Currently, the Detroit Red Wings have a decent marketing strategy. They are active on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The website is at least on the first page of Google, sometimes the first option but only if the right words are used in the search. There is minimal interaction with fans. People don’t seem as interested as they used to be in the team. I remember when it was nearly impossible to get tickets to the games. Now it’s possible to get tickets half an hour before the puck drops. This needs to change! Attendance is down even though they are currently third in the league averaging over 20,000 fans a game. This is amazing but is nowhere near the 452 game consecutive sellout they had from 1996 until 2007. The Wings are the sixth most valuable team in the NHL being worth an estimated $346 million behind teams such as the Toronto Maple Leafs, the New York Rangers and the Montreal Canadiens. They are one of the few NHL teams that are profitable, making about 20 million a year. This is impressive seeing as almost half of all NHL teams are losing money every season but should be much, much more. The 2012 lockout aimed to solve this problem but I fear that it hurt the fan following after one of the most successful seasons in history. What this strategy aims to do is gets fans as interested as they were earlier in the Red Wings history.
The new age of internet and social media should have people in the Red Wings marketing and public relations departments foaming at the mouth but it hardly seems true based on what I’ve seen. The current digital strategy uses a bunch of old ideas that are not contributing to the Red Wings brand. Where are the fresh new ideas? The current strategy is very predictable. They go through the same few steps every game day it seems. For example, on Facebook, early in the morning there will be a picture of some of the players during the morning skate. Thousands of people will like and comment on it but there is no more interaction with those fans beyond them commenting on the picture. This might be a good idea for Instagram but so much more can be done on Facebook.
The Red Wings organizations needs to realize that they could be doing a lot more on social media. Every game day there is a series of 5 questions on Twitter and prizes are given to the first followers to answer correctly. This is a great idea but that seems to be the only activity from the official Red Wings account to interact with fans. One Idea of mine is to let willing members of the team to have access to the Twitter/ Facebook accounts. Let fans tweet or ask questions and have the player answer for a few hours during the day. This will be sure to get more followers on twitter and fans on Facebook. I’m sure this will get more people to respond to the promotions, such as their famous $1 hot dog night and giveaways on social media.
The Red Wings should hire an digital agency to monitor anything relating to the organization on the Internet. This will help to learn of any negative as well as positive feelings about the team and let the PR department deal with it. Positive feedback is just as important as negative. WE want to know what the fans like so we can keep doing it. I would expect the monitoring should be done at least 10 hours a day, 7 days a week during the season. Maybe less in the off season as there are less people interested in hockey during the summer months. This would make a budget of $17,500 per week with a $250 hourly rate during the season. I predict the offseason needing around half the time and budget per week.
The team already has a strong family campaign (the family four pack, which includes tickets, food and drinks). They also do a great job of allowing entire hockey teams to come and enjoy the games with their families. I would not change either of these campaigns. They are perfect for the Red Wings brand.As for students I would create more buzz for the “student tickets” they offer on the day of each game. Sure they’re cheap but I’ve tried to buy them before. I’ll put it plain and simple… they suck. I can’t imagine people buying these seats more that once. Plus, most of the seats are single-seats, meaning it would be hard to sit next to friends. There needs to be a promotion giving lucky student fans prizes, or seat upgrades if they buy the student tickets. Treating the young fans well will create repeat business when they are older and can afford to buy more tickets and maybe even donate money to the organization. I would also try and run more television commercials on local stations to create more awareness from people in the Detroit Area.
The current Google Adword campaign is very strong when looking for information about the current team and the team’s history. The first link is almost always the official Red Wings website when searching for anything Red Wings related. The only problem I see is when looking for Red Wings Tickets. The first two websites are not affiliated with the Wings but are just general ticket distributors. (Ticketmaster and StubHub). This campaign will change that to make the official website the top result when looking for “Red Wings Tickets”
The goal of this campaign is to make more people interested in the Red Wings and create life long fans. We want tickets for the Wings to be a hot item to have in the Detroit area once more. We will consider this campaign a success with increased ticket sales, a stronger following on social media, and more traffic through the official Detroit Red Wings Website.
Through these simple changes in social media and internet marketing, I believe that the Red Wings can get a larger following and eventually become more profitable. I believe this can get more loyal fans for now and in the future. Thank you for your time.
