Thanks to the explosion of social media, communicating with a specific buyer persona has become a more measurable task, and is now a near-necessity for a successful social media plan. One company that I believe very effectively uses social media to communicate with a specific buyer persona is ESPN. First and foremost, the ESPN buyer persona has a strong interest in sports. For certain divisions of the media giant, it can be narrowed down to certain specific sports or styles. For example, aside from the flagship ESPN station, there is ESPNU, which focuses solely on college sports. In addition to being sports fans, the ESPN buyer persona is most likely a college educated male, aged 18-34 (ESPN, 2015). One of the things that makes ESPN successful at targeting this persona is the interaction it has with them. One of ESPN's most popular shows, SportsNation, has daily and weekly online polls that air on the show and are promoted on social media. They also encourage viewers to tweet their thoughts to the show's Twitter account.
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| SportsNation Poll |
ESPN, and its shows like SportsNation, use Twitter and Facebook heavily, as well as other outlets like YouTube. SportsNation targets the younger portion of the buyer persona, and thus, uses more "hip" language and many pop-culture references, as seen below, featuring hip-hop artist Drake:
This is in slight contrast to the main ESPN social media accounts, which takes a more professional approach and uses more mature language.
I am an avid fan of Major League Baseball's Baltimore Orioles, and I would love to have the opportunity to be in charge of the organization's social media channels. Since the fan bases of sports teams are heavily geographic in nature, it would be wise to start by communicating with the Baltimore/Washington D.C. viewing area, and like ESPN, targeting predominantly males, 18-34 years old, that enjoy baseball and attending live sporting events. Hopefully, this would help drive ticket sales and/or TV viewership. It would be ideal to have a presence on every social media outlet available, while making sure to pay close attention to the most popular, like Facebook and Twitter. Since we're talking about baseball - America's pastime - and not anything too serious like the evening news or medical research, the language would be somewhat relaxed, while remaining professional, and being sure to portray knowledge of the game and its terminology.
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| ALCS Game 2 - Oriole Park at Camden Yards - Baltimore, Maryland. October, 2014. |
I know one thing for sure: I fit perfectly into the Baltimore Orioles social media buyer persona.
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References
ESPN.com: MEDIAKIT - Demographics. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://espn.go.com/mediakit/research/demographics.html
Kerpen, D. (2011). Likeable social media: How to delight your customers, create an irresistible brand, and be
generally amazing on facebook (& other social networks). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Scott, D. M. (2013). The new rules of marketing & PR: How to
use social media, online
video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, & viral marketing to
reach buyers directly (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Great post. I'm a big fan of ESPN. It seems based on your post that ESPN has a good understanding of their buyer persona. How would ESPN expand their reach with the information they have on their buyer persona? The network seems to really struggle when trying to capture a broader audience. Loren
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reply, Loren. I think ESPN could start by extending to a female buyer persona. Sure, they cover women's sports like the WNBA and college softball, but it would be nice to see them market some of the more mainstream sports to women as well. I know a lot of females that are avid football and baseball fans, and I suppose ESPN has been trying to expand to that buyer persona, albeit slowly. In recent years, you see more females announcing games from the booth and not just the sidelines, as well as several of ESPN's shows having female hosts or co-hosts (SportsNation, Sports Center, etc.). It would be nice to see these roles to continue to expand, along with ESPN's buyer persona, in the coming years.
DeleteHi Jeff,
ReplyDeleteESPN, and more specifically SportsNation, is a great example of an organization that really understands its buyer personas. SportsNation's social media accounts, targeted at a younger demographic than ESPN as a whole, contains more sports memes than game scores, and that is what sets it apart. Young, male sports fans are as a whole very active on social media and love sharing memes like these on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. SportsNation capitalizes on this by making lighthearted, shareable images targeted directly at its young buyer persona.
The online polling that you mentioned is also an important contribution to SportsNation's target reach. Not only does the interactivity engage an otherwise short-attention-spanned demographic, but it also provides valuable insights into the buyer persona's thoughts and needs. As Scott (2013) says, "the best way to learn about buyers and develop buyer persona profiles is to interview people" (p. 166). Ongoing polling and other engaging tactics like this is a great way to keep buyer persona data fresh and get a look inside the target audience's head.
Looking at Loren's previous comment, I'm not sure that ESPN really needs to capture a broader audience. It has already captivated a very specific audience and has successfully engaged them to become the pinnacle of sports entertainment. I think that if ESPN tried to broaden their target audience too much they would risk straying from their core buyer personas. What do you think?
