Fantasy Football builds relationships with hard to reach audiences

Aside from appealing to a large range of people, sport is a great form of entertainment, building community and a conversation starter for like-minded people. It’s this insight which led Generate UK to develop a highly successful online Fantasy Football League to build customer relationships for Q Associates.

Maintaining a good level of communication with both customers and suppliers is often difficult. It takes a lot of time, resources and money to build relationships and strong brand loyalty. This is something Q Associates know all too well.

Q Associates are an award winning IT Infrastructure and Data Management Company who design and deploy IT solutions and provide ongoing support and maintenance to their clients. In addition to their clients, Q Associates need to build awareness and loyalty towards their partners whose technology they use eg. IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

Q Associates had many years of successfully engaging in peer-to-peer relationship building using email, CRM and hospitality; however they felt, (apart from hospitality which is expensive), that it was a little forced. What they wanted was a way to engage regularly with their community without the hard sell. Generate UK worked with Q Associates to understand the requirements, including:

  • The age and interests of their target audience (partners and clients)
  • Budgets
  • Key timing
  • Device usage and time of day
  • Learnings from successful hospitality eg entertainment, banter and engagement

Generate UK came up with a highly creative and visual solution of an online “Q Associates Fantasy Football Game” to engage hundreds of Q Associates’ key contacts. Importantly, this included senior individuals at the manufacturers who they might not normally get airtime with.

 

Why Fantasy Football?

  • Enables us to build community and communication with both Q Associates employees as well as vendors, without the hard sell.
  • Engaged all audiences including individuals who may not have been accessible previously.
  • Targets the right audience, specifically the decision makers who can be hard to reach.
  • Delivered mass appeal and reach, cost efficiently.
  • Provided a visual canvas on which to drive awareness of the Q Associates brand and USP’s.
  • Engagement over the long term not just one event.
  • It provided an absorbing application used regularly.
  • So successful that it was rolled out to a second sport: Formula 1.

Results speak for themselves

Based on the success of the First Season of Fantasy Football we ran for Q Associates 2014/15, we recently completed Season 2 2015/16. Based on word of mouth and targeted promotion, year 2 was even more successful than year 1.

There were 428 registered accounts and 122 teams across season 2.  These were predominantly made up of Customers and Suppliers, so Q Associates core audience, but also included some staff members.

Amazingly, 1,341 player transfers took place showing the involvement and interest the Fantasy Football game generated. Over 30% of people logged in more than 30 times across the season which demonstrates the sustained engagement over the entire football season.  This is very hard to achieve with other traditional forms of marketing/communication without large budget outlays.

Overall, Q Associates have benefited from a 23% increase in reach and engagement across 9 months of the year. This increased brand awareness and most importantly built relationships which were based on more than just sales.  Ultimately, this creates a more loyal customer and vendor base which is highly valuable to the business.

We at Generate UK, can see that through these results Fantasy Football and other games are a proven Customer Relationship builder that can add valuable equity to your business through awareness, favourability and loyalty. We would love to share more of the same success with other clients, so please give us a call if you feel this may be of interest to your brand.