Western is in a unique position as it does not have many large sports teams. There was a vacuum waiting to be filled, and I wanted to rebrand hockey games as the place to be on the weekend. I served as the Marketing Director, helping my team become higher attended than the majority of varsity sports.

I saw an opportunity.

The goal of our content was to drive attendance, build fan loyalty, and give depth to our players. We primarily used Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and FaceBook with a mix of graphics, photos, and video. Our audience was adjusted based on survey data gathered at our home games, which informed our brand voice and content strategy in the following season.

Content Strategy

Graphic content was altered after the instagram algorithm started favoring images without text. Pictures were used as a cover with information available on the next slide.

In the college hockey space there are a few accounts that repost content from across the ACHA and NCAA leagues. Three of these accounts are @achashow, @collegehockeybuzz, and @hockeyhousepod. Working with these accounts we had several pieces of content reposted (occasionally multiple times), increasing our awareness and engagement while exposing our team to their larger audiences.

Expanding our Audience with Earned Media

These collaborations were instrumental in reaching our communication objectives. Posts boosted by these accounts reached up to 828k views, increasing our brand recognition and credibility.

I could not have achieved my goals without help from the incredible media team I hired and trained. Their roles spanned broadcasting, content creation, marketing research, public relations, operations, and photography. Their perspective and insights were invaluable when it came to appealing to our target market, and the opportunity to develop skills in their respective industries helped them immensely. They added incredible value to our program and I would not hesitate to work with any of them in the future.

The Media Team

Brand Design

Brand design was in compliance with WWU Athletics. Despite not being a varsity sport I stuck with the same branding guidelines in order to increase integration between departments and credibility for our team.

Brand voice was determined based on our survey data. Since our audience is 63% women, which is a higher proportion than the total student population, we catered our brand voice to better speak to a majority female audience. We used similar language to increase the relatability of our content.

Brand Voice

Additionally, I paid attention to the style of posts our target market uses for themselves. I implemented “aesthetic” style photo dumps after games, and created a companion account called @iceviksonfilm. This account houses exclusively vintage “polaroid-style” photo dumps of our players in more casual environments, showing their personalities. Engagement routinely doubled on these posts.

To engage the local community we had several on-campus initiatives to increase awareness of the team and attendance at home games. Based on the marketing research data, our audience is composed largely of first and second year students aged 18-20. To engage these students we targeted places that they frequented, such as lecture halls, dorms, and campus recreation events. Our initiatives included: moving freshmen into dorms, leaving free entry tickets in lecture halls, giving out free food and games at the campus recreation info fair, and putting up posters around campus with a QR code to our website.

Grassroots Engagement

Until I created this website, our team had no online presence. Built using Squarespace, this site acts as a hub for any and all information about the team. Adhering to brand elements, this website was differentiated from the cookie-cutter sites often used by other college hockey teams. The two main audiences for this website were potential players and fans.

Potential Players

To appeal to potential players I emphasized the points of differentiation about our program. This includes but is not limited to: high fan attendance at games, the most prominent education programs at Western, and the abundance of activities in Bellingham. All of this culminates in a call to action to fill out a recruiting form. We want recruits to visualize themselves here.

Website Creation

Fans

I wanted to make the fan user experience as smooth as possible, so I immediately addressed two of the most common questions I’ve been asked about my team: where are home games, and what is the schedule. The first thing on our homepage are directions to where games are held, and the second is a widget of our instagram where they can easily find the schedule and other team content.