4 Marketing Lessons I Learned from Building a Bustling Baseball Fan Community. Nick is a Content Strategist that has been with the TopRank Marketing team for a few months and spends his time creating great content for some of our enterprise B2B clients. That is where marketing comes in. But first… What is Twins Daily? In 2012, I teamed up with John Bonnes, Seth Stohs, and Parker Hageman to launch the site, envisioning a community where Twins fans could find exceptional daily content and then stick around for intelligent conversation with like-minded users. In 2014, our site was the subject of a cover story in Twin Cities Business magazine. The following takeaways are worth keeping in mind for a marketer looking to build and foster online communities with purpose, even if those communities are blog readerships, social media followings, or brand audiences. You don’t need a shared passion like baseball to propel your messaging – only a sound strategy from the ground up. When planning out content strategies, it is important to have everyone collectively focused on starting strong with each new campaign. #3 – Events Fuel Engagement Before we ever conceived Twins Daily, we were already holding informal gatherings for the readers of our blogs.
[Editor’s Note: Please join me in welcoming another new author to TopRankBlog.com, Nick Nelson. Nick is a Content Strategist that has been with the TopRank Marketing team for a few months and spends his time creating great content for some of our enterprise B2B clients. Welcome Nick!]
If you build it, they will come.
Ah, if only it were that simple. But as any business proprietor knows, it is not. Even if you offer a great product or service, attracting customers takes time and effort. It requires creativity, dedication, and tenacity. That is where marketing comes in.
A fortuitous series of circumstances led to my involvement as a cofounder of Twins Daily, which now counts itself as one of the nation’s biggest completely independent fan sites covering a pro sports team. Through five years of ups and downs with this passion hobby and labor of love, I’ve gained some insights that prove indispensable in my day job as a content marketer.
Today, in my first entry here on the TopRank Marketing blog, I thought I would share some of those lessons, and how I apply them in serving our clients. In the spirit of a baseball diamond with its four corners, we’ll cover the bases before bringing it home.
But first…
What is Twins Daily?
It’s the brainchild of four fan bloggers
who sought to end hunger. Not in any noble way, mind you, but there was an appetite for baseball coverage in the Twin Cities market that wasn’t quite being satiated by mainstream media.
In 2012, I teamed up with John Bonnes, Seth Stohs, and Parker Hageman to launch the site, envisioning a community where Twins fans could find exceptional daily content and then stick around for intelligent conversation with like-minded users.
Since then, Twins Daily has piled up 12.5 million visits and 45 million pageviews, generating traffic that surpasses many of the resource-rich professional outlets in town. In 2014, our site was the subject of a cover story in Twin Cities Business magazine. We continue to grow, and in mid-June set a new daily traffic record when Minnesota made the first overall selection in the MLB Draft.
This traction has been driven not by us, but by the community we’ve brought together. When you create energy and participation around your content, there is no telling where it can go. Whether the goal is generating engagement, selling a product, or simply establishing a corporate narrative, this is critical to remember.
The following takeaways are worth keeping in mind for a marketer looking to build and foster online communities with purpose, even if those communities are blog readerships, social media followings, or brand audiences. You don’t need a shared passion like baseball to propel your messaging – only a sound strategy from the ground up.
#1 – Hit the Ground Running
When kicking off our new venture, we had a built-in advantage that is awfully tough to replicate: an established audience. Each of our four disparate blogs had its own sizable readership, giving us an intrinsic head start. However, we weren’t prepared to rely solely upon regulars migrating to the new destination. We needed to generate momentum and excitement. We needed to re-earn their patronage.
So we spent weeks teasing the site, on our personal blogs and our social channels. We planned out a launch on the first day of spring training, with baseball fever hitting a high point. When the big…
COMMENTS