For colleges and universities with accredited athletics programs and championships to protect, is their primary goal scouting the .1% of the 1% of star high school athletes? No. It’s consistently building its student athletes’ personal brands while simultaneously growing support for its institution’s team.
So, how are higher education institutions with smaller audiences than their drafted athletes and big-league alumni competing on social media? By running innovative marketing tactics during the off-season and seeing how many media mentions they can tally up.
Last spring, the University of Central Florida’s athletics content marketing team went viral when they experimented with jersey designs by replacing players’ numbers with their Twitter handles for the first spring game.
They tweeted a photo of their starting lineup, the news media covered the experimental design debut, and the organic attention ultimately drove over 6 million impressions to the original tweet.
This year they swapped out the traditional jersey numbers for QR codes, and their engagement numbers aren’t lying—the experiment is working!
Now, each spring fans and spectators expect to see the UCF Knights setting records during the season’s peak and setting trends in the off-season.
Join us on Wednesday, May 25 at 2PM ET/11AM PT to hear how Eric DeSalvo, the Associate Athletic Director of Content at the University of Central Florida develops and executes a trendsetting content marketing strategy and strategic partnerships to catapult both the Knights football players and the team into fame and fortune.
Meet the Speaker
Eric DeSalvo is a UCF ‘09 graduate who has served as the Associate Athletics Director of Content at UCF Athletics for the past 10 years. He also spearheads the department’s social media efforts, oversees all photo, video, and design content coming from the UCF Knights and UCF Football pages, and works closely on content strategy for the 15 additional varsity sports with the athletics communications team.