Source:
Scott, D. M. (2013). The new rules of marketing & PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, & viral marketing to reach buyers directly (4th ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
Hi Brenna,
DeleteThanks for your reply - you extend some great points about the memes and polling! As for Loren's question, you can see that I thought they could expand the buyer persona to females a little more. Overall though, I agree with you - I think ESPN has been very successful reaching the buyer persona it has intended to, and steering away from that could alienate some of its current audience.
Jeff,
ReplyDeleteI’m a sports fan (married to a coach) and therefore loved that you used ESPN and MLB as your examples this week. Nice work in identifying the buyer persona for each organization and I agree that the way ESPN has segmented to have a better reach at more specific audiences is great.
You pointed out something in your post that wasn’t necessarily the goal this week, but it added great content to the conversation. Traditional media – TV and radio specifically - are pushing their audiences to social media where they can have a more engaging relationship with the consumer. We obviously saw this with Super Bowl ads using hashtags rather than phone numbers and websites, and we see it all the time with live TV where you’re asked to go online and vote for something. It creates the opportunity to engage with the viewer in a two-way conversation rather than relying solely on one-way communication to build the relationship. Not only that, but by creating the “space” in which your customers (fans in your case) come to be engaged with you, there’s opportunity for customers to interact with other customers and build a community.
Nice job. You hit it out of the park this week! :)
Mandy
Hi Mandy,
DeleteThanks, I'm glad you think I connected for a "home run" this week. Good point about the Super Bowl ads. Using hashtags and directing viewers to social media is definitely a growing trend recently. By encouraging this two-way communication with a specific buyer persona, companies don't have to rely on the "old rules" like interruption based advertising to reel in the desired customers (Scott, 2013, p. 18).
Source:
Scott, D. M. (2011). The new rules of marketing & PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, & viral marketing to reach buyers directly (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Hi Jeff,
ReplyDeleteGreat post. I continue to be amazed at how big ESPN has become and how they are serious force in the world of sports. No longer are they simply providing sports news and some live sporting events, they have become directly involved with the various professional leagues and have even taken over Monday Night Football after decades of being on network television. With so much media strength they have the ability to learn a lot about their audience and formulate a very specific buyer persona.
To further what Brenna was saying about expanding their audience, I definitely agree that although they may have the most appeal to young males who are fans of baseball, basketball, and football, they also have gained a pretty solid audience with the extreme sports crowd with their annual X Games competitions and also diversify their programming to showcase things such as bowling, English Premier League soccer, and poker. For the younger crowds they've started showing high school football games and of course also show a majority of the little league world series games. They really have a pretty amazing breadth of sports coverage if you look at the various ESPN channels such as ESPNU, ESPN2, ESPN Classic etc.
As for your Orioles, let me just say that Camden Yards is probably one of the coolest places to take in a baseball game. I was actually there in November as my company had a conference in Baltimore and we held a reception at the ballpark. We were able to do a tour under the stadium and walk around in the dugouts. It was a really great experience. One thing that might be sort of interesting when it comes to their social media presence would to create a Twitter persona for their mascot that fans could follow throughout the season and in the off-season. They may actually already do this, I'm not sure, I just know that mascots seems to appeal to everyone and it might be away to attract a larger audience.
Cheers!
Hi Russ,
ReplyDeleteThe acquisition of Monday Night Football was definitely a major step for ESPN in strengthening its relationship with its ideal buyer persona. Can you believe MNF has been on ESPN for 10 years already?! It seems like they made the transition just yesterday. Good point bringing up the other programming that ESPN has like the X Games, and bowling. ESPNU also shows a few college lacrosse games each week, of which I am also a big fan.
I'm a bit jealous that you took a tour of Camden Yards, I've probably been to about a dozen games there, and have yet to take the tour. Hopefully I'll get around to it soon. And that is a good idea about the mascot twitter account. There seem to be a lot of parody accounts associated with the mascot, but no official one. Whereas Mr. Met does have an official twitter account. At least the poor Mets are doing something right!
Hi Jeff,
ReplyDeleteGreat post this week! I really enjoyed reading your analysis of ESPN's online activity and buyer personas. I don't typically think of ESPN as a brand online, but as I read your blog, its hard not to think of the company as a brand. The abundance of specific targeted cannels and communication makes it clear that they have done a great job understanding and communicating with their target buyer personas.
I also enjoyed reading about your ways to measure social media through Klout and Google Analytics. I thought it was clever how you pulled in the analytics technique from out reading.
Great job this week!
Allie