This story is part of a series about how marketers for sports teams and leagues around the world approach social media strategy.
One of the big four Premier League clubs is ruffling its feathers.
Liverpool FC, which is sitting atop the league standings, recently introduced a new brand design meant to unify the club’s look across areas like the match-day experience, retail, and social media, while making its brand identity clearer. Liverpool has a massive, global fanbase, and because many of those fans don’t get the chance to engage with the team in person, connecting with them on social is crucial to keeping them invested.
“Our social platforms are fundamentally to drive a level of emotional engagement,” Drew Crisp, Liverpool’s SVP of digital, told Marketing Brew. “They’re there to drive the first touchpoint, the connection with the club, and that’s through storytelling…It’s an opportunity for us to give fans content that they might not otherwise see.”
As Liverpool continues to roll out its new look, Crisp said he hopes the effort will unify the club’s content across its many social platforms and help to drive increasing fan engagement.
Bye-bye, birdie
The idea for the Liverpool rebrand was hatched about two years ago, Crisp said, when fast business growth resulted in some fragmentation in the way the club presented itself across its operations beyond soccer, including its charitable foundation and concert business.
“We have never had a common brand purpose that everybody in the club can really align with,” Crisp said. “Any campaigns that we do, any big social messaging, any big things that we want to then talk about, has [to have] something to hang on to.”
Crisp and his team first landed on a brand purpose—“inspire belief through our actions on and off the pitch,” he told us—and then focused on the visual elements of the rebrand, like font, color, and the club’s crest, the mythical liver bird, he said.
On the team’s crest, the liver bird is front and center, but on digital assets, crests tend not to appear very clearly, Crisp said. “They just look like splodges,” he said. That was a problem: 98% of Liverpool’s followers were viewing social content from their mobile devices, according to the club. So the team decided to use the liver bird on its own to build out digital assets, including custom fonts with letters that curve the same way the bird’s wings and talons do.
“That’s what drives consistency in how we appear,” Crisp said.
The new typefaces and color palette (which remains red, just with subtle changes), started showing up across the club this season, including in the art that wraps around its stadiums, on match-day programs, and across digital platforms, including out-of-home ads and on social media. On many of the club’s Instagram posts, the liver bird logo appears without a crest.
Social wingspan
Liverpool recently crossed the 200 million follower mark on social across platforms for both its men’s and women’s teams, and last season, it racked up more than 1.5 billion engagements and 12 billion views on its content, according to the team. So far this season, which ends next month, it’s already seen 1 billion engagements so far.
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With a stadium capacity of about 61,000 and fans around the world, it’s unlikely that all those followers will get the chance to attend a game in person (no matter how packed the Premier League match schedule is), so Crisp said the team turns to social as a way to be accessible to fans no matter how near or far they are from Liverpool.
Some teams and leagues prioritize certain platforms, like MLS with YouTube and TikTok, but Liverpool aims to thrive on all of them. “It’s not for us to dictate where a fan goes,” Crisp said. The team is on all the usual suspects like Instagram, where it has close to 50 million followers, as well as platforms like the Chinese social network Weibo, where it has 4 million followers.
Liverpool even manages a WhatsApp presence, where about 10 million users follow the team, according to Crisp. The team largely uses it for “informational purposes,” he said, like sharing news, promoting ticket sales, or driving people to its All Red membership offering.
Even though the kind of content will differ depending on the platform, the “very clear design and palette and tone” of the new branding is designed to help all those touchpoints feel cohesive, Crisp said.
“Asking somebody to take an action off of a WhatsApp message feels quite natural to people,” he said. “Asking them to do that on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, less so, because they’ve gone there for a bit of light entertainment. They just want to see some shorts and move on.”
Crisp said the team strives for engagement above all other metrics, which can come from a range of content. Highlights like dunks or goals are naturally popular for sports orgs on social, but on Liverpool’s accounts, “more emotional, raw content” is also a priority, he said. One heartwarming video of a young fan with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome who met with players Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah has more than 3 million views on YouTube, and, according to the team, it has seen 14.5 million engagements overall.
“If somebody’s bothered to comment, like, repost…it means that it’s working,” Crisp said.