Interactive football quiz: engaging fans online

Whatever the sport, whether you’re marketing for a team, marketing for an event, or even a national sporting body, sports fans are unique. There are few target segments more knowledgeable, or more passionate about a subject than a fandom.

In this case, let’s consider appealing to football fans. Today’s fan isn’t the same as yesterday’s fan. The days of supporting the same team as your father’s father’s father by default aren’t exactly gone, but people today are more geographically mobile, more technologically empowered, and are able to quite literally follow teams playing on a different continent if they so wish.

Just having a local football ground, some players, and holding your own in your domestic league doesn’t really cut it for sports marketing any more. Even the top teams in the English Premier League, La Liga, and the Bundesliga are experimenting in how they can more effectively connect with fans, and elevate the fan experience – both locally, and across the globe.

One way that works especially well is through the varying uses of interactive quizzes

The power of interactive quizzes

An interactive quiz is a quiz you can access on any modern device. A PC, a tablet, or perhaps most usefully for connecting with fans, a smartphone.

It’s a way to test fans, educate fans, and collect valuable data for your football club’s future sales and marketing actions.

Remember that self-evident truth about football fans: people who are willing to shell out on a season ticket, buy that season’s jersey, or even just commit to 90 minutes to two hours to watch a game, maybe even with friends and get in drinks and food to make an occasion of it, LOVE the sport of football. What’s more, they love their team.

When you love something, you subconsciously study it. You try to imbibe every aspect of it. You make yourself an unofficial expert – a resource for the uninitiated or football fan to be.

Ask quiz questions that appeal to the passion of a football fan

This is specialist subject knowledge, not general. While football can be a component of a trivia or a general knowledge quiz, when it comes to engaging fans, specialisation is the name of the game.

How their team has performed over the years, such as when they got to a significant final, or when a star player broke a league record, can be a source of nostalgia and pride fans enjoy reminiscing about, and asking questions that evoke those memories can carry real weight in delivering a positive experience for them, and a productive interaction for your business.

For newer fans, it’s as much about discovery. Manchester United, West Ham, and Arsenal may all be football clubs in the English Premier League now, but where were they 100 years ago? Why do the fans sing the songs and chant the chants they do in the stands?

Football fans love competition, so let them compete

If you’re using a powerful quiz builder platform like Drimify, you can enable the leaderboard to create competition among your football team’s fans.

This could be on an individual quiz or experience basis, or you could use the Leaderboard Combo™ app to create a virtual league table, collating fans’ scores week after week, to crown the most knowledgeable among them. (Or at least reward the top 50 with a place in a prize draw for next season’s kit.)

Use the quiz as part of a larger fan experience promotion

Of course, quizzes are a great draw in and of themselves for connecting with football fans, and as such, they can also work great for larger, more immersive fan activations.

Using the interactive quiz as part of a digital calendar

For football teams, Christmas means there are big opportunities for selling merchandise and tickets as gifts. However, if every retailer and manufacturer of X, Y, and Z hot products are making big swings – and you best believe they are – and there’s considerably less pertinent league action happening to keep their attention, more sustained and immersive digital tools are required.

One ideal way in the build up to Christmas is to create a digital advent calendar specifically to appeal to football fans. This could be over the entire month of December on a once a day basis, or even once a week. A mix of instant win games to distribute prizes, content screens to get across the team’s messaging, and football quizzes with trivia questions that tap into nostalgia and discovery about the team, their stars, and their prospects in the league.

If you were to weight it more heavily around the football quizzes, you could do niche football or team topics to appeal specifically to your target, such as their significance in league history, which players have represented their countries in the Fifa World Cup, and call it something like “The Ultimate Fan Christmas Quiz Series,” and put the top 50 performers into a prize draw.

Pro tip: Still keep the majority of the prizes to giveaway in this type of experience in the instant win games. That way, participants who fall behind won’t stop playing, as they’ll still have chances to win.

You want as many players as possible to make it to the end to see your branded messaging and calls to action (CTA), such as links to project pages or other strategic pages on your team’s website.

Using the quiz to support sponsor promotions

Professional sports, from the top performing Premier League club, to the small town football team made up of semi-pros, live on sponsorship. Therefore, typically, there are a lot of opportunities to cross-promote with these sponsors.

Ultimately, your football team’s fans, and your football team’s reach, globally, locally, and across social, is a resource, and their money allows you to upgrade your stadium, pay everyone’s salaries, and recruit the stars and raw talent that can keep the club moving forward. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

Therefore it makes sense to combine some communications projects, and for the football side of those projects, a part that can majorly entertain and engage fans, you can use the interactive football quiz format.

Consider the following use case: a major budget hotel chain sponsoring a premier league club, looking to promote their travel packages.

They could use Drimify’s Combo™ format, that allows you to combine games in a direct sequence, to create the following experience:

• Football trivia quiz, with questions and answers designed to captivate and appeal to the team’s fans, and start things on the right foot
• Survey, to gather some first-party data about fan travel habits, needs, and wants
• Instant win game to distribute team merchandise

Different screens in the experience deliver various tactical content on behalf of the sponsor, help them gather data, and tease the chance to win a prize, keeping the most amount of people possible engaged until the end.

Add interactivity to the club’s fan app with topical quizzes

Interactive quizzes built on enterprise-grade quiz builders like Drimify offer easy integration for sports teams across their digital channels. Whether it’s embedding them (or their leaderboard) on a landing page on their website, or within their team’s app.

Having exclusive quizzes inside the app is a great way to maximise user time inside the app, and also to promote discovery. This could be in the form of a catalogue, that leads to participants earning badges or points that can down the road be exchanged for prizes, like a free coffee at the stadium cafe, or bigger prizes as and when they’re available and make business sense.

Interactive quizzes in-stadium

Going to a match day is about so much more than just watching 90 minutes of football plus injury time. It’s a day out, with food and entertainment.

You could put QR codes on the backs of the seats, in programmes, or at strategic locations, and you can engage every fan in the stands with a smartphone in an interactive half-time quiz. This could be used with an end screen CTA to promote a specific food stall or vendor in the stadium, or some other partner brand.

Modern day football fan engagement

It all comes down to how passionate football fans are, both about their sport, and most importantly, about their team.

The modern day sports fan has a whole planet of teams they can get behind, follow and engage with, so it’s up to in-house marketing departments to push the boundaries and maximise their relevance, both locally, and globally.

Interactive quizzes offer an easy to deploy digital tool that ticks a lot of boxes, and can boost fan interaction inside the stadium, inside apps, and on both local and global levels.

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