Brentford FC: By the Numbers
Overview
Brentford FC was keen to innovate and engage its fanbase around its 2023-24 half-season membership drive.
One of the club’s values is ‘togetherness’, and the club’s content and marketing departments wanted to work with supporters to show the unique benefits of being a Brentford FC member. Alighting upon Greenfly +Engage’s UGC technology, the team devised a strategy of collecting fan-generated content of their favorite moments attending Brentford games to be including in the campaign hero video.
Opportunity
The club had three major campaign goals:
- Drive half-season membership ticket sales and renewals
- Build compelling content for the club’s marketing channels
- Engage existing Bees fans through their original content submissions
Having previously worked with Greenfly, the club’s content director knew the tool was a simple and effective way of gathering and distributing short-form fan content as well as managing automated digital content collection, organization and distribution to players.
A deepened partnership between Brentford and Greenfly to gather content and strengthen the membership sales campaign therefore made a huge amount of sense. Brentford understood Greenfly’s automated software could enhance their membership sales initiative and the relationship to their fans.
“As a club, we are always keen to innovate where it comes to our content and ensure our fans know they are an indelible part of Brentford Football Club. Using Greenfly’s technology, we saw an opportunity to build a membership sales campaign that was led more by the fans than by us. It was our fans telling the story of what it means to go to a game and experience all the emotions of a matchday.
— Simon Meehan, Content Strategy Director, Brentford FC
We are grateful to Greenfly’s technology for supporting us in this task.”
Partnership
Greenfly’s +Engage technology was a natural fit for the club’s aims to drive member ticket sales activation through user-generated content (UGC) from club supporters. The content team wanted to collect video footage from fans in the stands that showcased the energy, emotion and intensity of a Brentford game. They planned to compile these clips into a fan-led, emotion-driven video to kick off the campaign.
With this automated, one-click technology, the content staff had a customizable and mobile-friendly branded web page published in a matter of minutes to solicit and collect the fan clips. They also had built-in perpetual usage rights to edit and distribute that submitted media, royalty-free. The team used Instagram Stories to reach fans and ask for their submissions.
+Engage has enhanced and speeded UGC collection methods, including messaging and cloud services, producing a streamlined process for both the content staff and fans.
The collected videos were automatically tagged and routed into an organized media library — all within the Greenfly platform. The content team quickly reviewed and selected the assets they wanted to use to edit together the campaign compilation video.
They ran the completed video across Brentford’s social channels as part of a paid social ad campaign to introduce the membership sales drive.
Impact
Greenfly +Engage simplified the Bees’ UGC workflows, making it easy for the content team to execute a fan engagement campaign quickly.
Within days, the team collected 37 fan videos capturing the excitement of Brentford FC matches — surpassing their expectations.
Greenfly helped the team aggregate, organize and leverage a strong digital asset that brought Bees fans together in real time and allowed them to share that experience with their broader fan base.
The message around access to tickets was brought to life by the UGC content. This initiative yielded more half-season membership sales than anticipated from the team’s first paid social ad campaign promoting these packages.
And as the club’s content strategy continues to grow and evolve, this type of content will be key in helping the team achieve their objectives.
Header image photo credit: George Tewkesbury, Brentford FC. Photos and video: Courtesy of Brentford FC.
