AVP
Brand beyond the sand.
As new ownership ushered AVP into a new era, America’s professional beach volleyball tour was looking to take the sport to new heights and continue its 40 year development of brand equity. The AVP wanted to reposition itself as one of the country’s premier sports leagues and summer event series, bringing the ultimate beach day to both volleyball fans and casual fans.
The AVP approached Brand Knew, specifically because of the agency’s strong sports division. As AVP’s creative and digital agency of record, Brand Knew provided a complete website overhaul to optimize the league’s digital home, developed a broad creative marketing strategy that grew the sport’s social media reach, and brought an intimate, on-the-ground approach to covering each major tournament. Brand Knew brought the excitement on the sand to broader audiences by shoring up AVP’s digital narrative.
AVP: Digitally Enhanced.
AVP is always in search of creative strategies to deliver immersive action to fans across the country, including those who couldn’t attend tournaments in person. The previous online experience for tournaments was not user-friendly, confusing fans who were clicking in circles in search of information. AVP’s digital platforms also lacked consistent updates, which created a major disconnect between fans on the sand and those at home.
Using proprietary technology, Brand Knew developed a one-of-a-kind experience for AVP fans across desktop and mobile. Live scoring and bracket features were added so that fans across the globe could track live results. Thanks to this seamless integration of real-time updates and user-friendly designs, the AVP has been able to provide an unparalleled beach volleyball experience to millions of fans over the past four seasons. During the 2022 season, the bracket system was the site’s most popular page, earning 906,000 visits and an ‘Average Time on Page’ 75% longer than that of the overall website.
AVP: Digitally Enhanced.
AVP is always in search of creative strategies to deliver immersive action to fans across the country, including those who couldn’t attend tournaments in person. The previous online experience for tournaments was not user-friendly, confusing fans who were clicking in circles in search of information. AVP’s digital platforms also lacked consistent updates, which created a major disconnect between fans on the sand and those at home.
Using proprietary technology, Brand Knew developed a one-of-a-kind experience for AVP fans across desktop and mobile. Live scoring and bracket features were added so that fans across the globe could track live results. Thanks to this seamless integration of real-time updates and user-friendly designs, the AVP has been able to provide an unparalleled beach volleyball experience to millions of fans over the past four seasons. During the 2022 season, the bracket system was the site’s most popular page, earning 906,000 visits and an ‘Average Time on Page’ 75% longer than that of the overall website.
Game-Changing Navigation.
Brand Knew also created and launched an entirely new navigation and homepage UI/UX, introducing an updated brand aesthetic that is specifically tailored for digital usage. During tournaments, a live dashboard displays current match scores and stats above the fold so that fans following any match can see live updates as soon as they reach the AVP homepage.
Brand Knew’s cumulative efforts to overhaul AVP’s website resulted in considerable growth metrics over the past three seasons. Web users have grown steadily each year since 2020, going from 445K users in 2020 to almost 1 million in 2022, making it clear that our implementations are of special interest to the AVP faithful.
AVP + YouTube: An Unstoppable Duo.
With the advent of a new 16-event season in 2022 came the challenge for a new way to stream the AVP action – Youtube.
In past seasons, fans made sure to express dissatisfaction for paid services that blocked them from watching the events, whether it be Amazon Prime or Peacock. In 2022, with a full summer of non-stop volleyball at our disposal, the AVP switched to free streaming via Youtube, claiming full autonomy over event streaming & covering multiple courts at once.
Brand Knew was tasked with managing and updating the Youtube channel, as well as spreading the good news to fans about free volleyball for the summer.
Total views of our live matches saw a steady uptick throughout the season, starting at 90K hours of watch time at our first tournament in May and climbing all the way to 142K hours by the time we hit the Manhattan Beach Open in August. By the end of 2022, we had amassed 67M impressions on the platform and saw organic subscriber growth of 38% in 5 months.
Throughout the year, AVP streams tallied over 17 Million views on Youtube.
Raising the Net.
AVP athletes run in circles on the court, but there’s no need for their fans to run in circles on the AVP site in search of information. Completely redesigning and recalibrating the homepage after an audit of user behavior and site analytics, Brand Knew developed a user interface and infrastructural design that narratively highlighted the right information at the right time. Bringing the most pertinent tournament information above the fold and ensuring simple navigation, Brand Knew designed a beautiful, streamlined experience that delivers a story as users scroll, reflecting the in-person experience fans have as they approach the beach, walk on the sand and enter the stadium.
Intimately understanding the complexity of these tournaments, a dynamic schedule was created to provide up-to-date information, based on the highest-traffic moments of the season. Brand Knew redeveloped the homepage to funnel different types of fans towards the different types of experiences they seek: athletes directed to Athlete Corner, fans attending events directed to the schedule, fans following from afar directed to live streaming and live scoring, and casual fans directed to educational materials about the sport and opportunities to get involved.
