innovation

Knicks Now

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Shifting Fan Marketing to a content model

Challenge

Grow, and more deeply and frequently engage, the New York Knicks fanbase

Background

I arrived at Madison Square Garden in 2010 before the summer of the NBA’s most heralded free agency period in history, where LeBron James and several of the greatest young players would select teams. I worked behind the scenes on the pitch to LeBron and the other free agents, and the Knicks ultimately landed their biggest star in years, Amar’e Stoudemire.

While developing and implementing a new comprehensive business review and planning process for MSG teams, I uncovered a structural deficiency in our overall marketing approach. Our communication with fans was sporadic, focused almost entirely around ticket sales and ineffective at growing our fan base. This wasn’t simply a Knicks problem. In fact, at that time the primary team-to-fan communication tool, the team’s website, was an NBA-designed template focused on communicating news and promoting fan transactions (ticket and merch sales).

Fixing this structural issue would require a complete reboot of our marketing approach, reallocation of marketing resources, and a tech overhaul.

Solution

My big idea was to shift our marketing focus from traditional communications to generating content and growing our digital audience. To make this transition, we focused on three specific areas.

Develop a new technology platform focused entirely on content and fan engagement (website + app).
Grow and engage our social media audience.
Hire a content team that lived with the team (practices, travel, etc.) that could provide an array of insider content to feed our social and website channels.

Working closely for months with an external development firm, we conceptualized, designed, and built KnicksNow.com, the first website of its kind in the NBA — entirely dedicated to team specific content and fan engagement. The following season we launched the Knicks Now mobile app.

To fuel these channels, we hired a dedicated staff of journalists and writers, tapped into a group of freelancers, and enlisted die-hard fans and bloggers to contribute content. This team produced a broad array of content daily including insider player content, gameday features, analysis, interactive fan contests, posts, articles, and blogs, short-form and long-form video.

Vote Knicks Interactive Promo

Carmelo Wax Statue Unveiling/Prank

Daily Player Content

Behind the Scenes Player Content

Results

Not surprisingly, Knicks fans responded strongly to the new approach. Our engagement shot through the roof.

During a season when NBA web traffic declined as a whole, Knicks Now enabled us to more than double ours. Within weeks of launching, our KnicksNow mobile app became the NBA’s most downloaded. In addition, we increased our social media following twenty fold.

The bottom line benefited greatly from this fan engagement. Already the number one revenue generating team, we sustained growth in both season and individual ticket pricing and sales. Furthermore, KnicksNow provided a slew of new sponsorship revenue opportunities.

However, the greatest impact was longer-term and more widespread. The NBA took notice of our results and soon shifted their team website model toward a content-centric approach.

What was an innovation in team marketing quickly became table stakes. Following the Knicks Now model, a central marketing function of all teams regardless of sport, professional or college, is generating content and sharing it with fans through team digital/social channels.