Salford City FC - Digital Marketing Evaluation

Internet marketing is ‘achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies’ (Chaffey and Smith, 2017).

Salford City was promoted to the Football League for the first time in the 2018/19 season (Salford City, 2022). They came more into the national limelight in 2014 as former Manchester United players and ‘Class of ‘92’ stars Gary Neville, Phil Neville, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, and Nicky Butt bought the club (Keegan, 2014).

In this blog, we take a consultative approach to evaluate the digital marketing strategy of Salford City FC, which aims to give the club some feedback on how to improve and develop their digital marketing activities to increase revenue and fan engagement.

2.0  SOSTAC Analysis

2.1 Situational Analysis

The club benefits from much larger investments than their League 2 counterparts, as in terms of how much Football League owners are worth, Salford rank 5th out of 72 clubs (McCartney, Byrom and Evely, 2020), compared to their league ranking of 59th (BBC, 2022). Peter Lim and the class of 92 are worth £1,960,256,646 compared to Bradford City’s owners being worth £100 million (McCartney, Byrom and Evely, 2020), the closest in financial terms in their league.

This scenario allows them to invest heavily in digital marketing, as with the changing consumer trends and the way people engage with brands, especially football clubs having a digital transformation, being effective in this area is key.

However, Salford City currently have the lowest average attendance in League 2 in the 2021/22 season with an average attendance of 2075 (Football Web Pages, 2022) which is filling 40.64% of their ground’s total capacity (Football Ground Guide, n.d.) which shows a weakness in being able to convert potential fans to match goers.

Overall, Salford City currently have a very sleek design across their digital sphere, from their website to its various social media platforms, providing fans with a seamless user experience across all platforms with consistent branding and content.

However, a negative aspect of their user experience is the lack of opportunities to efficiently buy merchandise, tickets, and hospitality directly from their social media accounts, which is a common activity for football clubs and an easy way to add another revenue stream.

Salford City also has a very impressive follower count on their respective social media compared to their league counterparts, with 276,000 Instagram followers (Instagram, 2022), 167,100 Twitter followers (Twitter, 2022), 33,900 TikTok followers (TikTok, 2022), 56,150 Facebook followers (Facebook, 2022) and 30,500 YouTube subscribers (2022), the club boast a large following for a club of their stature.

2.2 Objectives

There are three specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound objectives for Salford City FC to achieve to greatly improve their digital marketing activities:

1.    Increase engagement and revenues from Instagram by at least 5% on each post in the next six months.

2.    Better calls to action across their digital sphere to help increase revenues.

3.    Increase follower counts on social media accounts by 10% every 6 months.

These are all different objectives on the Five S’s objective framework (Chaffey and Smith, 2017). The first is a ‘Speak’ objective, related to getting closer to customers, increasing awareness, and building the brand. The second is a ‘Sell’ objective as it is encouraging sales growth through wider distribution, promotion, and sales. The third being a ‘Sizzle’ objective, enhancing the brand by adding value, and improving online interactive experiences.

2.3 Strategy

In terms of their objectives, the club should keep their content seamless and consistent across all their digital platforms, however, Instagram has the widest range of features that can cause an increase in revenue, such as the Checkout and Shop features (Instagram Business Team, 2020) which can link directly to club shops. This would link to interaction in terms of the 5 I’s (Peppers & Rodgers, 1997) heavily focussing on leading customers to take more robust, direct and purchase-based actions such as buying a product or service.

The calls to action on the clubs digital platforms also need to be clearer and be highlighted on the page, encouraging potential customers and fans to buy tickets, hospitality, or merchandise, while also encouraging them to follow them on all social platforms. This would link to both involvement and interaction (Peppers & Rodgers, 1997) as the calls to action are heavily based upon generating more revenue, but also to become more connected with their fans and even neutral consumers.

Increasing follower counts could fall under influence and intimacy (Peppers & Rodgers, 1997) as they will be aiming to increase brand awareness of their product and increasing online mentions hoping to boost the awareness of the brand.

The Online Value Proposition of the club is related to their statement of being ‘committed to protecting the well-being of customers and employees’ (Salford City, 2022) they also have an official charity, Foundation 92, which focuses on supporting communities to improve their lives through sport, education, and bespoke projects, with an emphasis on positive physical and mental wellbeing. (Salford City, 2022). They frequently host fundraisers and have many partnerships with local schools and businesses (Foundation 92, 2020), often giving them free tickets to games to help them out whilst increasing brand awareness and engagement.

The club have a very active social presence for the charity also, demonstrating their work around the local community, but this would be great for the club’s public relations if this was featured more on their main football digital sphere, this would increase awareness of their charity work, to 275,000 more followers (Instagram, 2022) and could lead to people being more inclined to increase their involvement with the club and mentioning to others. 

Salford City FC are already a reputable business and football club so trust and credibility are already established, and they should continue to target geographically around the local area, those aged 25-45, and people who are interested in football, as a basis for their target market.

