You Need a Funnel

Here's something that would embarrass most sports organizations if said out loud in a room full of their own people: they have no idea how someone becomes their customer.

I don't mean that in a philosophical sense. I mean it literally. If you walked into the average front office and asked someone to draw you a diagram—a simple picture—of how a person goes from never having heard of you to buying a ticket, you'd get a lot of uncomfortable silence and maybe a flowchart from a consultant deck that nobody actually uses. The NFL can tell you. They had to get serious about it, and the NFL centralized first-party fan data to streamline outreach and enhance personalization—by consolidating fan profiles previously scattered across systems, the league gained a clear view of an audience of 70+ million active fans across league and team properties. That took intentional architecture. It didn't happen by accident. Most teams aren't the NFL. Most teams don't even have a napkin sketch.

What I'm talking about is a marketing funnel. Yeah, I know—it sounds like a 2004 HubSpot blog post. Bear with me, because the concept is simple and the application is almost nowhere in sports. And that gap is costing teams real money. Think of it like a record. Side A is the band everyone knows—the hit, the banger, the thing that gets people through the door. That's Awareness. It's people who simply know you exist. Maybe they saw a clip on TikTok. A WSC Sports report on fan viewing habits found that 55% of fans said they discovered new players, teams, or leagues through YouTube Shorts or TikTok. That is the top of your funnel, and for most orgs, it's where their "strategy" both starts and ends. Post content, get eyeballs, done. But awareness without a next step is just noise. It's Elvis Costello playing a killer show to an audience that doesn't know where to buy the record. The energy's great. The conversion's zero.

Side B is what separates intentional organizations from everyone else. After Awareness, you need an Engagement layer—a middle of the funnel where someone takes a step that signals they want to stay connected. A newsletter signup. An app download. A social follow that's actually meaningful because you captured an email in exchange for something. The key word here is exchange of value. At the top is Awareness, where a potential fan first encounters your brand or content; if interest is piqued, the fan moves to Interest/Acquisition, then Conversion—where they take a tangible step like registering, buying, or subscribing, and after converting comes Engagement, where the goal is to keep fans active and emotionally invested. That middle step is where most organizations have a black hole. The core problem is that most sports organizations today suffer from disconnected data, underleveraged content, and shallow personalization—a fan might see a viral highlight on Instagram (awareness) but never be guided to the team's owned platforms. The ball drops. The fan disappears back into the algorithm.

And then there's the bottom of the funnel — the Customer. But here's where I want you to think carefully, because "customer" is not one-size-fits-all. What counts as a customer depends entirely on what you're trying to build commercially right now. If you're a new franchise trying to grow your base, a customer might be someone who buys a single-game ticket. If you're an established club trying to deepen revenue per head, a customer is a season ticket member. If you're focused on sponsorship inventory, a customer is a fan who's handed you enough first-party data that you can prove audience value to a brand partner. If the value of a partnership investment isn't clear, brands may reallocate budgets elsewhere — unless teams and leagues can prove the commercial power of their audience, their partnership revenue could likely stall or decline. The bottom of your funnel is a strategic choice, not a default.

So here's the practical part. You want to actually do this? Here's how to start.

Step one: Draw the damn picture. Get a whiteboard. Put "Awareness" at the top, "Engagement" in the middle, "Customer" at the bottom. Under each stage, list every touchpoint your organization currently has at that stage. Social media posts? Top. Email list? Middle. Ticketing platform? Bottom. Do this exercise with your whole extended front office—digital, marketing, ticketing, partnerships, community. The first thing you'll notice is that most of your activity clusters at the top and the bottom, with almost nothing in the middle deliberately designed to move someone from one to the other.

Step two: Name your engagement exchange. For the middle layer to function, you need to decide what you're asking fans to do and what you're giving them in return. Use social platforms as an acquisition layer and deliver the core experience through an owned app, platform, community, or fan hub!—create year-round engagement loops to give fans reasons to show up frequently, and extract your first-party data from value-based interactions. That's the blueprint. A contest entry in exchange for an email. A free digital wallpaper in exchange for an app download. It doesn't have to be expensive. It has to be intentional.

Step three: Get buy-in by making it everyone's problem. The reason funnel thinking doesn't exist in most front offices is that nobody owns the whole thing. Marketing owns awareness. Ticketing owns the transaction. Digital might own the app. Partnerships owns the sponsor. Nobody is sitting in the room saying "how does someone travel through all of these stages?" That meeting needs to happen. Bring the whiteboard. Show people where fans are entering and where they're falling out. The most insidious leak comes from fragmented fan experiences—if your ticketing, merch, and digital teams operate in silos, fans feel unknown and undervalued, and a unified fan identity doesn't exist in many organizations. That's not a technology problem. That's a leadership problem. And the funnel is how you make it visible. The funnel isn't a revolutionary idea. What's revolutionary is that almost nobody in sports has one. Build it, show it to your team, argue about it, refine it. That argument alone — the process of figuring out what sits at each stage—will be worth more than any consultant deck you've ever paid for.

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