How the World Surf League is leveraging fan data without tickets or arenas

Ticket sales and in-arena transactions bring a wealth of fan data to sports teams and leagues, which can use it to understand, target, and grow their audiences.

The World Surf League (WSL), pro surfing’s international governing body, has access to neither. WSL competitions tend to take place at public beaches, where no tickets are required for general admission.

Nevertheless, for the past few years, the organization has undertaken an audience intelligence initiative meant to help WSL execs and marketers understand surfing’s existing audience, divide it into key segments, and tailor communications and content to each. The goal is to unlock new fans ahead of LA28, when surfing will serve as an Olympic sport for only the third time.

“With the growth of participation in surfing, the growth of the types of people surfing, the emergence of wave-pool technology that’s bringing surfing inland, and surfing being in the Olympics, it’s opened up the awareness around surfing and access to it,” Travis Tan, former director of global and North America marketing for the WSL, told Marketing Brew. “That is our next great fanbase to build and to reach.”

Fan funnel barrel

Prior to building a formal fan database, the WSL team had a solid, albeit unproven, understanding of its audience, said Tan, who recently left the league after about four years. Many WSL employees are surfers or know surfers, and the league has deep ties with the communities where it hosts events, he said.

“We had really good understanding and hypotheses, but we didn’t really have [those] fully foundational, data-backed insights around who our audience is, what else are they doing, all of all of those things that build out a profile,” Tan told us.

The WSL tapped Two Circles, a sports and entertainment marketing agency focused on fan data, to build out its fan intelligence practice via brand tracking, fan surveys, and other first- and third-party data, like purchase info from the league’s merch store and engagements with the league’s digital ecosystem, including its app, fantasy game, and bracket challenge. Tan described the project as being similar to Major League Soccer’s Fan Genome platform, which uses more than 1,000 data points to segment and target fans.

The WSL uses that fan intelligence to inform its four audience segments based on their level of fandom: superfans, committed fans, lifestyle fans, and younger “next-wave” fans, according to Corey DeLaney, director of marketing and consulting at Two Circles.

The groups were identified largely via survey work, DeLaney said. From there, the Two Circles and WSL teams looked at data from paid media efforts and social listening to identify attributes of the different segments, like what platforms they tend to use and other sports they’re interested in, she said. That intel then informs how the WSL communicates with different fans.

“If you’re a superfan, you know everything about WSL, you don’t need to be told what’s happening,” DeLaney said. “If you’re a lifestyle fan, you might need some more hand-holding around how the competitions work, how scoring works, how judging works.”

It’s a lifestyle

The lifestyle fans and next-wave fans present big opportunities for the WSL, especially with the Summer Olympics coming up and likely drawing more attention to the sport. On-demand and social content, DeLaney said, plays a big role in moving those fans up the funnel, in part because surf competitions move around the world, making them harder to regularly tune in to.

When social media users engage with content like highlight clips, the league can sort those users into segments and figure out “the next logical touch point for you to get deeper down the funnel,” DeLaney told us.

Athletes play a big role in the WSL’s content strategy, she added. In other solo sports, and even team sports, athletes drive modern fandom, and surfing is no different. “They are the product,” DeLaney said, so the WSL leans into their personalities, does collab posts with surfers, and is generally invested in building athletes’ individual brands alongside the league’s. In turn, surfers’ content can help make fan recruitment “feel less marketing-y, more organic,” DeLaney told us, potentially generating interest for the league.

LA28 is also poised to potentially turn the tide of interest in surfing, like the way the World Cup helped drive fandom for soccer in North America, she said. It just comes down to how the WSL can capitalize.

“Because we don’t have that big, single source of truth, ticket sales piece, it causes us to get a little bit more creative…and look at things a little bit differently, which I think is a blessing and a curse and a challenge, but something that we’re getting pretty good at,” DeLaney said.