2.4 Tactics and Actions

2.4.1 Instagram Engagement and Revenues

Although Salford City are established in all forms of digital media, Instagram is the platform with the most potential to increase fan engagement and revenue streams direct from the app. They have roughly one billion monthly active users, with at least 500 million daily active Instagram Stories users and 90% of accounts follow a business account (Statista Research Department).

The way that Salford City can increase their engagement on Instagram is by diversifying and adding more details to their content. For example, they should take advantage of the ‘Shop’ feature by when they post a photo with a player who is in branded club clothing that is available to purchase, they should tag the product to take the fans directly to buy the product – which is successful for other clubs, (see Figure 3). This would increase awareness of the online club shop and increase engagements and revenue direct from the club’s Instagram account.

Another simple way to increase direct clicks to the club shop is by having a direct ‘View Shop’ call to action button in their bio (see Figure 4), which is an impactful way to make the customer journey more efficient, crucially decreasing the amount of clicks it takes to let a customer buy a product.

In terms of increasing engagement and getting more people to view their content, there are many options for the club. Firstly, Instagram rewards users, especially brands for using new features regularly by placing them higher up in people’s feeds (McLachlan, 2022).

More specifically, the ‘Reels’ feature is currently the best way to increase viewership and engagement quickly, because they are in heavy competition with TikTok and YouTube Shorts in the format of shorter, vertical full screen videos (Schneider, 2021). A clear example of this working for Salford City is that they have only ever posted one reel on their Instagram account, and it amassed over 137,000 views, 9610 likes and 44 comments, compared to an average of around 450 likes and 5 comments on their usual posts. This content was also taken from their TikTok, which is usually unfavourable for the algorithm however this more so highlights the potential success that reels could have.

The main way that reels are being utilised by more digitally successful clubs is by having someone on the side of the pitch ready to film key moments like penalties, free kicks, and celebrations etc, which puts the viewer closer to the action, feeling the more emotive side of the game. This is evident as Manchester United had much more success with a pitch side camera as their usual reels amass around 10 million views, but one of Cristiano Ronaldo performing his notorious ‘Siuu’ celebration collated 63.7 million views (See Figure 6). 

2.4.2 Improved Calls to Action

Another way that Salford can improve their digital strategy is making the user experience more seamless when it comes to calls to action that generate revenue, shortening the customer journey, helping them buy a product or service easily and efficiently.

This objective could also link to the last one (Instagram engagement and revenues) as linking the club shop to their official social platforms with calls to action such as ‘Buy now!’ or ‘Check out our store’ give the customer both instructions and guidance to what they need to do to purchase a product or service, rather than just a link with no caption or words.

Also, with the club’s website, the sleek design and clear layout makes it seem very reputable and trustworthy, increasing the likelihood of customers purchasing. However, it takes too many clicks and a longer customer journey than most to buy a product or service. As the shop feature, tickets and hospitality are not as clear as other features, which in reference to the ‘E-Marketing Sloppiness Graph’ (Chaffey and Smith, 2017) (see Figure 8) is a reason why certain customers do not fulfil an online order. If these specific click-throughs were more evident on the page, this could increase revenues.

They should also offer certain matchday packages when people buy tickets to a match, offering match day parking, the match day programme or even discounted merchandise as optional extras.

Additionally, on the online club shop, it would be beneficial for the club to offer incentivised and limited time offers once they are on the landing page, giving customers for example a discount code for 20% off, if they use a specific discount code within the next 15 minutes, which research suggests that as long as the time limited discount is large enough compared to the actual value of the product, customers will be more inclined to buy the product (Devlin et al, 2007). A way to also reach a larger audiences is to post a promotional code with a time frame across their social platforms.

2.4.3 Increase Follower Counts

With the third objective, it aims to tackle the problem of the club’s low attendances by gaining more online followers, then converting them into customers.

One way that the club could do this is by paid social media advertising, more specifically on Facebook and Instagram, as they have many options to curate a specific audience to advertise to (Facebook, n.d.). Especially given Salford’s’ budget in comparison to others in their league, they will be able to reach a larger audience than their competitors. They should segment geographically, to people in the Greater Manchester area, also segmenting demographically to those aged between 25-45, which is around the age where most people start having families (Harvey-Jenner, 2020), and tend to have more disposable income (Francis-Devine, 2021).

So thus, after this engagement is made, more followers will naturally arise due to the increased awareness around the brand. They will also be more fiscally able to purchase tickets, hospitality and merchandise for themselves and their families, which will also be a successful long-term strategy for the football club as these families and especially younger consumers could become lifetime customers and this will significantly increase Salford’s revenue in the future.

2.5 Control

In terms of these objectives, Salford can measure their success with certain key performance indicators. With Instagram they can measure success through the analytics section in a business account, where they can see if the shift in strategy to promoting the shop will have increased direct leads.

In terms of the improvement of calls to action, they can do analyse their website traffic and analytics and see how long the user journey was to them buying a product or service.

Finally, they can check the attendances of matches and offer some match day surveys to see where people purchased their tickets from.

3.0 Conclusion

In this report the author analysed Salford City FC’s digital marketing strategy, highlighting the current successes with the sleek design and seamless user experience across all social platforms. However, they have demonstrated easy ways to shift the strategy to generate more revenue and awareness for the football club.