The Professional Fighters League (PFL) is an emerging mixed martial arts league and they’re driving growth and success thanks to implementing a thoughtful and well-executed digital strategy, and putting their MMA fighters in position to help grow the brand.
The PFL’s Chief Digital Officer Daniel Ghosh-Roy recently sat down for an extensive Q&A with Engage by Hashtag Sports to discuss the league’s content strategy, operations, empowerment of athletes, and more. Here are a few excerpts from that interview with Ghosh-Roy.
Professional Fighter’s Leauge: Digital Strategy
Ghosh-Roy: “When it comes to the PFL’s digital strategy, we break it down based on three objectives: audience growth & engagement, brand awareness, and content consumption.
“We work with our fighters, their teams, and our partners to tell the best stories through content—video, images, and editorial—and that helps drive towards our three objectives. We try to be well prepared heading into these fights and when the bell rings, anything can happen.”
PFL’s Content Strategy
Ghosh-Roy discussing PFL’s content: “We’re not trying to fit into some stodgy sports league mold—every day we’re trying new things, we’re working on new content, we’re inviting our audience to help build this league into something they’re proud of and something they can get behind…”
He also talked about working with their fighters to create a diverse content mix and how they use the Greenfly platform to not only collaborate on content creation, but also as an indispensable communication tool. “We’re not always looking for fight-focused content—we want our fighters to showcase their personalities. So we communicate with them through Greenfly.
“A good example of that is when we hit up Kayla Harrison on the 4th of July and asked for some content to get fans in the right celebratory mood. She sent over a great selfie. Her at the pool, stars-and-stripes bikini, and hat, her Olympic sunglasses, floating on her inflatable unicorn—her nickname at her gym is The Last Unicorn—and she wished everyone a Happy Fourth. The fans loved that, and that’s the power of us being able to connect with our athletes on a one-to-one basis through these great tools.”
Distributing Content on Fight Nights
During a fight night, the league has a cage-side desk where the digital and social team are pulling content from the live feed and distributing real-time highlights across platforms to drive tune-in retention.
Ghosh-Roy: “We’re curating content, and then we’re simultaneously sending all of this content out through Greenfly to our fighters’ feed. It’s seamless, and we take great pride in seeing the fighters’ social handles start popping off with content when they’re still in the building, even sometimes when they just got out of the cage. That’s something that is really exciting when we see it happen—and it happens every single fight.”
What the Athletes Think
Ghosh-Roy: “The greatest impact of giving the fighters fast access to content is that at the start, it gave them an appetite for it. Once you get a taste for it, it becomes addictive. There’s nothing more satisfying than getting messages from the fighters asking for more content.”
Read the full article online at Engage by Hashtag Sports
