/fan base
2. Gain positive engagements and authenticity within the football community on our social channels
3. Connect with our fans
Key features to support this hash tag were abundant. When we looked at how Chevrolet FC could activate the sponsorship with Manchester United, we wanted to go above and beyond in what we could provide to our fans and audience. We wanted Chevrolet FC to be seen as a go-to source for exclusive club content that they couldn't receive anywhere else. Through our partnership with the club, we were able to gain access to the players…something we knew that our fans and followers were hungry for. We also knew there was some scepticism from the fans of us as a sponsor. The deal was the largest in the Premier League and fans may have been weary of how that sponsorship would play out. We challenged ourselves from day 1 to be "for the fans and by the fans." The #AskManUtd series is a great example of how we began and are continuing to engage with and listen to the fans of the club.
To kick off the series, we wanted to develop an idea that would provide some personal insights to the players, while showing overall team camaraderie. And for this first episode we developed an idea around a theme similar to the Newlywed Game. We paired players with one-another and asked one pre-answered questions, while the other had to guess the answer. Darren Fletcher with Ashley Young, James Wilson with Jesse Lingard, Anderson with Ben Amos and David De Gea with Ander Herrera. The results were hilarious. One of the videos highlighted on social media was picked up by The Mirror, with great commentary supporting the camaraderie between the players (link to article in "Links" section).
In our second series episode, we used social listening (utilizing the hash tag) in order to see what our fans wanted to know most about their favourite Manchester United players. We received many questions and comments from our fans through our owned social media channels and filmed player responses to those fan questions. In this episode we highlighted Wayne Rooney, Marcos Rojo, Marouane Fellaini, Angel Di Maria and Phil Jones. One highlight that resulted was our fans wanting to know the size of Marouane's signature afro hairstyle, which was measured by Phil Jones. This later lead to a user-submitted photo contest where we asked fans to submit photos of themselves with a similar hairstyle. We also noticed that two of the players, Rooney and Fellaini shared our content, helping to drive 2.9 million incremental impressions.
Finally, in our third episode, we wanted to get even more engaging content that we knew would perform well on social media, while providing some comic relief. We noticed that user questions were also coming in from parents, with their children wanting to know from their heroes. To tease the filming and get more submissions, we posted an initial video, which received 1.9M+ views. We filmed live from Old Trafford with a group of local children, as well as highlighted some video submitted questions. We also utilized a child super-fan of the club as an on-site influencer capturing photos during the live filming. To show more exclusive access, our first message around this content was a behind-the-scenes photo album on Facebook. This album received 130,367 engagements on Facebook. Our first teaser video of this content was posted on 2/26 and received 530K+ video views in the first couple hours of posting.
Some other highlights include;
- 36% Instagram channel growth since re-instalment of #AskManUtd series
- Earned mentions of hash tag; over 20K organic uses on Twitter ranging in origin from Thailand & Indonesia to the UK and South Africa
- Reach of 123M+ in 2 months
