Driving revenues in difficult times
The 2020s have been tough for sports teams all over the world.
The prolonged shutdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic were followed by economic shocks and industry challenges that limited ambitions and strained operational comfort.
Clubs have become more conscious than ever of their own value – not just financially, but to the communities they serve and the people they employ.
The unluckiest face a threat to their very existence. But even where that is not the case, plenty of teams want to take more control of their commercial destiny and unlock their full potential in a different competitive environment.
A scrambled rights picture
At every level, the business models that have driven a global explosion in sport’s wealth have been challenged as never before. The risks of that have not been evenly spread.
The move from linear and pay-TV to streaming has affected the whole business of entertainment and in sport, it has led to a real crunch in the media rights market. Growth is no longer assured – at least outside a handful of top leagues, whose appeal to broadcasters leaves even less money to play with elsewhere.
The sponsorship rights market has also become much tighter. Marketing spend has an ever narrower focus and data measurement is non-negotiable: brands expect to see what they are getting for their money.
It can make for an unsettling picture but the opportunities are still there. To find them, teams must engage better with their own fanbases to understand the true value of their activities.
Meeting the cost of living – and doing business
Broader economic conditions have not made life any easier for sports teams, either.
In the past couple of years, rampant inflation and a succession of supply chain issues have stretched plans and budgets to their limits. Clubs have found it harder to run events in a financially sustainable way, with everything from food and beverage concessions to floodlights becoming more expensive to run. Efficient spending and tangible returns are critical.
Supporters face their own similar choices. With so many households still counting the cost of rising bills, every spending decision is weighed more carefully: even those with a strong emotional component, like buying a ticket to watch your favourite team. And where fans do prioritise that trip to the stadium – or that subscription or replica shirt purchase – the strength of their commitment is worth rewarding.
Finding a path forward
In other words, this is a good time for any team to invest in its relationship with its fanbase – to learn more about what is important or exciting to them, what they want from a match-day or how their club brings them together with other people.
Tiparra aims to help those conversations happen. Our immersive and personalised platform bridges the gap between fans and their teams through an intuitive, white-label mobile app that centralises content distribution and a whole range of vital functions like ticketing and digital membership.
With all that communication and consumption coursing through a single owned channel, Tiparra also provides the ability to capture and analyse both zero and first-party data, or feed it to your existing CRM. The detailed insights this delivers about fan preferences and behaviour will not only inform your team’s commercial strategy, it will also reinforce the offer you can make to partners.
And Tiparra makes financial sense, too, with flexible software-as-a-service pricing. Taken together, these features can help your team maximise the value of supporters’ engagement – to their benefit as well as yours.
Even in an uncertain era like this one, the power of fandom always holds new possibilities.
