Brian Himstedt likes to think of baseball as the soundtrack of summer, and for 2.8 million fans across six Midwestern states, the Kansas City Royals are the featured artist on that soundtrack.
“We play 162 games between April and September,” said Brian, the CIO and VP of Technology and Business Analytics for the Royals, “...and from mid-June through August, we’re the only game in town,” because pro football, basketball, and hockey are all on hiatus.
But the Royals’ fan base extends beyond the 1.6 million people who buy tickets to the Royals’ home games at Missouri’s Kauffman Stadium: another 4.4 million nationwide count themselves as Royals fans. “They watch us on TV, they follow us on social media, they stream our games online, they visit our website, and of course, they listen to our games on the radio, which provides that summertime soundtrack on 50 stations,” Brian shared. “Our goal is to give each and every fan the greatest experience possible.”
Getting to know 7.2 million fans
While having a winning team always helps boost fan morale, that great experience is aided by knowing what makes those fans tick and how to keep them engaged between games and throughout the offseason as well. The customer data on Royals fans comes through the many touchpoints fans have with the team, as well as from Major League Baseball (MLB), who helps collect and distribute fan data from various sources for each of its Clubs.
“MLB provides all its teams with marketing platforms for websites, mobile apps, and email campaigns that help us engage with our fans,” Brian explained. In addition to those league-owned platforms, the team collects information about its customers on game days — from merchandise and concession sales, contests and sweepstakes, and the Royals’ own customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
But with that many data sources, data silos developed between the League and its teams and between the platforms themselves. And as those silos multiplied, they become increasingly difficult to bridge, especially when each system uses different attributes for identifying a fan.
“Our biggest challenge was consolidating all that customer data into a ‘golden record’ of everything we knew about each fan that we could then use to drive our sales and marketing efforts,” Brian admits. “And there’s only so much you can do with data extracts like CSV files and brute force.”
In addition, their existing data strategy provided no way to integrate the user-data generated when fans interacted with a marketing channel like email clicks. “We’d run nurture campaigns through Zeta or Iterable, or Meta ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, but there was no master marketing platform or data warehouse in which to aggregate the results.”
A four-part unified data strategy
Brian envisioned a data ecosystem that would accomplish four things:
- Integrate data from all data sources into a single source of truth that holds a comprehensive record on each fan
- Activate that data without moving it to a different platform
- Analyze the data each activation generates in order to refine marketing strategy in a continuous feedback loop
- Visualize the data to make it easy to understand and accessible to non-technical members of the sales and marketing teams
Because the GrowthLoop composable customer data platform (CDP) can sit atop any enterprise data warehouse, we were able to help him realize that vision.
Brian’s team began building their data ecosystem by creating a single source of truth on BigQuery in Google Cloud with modeled data from the Royals’ ticketing, CRM, point of sales (POS), website, and loyalty and engagement platforms, so everyone in the organization was finally making decisions based on the same data.
“We were then able to plug GrowthLoop into that enterprise data warehouse, which decreased the complexity of the integration dramatically,” Brian related. “Activating the data without having to move it to a separate platform also mitigates organizational risk.” That’s because they remain in control of all their data, leaving the teams free to switch out marketing channel platforms without disrupting the entire ecosystem.
What does a ‘data democracy’ look like?
GrowthLoop’s intuitive interface also meant the Royals could democratize access to that data — something that pleased Brian’s colleagues on the sales and marketing teams, who had long been hungry for access to accurate data, well-informed insights, and activation processes they could implement themselves.
“We’re a big brand, but we’re not a large corporation,” explained Brian, whose own data analytics team numbers only seven. “With access to GrowthLoop’s platform, everyone — not just our data analysts — now understands what information we have, what it means, and how to leverage it. That makes everyone more self-sufficient.”
It also frees his data team to develop comprehensive insights their marketing, sales, corporate partnerships, and stadium operations teams can use to improve engagement with their customers.
“We’re finally maximizing what we can do with the talent and resources we have,” he said. “And with proven results we can point to, there’s trust in the data and an appreciation for the insights we provide.” This has led to an openness to and flourishing of new ideas.
A team effort for marketing a sports team
This data unification has also synced the efforts of teams that were previously working with siloed data and in siloed lanes. “Now that we’re all working from the same up-to-date, uniform data source, I’ve even stopped thinking in terms of marketing technology and sales technology, and started thinking in terms of revenue technology,” Brian noted.
The continuous feedback from marketing channel platforms to the enterprise data warehouse means they can attribute interactions to individual fans and touchpoints, measure the results, fold the data into their existing ecosystem, and activate it almost instantly across their marketing channels.
Brian’s team is now collecting data on many types of interactions: promotional giveaways to fans who come through the stadium gates, the engagement generated by personalized marketing content, the revenue generated by adjusting pricing models over time, responses to social posts that provide insight into customer interests, and many others.
“Understanding how a fan interacts with all these channels puts some teeth behind terminology like ‘customer journey orchestration’ and ‘customer engagement,’” he said. “Today, we not only have faith in our customer journeys, we have the data to justify them. If a marketing sequence starts with a Facebook ad, includes interactions using Conversica, and ends a few touchpoints later with a ticket purchase on a call with a salesperson, we understand why.”
GrowthLoop is critical in orchestrating those omnichannel campaigns. “We’re no longer orchestrating customer journeys from within the bubble of our marketing tools. The journey is informed by all the data we have on each prospective and current customer, and our customer database is continuously updated by the interactions we have with our fans.”
This has not only helped them work smarter, it’s helped them respond to market opportunities more quickly. “In the past, the data lagged behind the creative process,” Brian reported. “We’d have a great offer to put in front of fans, but we didn’t know which fans should receive it or the channels they’d be most receptive to. GrowthLoop has flipped that equation: Now we can define an audience in seconds, so we can get the creative in front of fans almost in real time.”
Fine-tuning targeted marketing for optimal engagement
It’s marketing gospel that personalized customer interactions are more effective, but precise, accurate, contextualized targeting is as important as the messaging you create. In other words, some communications are music to a fan’s ears; the rest is just noise.
“Some people are just casual fans of baseball. Some are avid fans of the Royals,” Brian explained. “Some people want to come to every game, while others just want to see us play against another team they like.” GrowthLoop gives Brian’s team the ability to analyze historical customer data and nix messaging, offers, and marketing channels that aren’t working and may actually be detracting from a fan’s overall experience.
“Bombarding a fan with multiple messages that don’t resonate can have a negative effect on our brand,” he said. “Having the right data means the Royals can eliminate the guesswork from aligning messaging, offers, channels, and customers,” adding with a bit of pride, “and match the fan experience with the high caliber of the team on the field.”
Brian hopes eliminating that noise and elevating the fan experience will keep loyal fans coming back to games, get even more fans through the turnstiles in years to come, and leave room for Royals fans nationwide to listen to that “soundtrack of summer” even when they are far from Kansas City.
