ECAL’s Top Trends In Calendar is here! This special 4-week series showcases the latest techniques and strategies used by the most progressive brands in calendar marketing at ECAL. This week we focus on trends in Audience Building.

Pre-Promotion Campaigns

The release of the season schedule has become a highly anticipated event for fans, and presents an important opportunity for brands. It not only keeps fans engaged during the off-season, but a well-orchestrated, well-hyped schedule release event builds excitement and anticipation for the season, and keeps the brand front of mind for longer. Fans with renewed hope and expectation for the season ahead are keen to know the schedule, and plan their lives accordingly! For brands, it is a critical opportunity to connect and engage with high value, passionate fans with the official digital calendar service, powered by ECAL.

The very best brands are taking this a step further, with a pre-promotion campaign launched up to seven (7) days prior to schedule release. Standout, takeover creative and editorial messaging encourages fans to sync their calendar now to receive the schedule first, as soon as it’s released, straight to your calendar. This strategy has proven hugely successful in growing your connected calendar audience, whilst working to create a buzz and positive virality around the upcoming schedule release. So, two days of typical promotion turns into two weeks. Check out these pre-promotion campaigns by two of the very best brands in Premier League and International Cricket Council.

Online Member Sign-up

Single Member ID architecture is a growing trend across many leading brands, aimed at providing instant access to a range of premium features, with greater personalisation, more relevant content and deeper engagement.  Keen to convert largely anonymous fans to known and more engaged online members, brands are increasingly looking to provide premium features behind a sign up / sign in form. Your ECAL digital calendar is one popular service that can help you achieve your goal of online member conversion. Ultimately, the size of your calendar audience is likely to be less than normal, but if brands believe in the benefits of building a high value committed online membership, it’s definitely a popular feature that works well to turn the tide of users in adopting your online membership concept.

Check out how leading brand Liverpool FC ‘gate’ their users to sign up / sign in to access their ‘Sync to Calendar’ feature.