
The Inches: Finding the best vessel for promotion
How we worked backwards to find an adoption fire starter
Each week we’ll dive into the little insights we find each week while putting our platforms into the wild with our clients. Our hope is that as we find solutions, they can help your team as well.
🔑 Keys from this talk:
The Problem: With the Seattle Storm we were plateauing in downloads mid-season for their mobile application. In a quest to drive downloads we went searching for a new promotional vessel to move the needle on adoption.
The Answer (for now): Instagram Stories ended up being the vessel that worked best for increasing downloads. With the implementation of our DoppsPicks content on IG Stories we were able to 4X our daily average downloads.
The Insights: After working backwards we realized that next time we tackle this problem we should look at 2 items:
- Understanding Your Target Users
This seems basic but is a big part of why Instagram Stories worked. It matched our current age demographic (76% of our users are age 18–35) for users on the platform. If our goal is attracting a younger fan base then we need to advertise where they’re consuming info on the team. Twitter had been our bread & butter in the past but by looking outside to a new social vessel we were able to move the needle on downloads. Had we sat down and looked at our current demographics we could have found IG Stories as a solution quickly)
2. Write Out Your Fan’s Schedule On Game Day
What we found is that if we schedule out our fan’s schedule on game day you can see every point they interact with your team whether it’s on social, in person, or in-stadium. By writing this out we could see that fans watch Storm IG Stories before they even step into the arena and we were able to pinpoint where to integrate the campaign to have the best success. The post below (DoppsPicks) builds curiosity ramping up to game day and pushes fans to take action of downloading the app.
What I would challenge you all to do is schedule out your fan’s actions ramping up to game day and find natural places to integrate promotions your platform. Moving forward we’ll look beyond social to in-person experiences (kids zone before the game, etc.) for other places to integrate in our next promotional campaigns.

Again great results from IG Stories, but the bigger insights come from building a process to replicate this success in the future. For us we’ll now take the two points above to plan out our next promotion campaign.
We hope this helps you get over that plateau to drive those downloads & adoption.
Written by Nick Lawson with SQWAD Sports. SQWAD is a digital engagement company that helps sports teams capture fans on game day and amplify their experience. We work with teams looking to build a digital experience from scratch, pull more engagement out of their current platform, or have specific goals they would like to hit with digital (sponsorship activations, database building, etc.)

