Picture this.
I hand you a whiteboard marker and ask you to draw your fan marketing process.
Everything. From the moment someone first hears about your team, to the website, to buying a ticket, to becoming a season ticket holder.
Could you do it?
Most marketing directors can’t.
And that’s not a knock on you. It’s just how sports marketing has been taught. You learned to send emails. Run promotions. Post on social. Update the website.
Nobody ever showed you the map.
You don’t have a tactics problem. You have a system problem.
Ask most teams what their marketing strategy is and you’ll hear a list.
We send emails. We run social ads. We do theme nights. We have a postgame survey. We offer group packages.
Those are all fine. But they’re tactics, not a strategy. Activities, not a system.
Here’s the thing: there’s a massive difference between doing marketing and running a marketing system.
Doing marketing is sending an email blast because you’ve got a homestand coming up.
Running a marketing system is making sure every fan — from the moment they buy their first ticket — is guided intentionally and automatically toward their second ticket, their third, a mini plan, and eventually season tickets.
Most teams are stuck doing the first thing. They pour dollars into capturing that first ticket buyer, and then it gets messy. So they work twice as hard for half the results.
The fan journey is already happening. You’re just not guiding it.
This is the big idea, so sit with it for a second.
Your team is already running the fan journey, whether you designed it or not.
Fans are moving from first ticket toward becoming regulars — or quietly falling out along the way — right now. The journey isn’t something you build. It’s something that’s already happening.
Your job is to stop letting it happen by accident.
The five stages
The fan journey has five stages. Learn them and you’ll never look at your marketing the same way.
Capture. A fan first hears about you — a social ad, a billboard, a friend’s invite — and buys a ticket. They show up. Now you have their information.
Know. You have data on this person. What they bought, when they came, their email, their phone. Add a postgame survey and you know why they came and who they came with. Most teams treat this like a filing cabinet. The data goes in and nothing happens.
Respond. You put that knowledge to work. Not an e-blast with everything under the sun — communication that feels like it was written for that fan, because it was. The grandmother who brought her grandkids gets one message. The guy who came for cold beers on a Thursday gets another.
Return. The fan had a great time. Now you bring them back — win-back campaigns, lapsed fan reactivation, second-game offers, mini plan invites. The goal is turning a single-game buyer into a repeat buyer.
Grow. The repeat buyer becomes a flex plan holder, then a season ticket holder. They’re not just coming to games. They’re invested. Their lifetime value compounds because you kept showing up for them at every stage.
It’s really a diagnostic tool
Here’s why this matters. The framework isn’t just a nice way to think about marketing.
It’s a diagnostic tool.
When the AC tech comes to your house on a 100-degree day, he’s got a tool that tells him exactly what’s broken. This is the same.
When I look at a team’s marketing, I don’t start with email open rates or social following. I ask one question: where are fans leaking out of this journey?
Because they’re leaking somewhere. Every team has leaks. And they almost always happen in the same places.
Most teams just can’t see them, because they’ve never mapped the journey. So they blame the weather. The losing season. Competition from other entertainment. Sometimes that’s true. But a lot of the time, the fan would have come back. They just never got the right message at the right time.
That’s a systems problem, not a product problem. And unlike the weather, it’s something you can fix. Listen to the full episode here.
What to do this week
- Grab a whiteboard or a sheet of paper and map your own fan journey, stage by stage.
- Start with Capture: when a fan buys a ticket, what happens next? What do they receive 24 to 72 hours after the game?
- Move to Know: do you actually know your fans, or is your database full of strangers in a spreadsheet?
- Check Respond and Return: are you sending relevant, personalized communication — and do you have a system, not just a campaign, for winning fans back?
- Then Grow: do you have a real path to convert repeat buyers into plan holders beyond smiling and dialing at season’s end?
You don’t have to fix everything at once. Just map it out so you can see it. Once you can see the journey, you can start plugging the leaks.
🎙️ Listen to Episode 175 of the Sports Marketing Machine Podcast