Digital Strategy For ESPN Insider

Editor's Notes

1. I chose ESPN in the beginning of the semester due to my love of sports and also because I thought ‘hey it’s ESPN, how hard can this be’. Boy was I wrong! Since ESPN is such a great company, they have every means of advertisement covered. After some further brainstorming though, and possibly reading up on some sports rumors, the light bulb went off and I thought to myself ‘ESPN does not really advertise for their Insider Account’.
2. Being an ESPN Insider member gives you access to the most exclusive fan news out there. The price for an Insider account varies from one month at $8.95 to one year at $39.95 and the best deal of $59.95. The key features of ESPN Insider include rumor central, which provides you with your daily sports gossip, Interactive tools, which will help your fantasy football team out, and expert analysis, where you can take a look to see where your favorite Spartans will be going in the draft.
3. The first thing we want to look at is the demographics we should be targeting. Our target market is going to be centered around the male gender, due to the percentage of males that watch/read about sports compared to women. From the male demographic we will be targeting college students, who can enroll in a free three-month trial with their .edu email address, and all other males between the ages of 18 and 34.
4. Here we have a chart of the percentage of males and females who are football fans. In my research, this type of gap between males and females could be seen with each sport.Source: http://www.statista.com/markets/409/topic/442/sports-fitness/
5. The big idea, or goal, is to try and gain as many college student subscribers we can. College students love sports, and having an ESPN Insider account can give them something to do during class! Just kidding! We will model this strategy off of Amazon Student, in which they give 6 months free of their ‘Amazon Prime’ membership to enrolled students. The video is from ‘The Frugalicious Show’ and describes the possibilities with Amazon Student!
6. The budget has been put together after looking at a digital strategy budget calculator. This calculator does not have the ability to calculate a budget for a company with as much revenue as ESPN, so I have adjusted the numbers to accommodate ESPN’s $11 billion dollars in revenue compared to the calculators highest amount of $10 million dollars (I have done this by multiplying the monthly amounts by 100). The suggested monthly digital marketing budget for a company the size of ESPN is $4,800,00. For this specific project from the digital strategy, I would expect the budget to be around $1 million dollars each month.
7. The goal of this digital strategy will be to have our target demographic join the ESPN insider account on ESPN. Key Performance Indicators for this digital strategy will include the percentage increase in insider accounts within the targeted demographic and also the number of subscribers that continue after the free trial period. The goal of the campaign will be to double our current number of users in our target demographic, which will include the college students who are given a free trial. From the college students that are given a free trial, our goal should be trying to retain at least 30% of those users.
8. Having a focus on the younger demographic will hopefully allow ESPN to grow its insider account. Throughout the years, ESPN has been the pioneer in almost everything relating to the coverage of sports, and with this digital strategy they can take paying for sports related news to the next level. They will need to adjust their pricing for ESPN insider accounts, but that discussion is for another day.