A professional sports team knew who had bought tickets, but little about who those people were. Persona analysis revealed the fans most likely to attend, and how to find more of them.
Watch the short walkthrough of this case study.
The Challenge
A professional sports team came to Source Path Digital with a problem many established organizations face.
The team had accumulated a sizeable customer and marketing database through ticket sales, inquiries, promotions, and previous campaigns. But the records themselves revealed relatively little about the people behind them.
The organization lacked a deeper understanding of its audience’s:
That created an important gap. The team knew who had purchased or engaged in the past, but it had difficulty translating that history into a clear picture of the kinds of consumers most likely to become future fans and ticket buyers.
Without that understanding, prospecting often risked falling back on broad geography, age, generic sports interest, or platform-native audience definitions.
The advertiser needed a better way to answer: What actually distinguishes a high potential fan in this market, and how can we find more people like them?
Source Path Digital believed the opportunity was not simply to find more people who liked sports, because strong fan potential can emerge from the intersection of several behaviors.
The objective was to move beyond a single “sports fan” designation and identify consumer Personas whose behaviors repeatedly demonstrated stronger potential for awareness, ticket acquisition, attendance, and long-term fan development.
The Analysis
Source Path Digital conducted a market analysis using consumer Personas and a set of sports behaviors selected for their relevance to the team’s audience.
The analysis examined propensity across a variety of signals including:
Each behavior was analyzed against the consumer Personas present in the team’s market. This allowed Source Path Digital to see which types of consumers occurred disproportionately among people demonstrating the behaviors most closely associated with likely fandom.
Importantly, we did not rely on any one trait. A consumer segment that indexed strongly for one sports behavior might represent an interesting opportunity.
A segment that repeatedly indexed strongly across interest, attendance, participation, and adjacent sports affinity represented something much more valuable: a repeatable fan-growth pattern.
What the Data Revealed
The market analysis uncovered several consumer segments with unusually strong relationships to the behaviors surrounding professional soccer fandom.
One of the strongest Personas was 3.76 times as likely to have participated in soccer during the past year.
Another high-value Persona was 2.89 times as likely to have participated in soccer, while also indexing:
Other high-potential Personas demonstrated a broader relationship with women’s and professional sports. One segment was:
Another family-oriented audience over-indexed across seven of the eight sports behaviors analyzed, suggesting an opportunity that extended beyond hardcore sport enthusiasts into households where live sports could become a meaningful family and entertainment occasion.
The strongest prospects were not defined by a single interest. They were defined by a pattern of sports participation, fandom, attendance, and lifestyle alignment.
From Market Signals to Actionable Fan Audience
The analysis allowed Source Path Digital to separate the market into audiences with different roles in the team’s growth strategy.
This created something the advertiser had previously been missing: a practical model of what high-potential fans in its own market actually look like.
The Audience Strategy
Source Path Digital translated the findings directly into a curated, addressable prospect audience.
Rather than targeting everyone who showed some interest in soccer, or relying solely on broad demographics, the audience prioritized consumers whose combined behaviors and Persona characteristics indicated stronger fan potential.
The analysis moved the advertiser from a database of known contacts to an addressable model of the broader fan opportunity surrounding them.
The Outcome
The professional sports team started with a substantial amount of customer data, but limited understanding of the people represented by those records. Source Path Digital added the missing consumer context.
The result was not simply another audience segment. It was a data-driven framework for finding more of the consumers most likely to become fans.
Many professional sports organizations possess large customer databases. What they often lack is a complete understanding of who those customers are beyond the information required to sell them a ticket.
Source Path Digital helps fill that gap.
By combining market level consumer intelligence, behavioral signals, sports engagement, Personas, household context, and propensity analysis, we can identify the consumer patterns surrounding fandom and translate those insights into addressable audiences.
That is the difference between broad sports targeting and a purpose-built fan acquisition strategy.
