The Washington Spirit is turning Olympic hype into ticket sales

This story is the second in a series about how marketers for sports teams and leagues around the world approach social media strategy.

The Washington Spirit recently got a caffeine boost.

Trinity Rodman, the NWSL team’s star forward and one of the leading goal scorers in the Olympic women’s soccer tournament, brought home a gold medal. Rodman and fellow NWSL players Mallory Swanson and Sophia Smith were together responsible for 10 of the US women’s 12 goals, and the trio nicknamed themselves “triple espresso” amid a whole bunch of hype.

Some of the excitement has trickled down to the Spirit, which saw an increase in both social media followers and ticket sales in the hours and days following the gold-medal match, according to Brandon Clark, the team’s VP of marketing and communications.

“There was real demand from our core fan to document, to share everything [Olympics-related] from a Spirit perspective that we possibly could,” he told Marketing Brew. “But the real opportunity came in both servicing that part of our fan base, and really reaching a greater amount of people in our casual fan base.”

The Spirit is certainly capitalizing on Olympic content on social, but it’s not every day—or even every year—that the Olympics make one of the team’s players an international star. To keep old fans and new ones engaged year-round, the Spirit’s marketing team focuses on authenticity and personality online.

Shot of espresso

The Spirit used the watch party and additional social activity surrounding the Olympics to promote a few of its upcoming matches, and as a result, sold more tickets during that weekend than any other weekend prior, excluding weekends when the team had a home match, according to Clark.

“You could see that direct ROI from…social in particular that converted into short-term revenue,” he said.

The Spirit marketing team is still working on gathering engagement data related to the Olympics, but Clark said he suspects, based on increased posting activity alone, that the spike in engagement was significant.

Engagement rates tend to vary depending on the time of year, according to Meg Patten, the team’s senior director of brand strategy, commercial marketing, and merchandise. Typically, teams tend to see dips in engagement during their offseasons, but Patten said draft day usually brings a lot of social media attention to the Spirit, as do announcements of transfers, trades, or anything else related to the roster.

“At the end of the day, content performance is directly related to the star power of the player, and then also on-field performance of the team,” Patten said. “If you look at any team, I bet you will see that when they win a championship…they’re always going to have the highest engagement. Bigger moments will see bigger numbers, and that’s because people are tuning in. They’re watching.”

Huddle up

Not every day is game day, so aside from posting roster news and match stats, the Spirit tries to showcase players’ personalities through “fun content that makes people smile,” Patten said: When the Spirit signed Casey Krueger, also a member of the USWNT for the Olympics, they posted about baby-proofing their facilities for her son. And when the team released branded pizza boxes as part of a marketing campaign at the start of the season, they posted photos from a shoot of players with the boxes and subsequent behind-the-scenes videos.

The team leans into other BTS moments that fans might not otherwise have access to as well, like huddles, celebrations, training sessions, and particularly fashionable players like Rodman or Croix Bethune, another Olympic national team member, arriving for home games in style, Patten said.

When Rodman, Bethune, and Krueger show up for their next NWSL match on Aug. 25, they’ll have added a certain gold accessory to their fits. The Spirit is sure to post about that, and anything else related to the Olympics they can come up with in the coming weeks, Clark said.

“It gives us an opportunity to service our core fan, because I think they have an insatiable appetite for it,” he said. “But I think what the Olympics provides us is [the opportunity] to maintain that mindshare with the casual fan that might come through our gates once or twice a year.”