Digital-transformation on the example of the humble English football club Nottingham Forest
Nottingham Forest is a professional English football club from Nottingham. It is one of the ten most successful clubs in the history of English football.
When the football player Brian Clough was part of the team it was the most successful period in the history of the club. It was the time when Nottingham Forest won two European Champion Clubs' Cup, UEFA Super Cup, four Football League Cups, England SuperCup, and for the first time in its history became the champion of England.
However, at the moment Nottingham Forest is a humble English club playing in Championship (2nd English league). Nevertheless, having taken the course on the digital-transformation, the club managed to achieve unique results.
The official site of Nottingham Forest FC is one of the most popular sites in Great Britain. About 2 million users follow the official team pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and signed up to the official site.
What opportunities Nottingham Forest offers to sponsors?
Due to such a big popularity, Nottingham Forest digital platform is attractive to sponsors who want to develop local and national business.
The club uses three main types of advertising:
• advertising at the stadium;
• digital-marketing;
• advertising in the matches programs.
For each partner the club offers individual tools and opportunities of the platform for promotion that will help a sponsor to achieve the goal. When designing an ad package, the needs and marketing goals of each company are taken into account.
Digital marketing
The development of the latest football technologies caused a transformation of a football match from usual social event of the day off to constantly interacting with their fans. Fans are keen to know all news about football clubs, want to be aware of upcoming matches, discuss games at the same time through different channels, discuss, participate in polls and drawings.Therefore social networks and websites are so popular.
In this way, partnership with soccer clubs gives sponsors a great opportunity to present their brand to a large audience and attract new customers.
The official website of the Nottingham Forest Football Club (www.nottinghamforest.co.uk) is one of the few dominant on the FLI platform, the website regularly receives more than 1.5 million page views and 300,000 unique users per month.
The website of the team offers sponsors such an advertising opportunities:
• placement of the company logo on the site for the official partners of the club;
• advertising in stories;
• banner advertising;
• sending messages through the official site application;
• advertising tickets, news, events, etc.
As statistics show, Nottingham Forest owns one of the largest social audience in different networks compared to other football clubs:
• Twitter - 218k followers
• Facebook - 307k followers
• Instagram - 47k followers
• Youtube - 22k followers
More than 10,000 fans of the club downloaded the official club application on their phone.
The Internet and social networks have become an integral part of the life of every modern person. For football clubs it's a great channel for engaging with its fans, and for football sponsors and business owners it's a unique opportunity to announce their products to a wide audience and promote their brands.
IT solutions of company WBE for football clubs
IT-company WBE offers such solutions for football clubs:
• CRM system for the integration of all resources of FC, user behavior analytics, process automation and tasks.
• The official website for fans.
• Online store with specialized modules for FC.
• A mobile application for engaging with fans and an easy way to demonstrate live events.
• A platform for tickets, where you can buy tickets for football matches around the clock without additional fees.
Do you have any questions? Write to us at office@it-wbe.com, and we will be happy to answer you!