How we’re using suggested audiences to help you target fans quickly

We know fans respond well to personalized, targeted content—that’s why powerful audience segmentation has always been one of FanThreeSixty’s core features. But sports organizations don’t need a tool that asks them to do more work. What if teams could get insights from their data without building complicated queries?

As FanThreeSixty has evolved, we've noticed our Audiences product wasn’t reaching its full potential. You could segment on a wide variety of attributes, but this took time and considerable knowledge of the data. Some users were spending a lot of time making the same audiences again and again, while others were barely segmenting at all because it was too much work.

We were also missing an opportunity to share insights about a team’s fans that might inform their marketing and sales strategy. In short, we had a mismatch between what our platform provided and what our users needed. 

Some users were making the same audiences again and again, while others were barely segmenting at all... it was too much work

As a product and design team, we asked ourselves, how can we help sports organizations get the most value out of our Audiences product? And how could we make it easier for them to get those benefits?

While researching this problem, we made two key observations:

1. Data science should be more integrated into the platform. Our team has studied years of fan data from all different sports organizations—soccer leagues, colleges, racetracks and more. They’ve been able to turn their observations into insights and predictions that wouldn’t be obvious in a basic segmentation tool.
   
   
2. All this knowledge doesn’t help anybody if it’s not easy to access and act on. Sports marketing and sales teams are juggling a host of responsibilities and don’t have time for multi-step workflows or complicated queries.

Audiences 2.0: Data science when you need it

We needed a better way to help our clients access insights about their fans and take action on those insights right away. So we decided to focus on creating audiences for our users, rather than making the users do the work themselves. 

We needed a better way to help our clients access insights about their fans and take action right away

Now, when you log in to FanThreeSixty, instead of a blank canvas you have to explore on your own, you see a catalogue of audiences that represent different ways of looking at and engaging with your fanbase. Some of these standard audiences are ones our users were creating themselves over and over—for example, fans by their distance to the venue. Others are collections of insights and attributes created by our data science team, like mobile engagement scores and last-minute buyers.

Taking action immediately

At the same time, we introduced one-click shortcuts. If you see an audience you want to email or send a mobile communication to, you can do that right away, so you can spend more time crafting impactful messages and less time managing tools.

If you see an audience you want to email or send a mobile communication to, you can do that right away

We hope these innovations will make it easier for sports organizations to learn new insights about their fans and, crucially, to use those insights to engage them more effectively.