Top of the league marketing
When you think of competition in non-league football, marketing doesn’t exactly spring to mind. It’s more about scoring goals, keeping a clean sheet and ambitions for promotion. But AFC Totton had more than just football in mind when they started working with us at Livewire Marketing.
The non-league club are based just outside Southampton in Hampshire. Despite their non-league status, they have first-class facilities, including league-standard changing facilities, a Muga Pitch, and large function rooms. They also have high ambitions driven by the team manager, Jimmy Ball, son of World Cup winner and local football legend Alan Ball.
What the club lacked was a joined-up marketing strategy to help drive footfall through the gates and to promote awareness of their non-football activities, including community and social events. The latter provides a crucial source of revenue for the grassroots club.
Livewire became a sponsor of AFC Totton more than five years ago. Our role developed from being a silent sponsor to an active part of the AFC Totton team, providing active marketing support and strategic and commercial advice. Our partnership goals were clear.
Goal 1 - building a brand
AFC Totton had a badge and an existing brand. Known as The Stags by their loyal following, the club had a good presence. However, they lacked a strong brand that filtered through all their business collateral. In addition, their digital presence was inconsistent, with no template for social media posts and no clear outline on how the logo should be used and what the club colours were (beyond ‘blue’).
Working with the AFC Totton team, we developed clear brand guidelines, which included:
Social media templates
Presentation templates for sponsors and prospective partners
Event marketing templates
Digital advertising templates
Digital display templates for use around the ground
Clear guidance on colour codes and logo usage
The result is a more consistent, recognisable brand across all media.
Goal 2 - a revamped website
To reflect the growing brand and aspirations of AFC Totton, we worked with the management team to develop an updated, more user-friendly website. The website needed to be informative, easy to navigate and commercially driven. With the latter, the objective was to drive ticket sales, event bookings and sales through the club store.
In addition to upgrading the core website, we developed the AFC Totton store. This uses a Shopify platform to allow fans and supporters to purchase club merchandise and season tickets.
Overall, the club website shows increased users, new users, sessions and page views. In addition, the average session duration and the bounce rate have also improved (comparing Jan 23 – Apr 23 versus the same period in 2022).
Goal 3 - growing a community and social media following
AFC Totton had a steady social media following, but posting was often sporadic and managed by fans or volunteers. Their social media management lacked strategy or consistency, and brand guidelines often fell by the wayside.
By restricting access to the social media accounts to a handful of core team members and creating branded posting templates and a content schedule, AFC Totton’s presence has grown. In six months, the Facebook community has increased by over 60%.
They also have a solid Twitter audience, with tweet impressions regularly reaching between 500k and 1m. We also wanted to increase the team’s presence on Instagram, which is growing sharply, especially in terms of engagement.
Together we have also been driving the use of video content to help engage the community. The club’s YouTube channel is growing in popularity, with video views of over 2,500 in March 2023, up from 1,300 in November 2022. This has been driven by publishing regular content, including player and manager interviews and behind-the-scenes interviews.
Goal 4 - newsletter
The club have a database of fans, contacts and sponsors, but they weren’t engaging with them. They weren’t communicating with this audience regularly, so many people didn’t know about upcoming fixtures, club news or community events. Livewire created a weekly newsletter designed, written and managed by our in-house team of copywriters.
The tone of the email is lighthearted, engaging and informative. Since its inception, the weekly newsletter has generated open rates that are regularly over 50%. Click-through rates sit above the industry average, typically between 4 and 5%. The calls to action drive traffic to the club’s store, events booking page, and ticket and news pages.
Marketing for champions
AFC Totton has more than just their marketing efforts to celebrate. The club is celebrating being crowned Southern League Division 1 South champions. They won the league with two games to spare and have achieved automatic promotion. Of course, the Livewire team can’t take credit for the promotion, but we are delighted to have played a part in the journey. Seeing the AFC Totton brand come into its own with the promotion coverage and end-of-season celebrations is something we can all enjoy.
A huge congratulations to everyone at AFC Totton for your success. We look forward to seeing what next season brings!
