FROM THE VERY BEGINNING
AProfessional sports club in the San Francisco Bay Area for the one sport that seems to only fight for popularity in the United States, soccer. This has been Anders Perez’s dream since the start of his soccer career almost two decades ago. Finally, through networking, discipline and hard work, charm, and a little luck, Anders assembled his team and turned that dream into reality. They established their mission, their goals as a professional club, to provide the next generation of soccer players a pathway of professional, career development. To build the Bay Area’s future soccer stars. In order for thi reality to flourish, Bay Cities began to pull together its team and connected with us to manage its marketing. We began working with Bay Cities through one of our other clients, Juventus Academy Silicon Valley, making it our 3rd soccer client. This project helps to remind us that fostering strong client relationships builds a network that grows our experience and reputation for us to be trusted with other projects.
How to build a fan base?
Establishing a professional sports club in as popular of a metropolitan area as the Bay Area is no small feat. First and foremost the brand needed to be established within its community and its image developed. How would it look, feel, and connect with its community? Furthermore, while we were working on the brand we had to consider that we did not yet have the product, the soccer team, ready to go. As digital marketers our focus had to be on building the club’s online presence, at the heart of everything that is digital, in Silicon Valley. Bay Cities needed to figure out how to communicate itself to its audience, how would it be perceived? Most importantly, how would it represent the Bay Area as its soccer club? All of these challenges are put together to meet the overarching demand for investors to fund and breathe life into the project. So that the Bay Cities brand could one day play amongst its fans.
Our first course of action was developing the brand guidelines and visuals of Bay Cities. Using colors and assets that reflected the ideals of its team while also standing out among other clubs and organizations of any sport in the region. We built their website and brand elements. Asserting Bay Cities’ presence online. Then we focused on connecting the club to its home. We developed the “Bridge the Bay” campaign. A play on words that the Bay Area is connected together by multiple bridges and that the club would unite all of its cities under one team.
We ran outreach campaigns to build awareness, using social media we built templates for their internal team to use and launched their content strategy. We managed communications, collecting emails and other information. We used these communications to spread the word of the club and reach as many local soccer fans as possible. Letting them all know that they would be represented in the sport they held dear.
While the brand remains fresh and growing, we are proud that our efforts towards building awareness are now fueling a crowdfunding campaign to meet the club’s investment goals. Without a single advertisement we were able to collect over 1,000 emails organically from the club’s rising reputation. This means to say that the brand has been officially established in the Bay Area and has only begun to flourish. The club’s most recent game held over 600 attendees with under 5 games total. The team is also participating in the NISA Independent Cup!
