This is part two of a multi-article series. Click here to read the first article about Terminal Goals and Results.
As challenging as it is to get market penetration for a second division soccer team in Orange County, it might be more difficult for a Second Division Soccer Team Podcast to increase market penetration.
In the previous article, I talked about my terminal goal for 2024 and how I planned to get there:
Terminal Goal — Increase show audience to 10% of game-day attendance
Enabling Goal 1 — Increase fan-base awareness
Enabling Goal 2 — Increase Social Media click-through
Enabling Goal 3 — Increase Instagram engagement
In this article we’ll talk about my approach to increase just general awareness of the show in the team’s fan base.
Unfortunately, ‘awareness’ isn’t a metric I could measure directly. That would require a lot more polling of the fan base over the course of the season, and we neither have the bandwidth nor the budget to take that on. But, as I’ve learned at work, use the metrics you have to tell the story you can tell. If the Terminal Goal was to increase the show audience, then “more awareness” would mean more people would tune into the show. Right? Please tell me I’m right. I admit we’re making a few assumptions here, and they will probably be my downfall.
As we learned in the last article, we eventually did increase the average viewers per episode by about 40% over the course of the season. I was honestly surprised by that number. So let’s see how we got there.
Social Media Spam
I absolutely started replying to every single social media post from the team with something along the lines of “Hey fans, don’t miss the first and only show dedicated to Orange County Soccer Club, live every* Monday at 8pm Pacific time on YouTube.” If you follow the team’s social media you probably saw that reply somewhere.
A few weeks into that strategy, my buddy who works in marketing at the club DM’d me and said “Hey, just so you know, <platform name> is flagging your replies as spam and hiding them until we approve them.”
Awesome.
I think what caused that was me copy-pasting that reply from a text file into each platform. I have a feeling the platform tracks when I click ‘reply’ and when I click ‘submit,’ and if that doesn’t take some number of seconds based on how many characters the reply is, the platform says “uh, no thank you,” and flags it. So, frustrating, but I kept doing it manually, which probably meant more auto-corrections and typos on my end, but I got pretty good at typing it on my phone.
TikTok
Much to my chagrin, Ray created a TikTok account at the end of last season. Maybe it won’t matter with the ways things are going, but at some point it was the platform to be on if you wanted to be cool, so I committed to cross posting our show clips and other things to try and increase our audience. TikTok tends to skew younger, which we were hoping to connect with, but we didn’t seem to crack that nut. Personally, TikTok didn’t have a lot click-through for us. Partly that’s on me for not understanding the platform and it’s algorithm, and that our content was regularly not shown to followers because of one random rule or another. Sometimes they called it “adult content” and sometimes they penalized it for having a QR code. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about the QR code problem until recently, so that’s one adjustment I’ll make for 2025. Generally speaking metrics on TikTok videos look like this:
Now, granted, I don’t make videos for only TikTok, but for people to only watch 2-5 seconds of a 30 second video… that’s discouraging and obviously our content isn’t for that audience. I’ll keep trying for 2025 and see if we can get an appreciable uptick in followers and views.
OCSC Owner’s Night
Who would be more interested in becoming listeners to the first and only show dedicated to Orange County SC than people who had recently become owners of the team? It made perfect sense to me. The team had a big event planned for July 20th, people were flying in from all over, we found out at the stadium Nieve Petruzziello, aka StuntPegg, a creator with a YouTube audience over 100,000 now was at the game, an owners march on the field, and a cocktail reception— I thought for sure this was a perfect opportunity to get the word out to owners. In person, face to face with my voice, tell people about the show and get them as listeners. Flawless, I thought.
We had a two prong attack planned:
Larry would talk to some people and pass out the QR code stickers I had pointing to our YouTube channel
I would pass out QR code stickers to other owners as I found them at the reception and during game time
Larry talked to many people before the march actually started and passed out all his stickers. As luck would have it, the pre-game march exited the field into the GA stands where I sit. I scrambled to the top of the bleachers and passed out all my stickers to as many people as would pause for the 10 seconds as I blurted out the basics of the show “We have a fan podcast, every Monday on Youtube, here’s a QR code to get there.”
Flawless, right? I cranked up the post-game social media and prepared for what I was hoping would be a record live audience for Monday’s show with goal-scoring team captain Markus Nakkim as our guest. And...
It didn’t happen.
We did slightly better on the total show views, but the live audience was about the same as we always see, and then it returned to the average we’d been seeing through the year.
To compare, this graph (below) shows June, July, and August of 2024. The black vertical line shows when the stickers were passed out. Note, the prior show was when we had then-Head Coach Paul Hardyman on the show.
The stickers seemed to move the needle a little bit, but clearly not the increase I was expecting after passing out almost 200 QR code stickers.
What’s Next
For 2025, this goal will remain as it feeds up to the Terminal Goal, but we’ve got some different ideas to make this happen. This might mean spending a little money, but we’re hoping to partner with the club more to get our name out into the fan base and in front of people every game day. Check out the next article about Enabling Goal #2.
