Case Study

CHARLOTTE FC

As A New Franchise In A Rapidly Growing League, Charlotte FC Headed Into Their Inaugural MLS Season With Several Goals For Their Social Content And Digital Partnerships. In Order To Track, Measure And Evaluate These Goals, Last Season And In The Future, MLS’ Latest Team Used Zoomph. 

 

To fulfill club ownership’s priority on building a fan base, their content strategy focused on the passion and unique atmosphere of the MLS experience, with an emphasis on maximizing content during the first 24 hours after a win. To maximize value and ROI to inaugural season corporate partners, the club drove activation around specific branded content campaigns as well as the MLS’s first-ever Chief Fan Officer position.

Challenge #1

Build an Engaged Fan Base

Starting from scratch as a franchise, Charlotte FC used social media as a tool to build their fan base before and during the 2022 season. Once they had these fans, they needed to continue creating content that would keep them locked in, even after the excitement of having a new team in town wore off.

Action: Charlotte FC creates the content, Zoomph measures its effectiveness. 

Throughout the season Charlotte FC leaned into the fans, on-field wins and the atmosphere of the MLS experience to inspire their content. Using Zoomph, they focused on metrics like engagement rate to analyze what content worked and make subsequent content decisions. 

Result: A creative and successful social strategy that captured major moments. 

Charlotte FC finished the season with the highest engagement rate in MLS on Instagram and 3rd highest on Twitter. Their social media successfully celebrated big fan moments, like breaking the MLS attendance record at their inaugural match, and creatively highlighted team wins, like posting a crushed Red Bull can after beating the New York Red Bulls. 

 Zoomph provides comprehensive metrics for every social post, as seen here with Charlotte FC’s Tweet celebrating a new MLS attendance record. 

“Having Zoomph during our inaugural MLS season helped us establish a data-backed process for evaluating social media and partnership performance,” said Eric Hansen – Director, Social, Content and Broadcast of Charlotte FC. “Looking ahead to 2023, we’re excited to continue leveraging Zoomph to maximize our social strategy and ROI for our partners.”

With a custom MLS social report Charlotte FC was able to compare their social data to other teams in the league with just a few clicks. 

Challenge #2

Benchmark accurately against competitors

For its first season, Charlotte FC immediately looked to gauge its results against other MLS teams.

Action: Create an MLS report to quickly monitor competitor social accounts. 

With Zoomph’s ability to monitor other team’s social data, Charlotte was able to compare their social performance against a comparable group of peer teams throughout the season. Additionally, Zoomph Insights did two major benchmark analyses for their jersey kit release and Opening Weekend social stats. 

Result: An understanding of how their social content stacks up compared to other teams. 

Week-to-week, game-to-game Charlotte was able to quickly see how their social accounts did relative to their opponents. As for specific social launches like their kit unveiling, Zoomph Insights compared their release to other recent expansion teams and found Charlotte FC earned 2x to 10x more impressions and total social value for their launch. 

Challenge #3

Report on Sponsor ROI

With a brand new team comes a brand new slate of partners, and establishing a method for reporting on the value Charlotte FC creates for these partners was important for starting a successful sponsorship strategy.

Action: Set up reports and tags for branded content campaigns and logo presence across social media content.

With Zoomph dashboards and brand reports Charlotte FC tracked branded content campaigns for Harris Teeter, BODYARMOR and Carolina Ford Dealers. Additionally, they used Zoomph’s AI technology to monitor logo exposure on social for kit sponsor Ally and sleeve sponsor Centene.

Result: Useful data to report back to partners and implement in future sponsorship planning. 

Charlotte FC used Zoomph data to quantify their partner’s exposure to fans. For example, Charlotte FC found that throughout the 2022 season 43% of all their content mentioned Ally or displayed their logo, making them one of the biggest brands in Charlotte FC’s inaugural season story. 

Logo AI technology detects partner logos like Ally’s in social content, then Zoomph values that brand placement based on post performance and logo exposure data, such as size and clarity.
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