Serving Beach Volleyball to the Masses.
Brand Knew developed a creative marketing strategy that catered as much to the old school beach volleyball fans as it does to the substantial Gen Z market that has shown increasing fondness for the sport. Following the AVP’s lead on a revamped season structure of 16 Tour Stops nationwide, we introduced the #NoHoldingBack campaign, which signified the AVP’s unwavering determination to reinvigorate fandom for professional beach volleyball post-pandemic.
This multi-platform social media strategy was immersive, extending the new live experience to fans keeping up with the tournaments on YouTube. Our tactics included supporting the AVP livestream broadcasts with real-time tournament updates on all social media channels, high-quality graphics and produced video highlights, and match results on Instagram Stories. During 2022, Brand Knew’s efforts led to 168.1M+ impressions, over 200 pieces of produced content for Instagram Reels, and 252.3K new followers across all social platforms.
Serving Beach Volleyball to the Masses.
Brand Knew developed a creative marketing strategy that catered as much to the old school beach volleyball fans as it does to the substantial Gen Z market that has shown increasing fondness for the sport. Following the AVP’s lead on a revamped season structure of 16 Tour Stops nationwide, we introduced the #NoHoldingBack campaign, which signified the AVP’s unwavering determination to reinvigorate fandom for professional beach volleyball post-pandemic.
This multi-platform social media strategy was immersive, extending the new live experience to fans keeping up with the tournaments on YouTube. Our tactics included supporting the AVP livestream broadcasts with real-time tournament updates on all social media channels, high-quality graphics and produced video highlights, and match results on Instagram Stories. During 2022, Brand Knew’s efforts led to 168.1M+ impressions, over 200 pieces of produced content for Instagram Reels, and 252.3K new followers across all social platforms.
AVP's Digital Media Takeover.
Serving professional beach volleyball content to the next generation of fans is an achievement Brand Knew has proudly championed, which meant that in 2022, we felt compelled to explore emerging platforms like TikTok and Youtube Shorts. From capturing live handheld footage on the ground at AVP events, following viral trends and sounds on TikTok to feature AVP stars, and repurposing traditional highlights into snackable content, Brand Knew’s Marketing and Production team created a blueprint to target the growing demands of the Gen Z audience. These efforts resulted in nearly 8 Million video views, an average engagement rate of 10.5%, and an impressive 203K new followers on TikTok in just eight short months.
Brand Knew also implemented an extensive digital media buying strategy, bringing the AVP to fans and prospective consumers across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google. The team executed a narrowly targeted ad buy and then used a variety of retargeting tactics to drive ticket sales and tournament attendance in relatively non-traditional beach volleyball markets. The Phoenix Championships ticket sales strategy returned a ROAS of over 5X.
Ya Dig?
It was hard to call it work when we were having so much fun. The Brand Knew marketing staff created every single piece of AVP content, traveled with the AVP tour across the nation, and developed meaningful relationships with dozens of players. Following Brand Knew’s leadership and a carefully curated content strategy, the AVP brand has pivoted from an event-based brand to a media company that is growing the sport of beach volleyball across the country.
The data showed that the content resonated. Comparing the 2022 season to the first full season since the Covid Pandemic cut the 2020 and 2021 seasons short, the average time spent on AVP blog pages has climbed 304%, while the videos have garnered 32.5M+ views on Facebook and YouTube. With this momentum, the overall growth of the AVP brand continues on course to make the every-four-year Olympic obsession with American beach volleyball, a year-round fanaticism.
Ya Dig?
It was hard to call it work when we were having so much fun. The Brand Knew marketing staff created every single piece of AVP content, traveled with the AVP tour across the nation, and developed meaningful relationships with dozens of players. Following Brand Knew’s leadership and a carefully curated content strategy, the AVP brand has pivoted from an event-based brand to a media company that is growing the sport of beach volleyball across the country.
The data showed that the content resonated. Comparing the 2022 season to the first full season since the Covid Pandemic cut the 2020 and 2021 seasons short, the average time spent on AVP blog pages has climbed 304%, while the videos have garnered 32.5M+ views on Facebook and YouTube. With this momentum, the overall growth of the AVP brand continues on course to make the every-four-year Olympic obsession with American beach volleyball, a year-round fanaticism.
Membership.
AVP wanted to turn the casual beach volleyball viewer into a year-round paying AVP fan. To facilitate this, the AVP offered memberships with perks like discounts on merchandise, travel, and first priority for VIP ticket experiences. While the perks of an AVP Membership were already known by the diehard fan, their membership portal needed updating to make it more intuitive & user friendly to appeal to a wider audience.
Brand Knew’s rebuild of the entire AVP Membership portal led to more efficient revenue generation and increased web traffic. Clear articulation of the benefits AVP members could expect to receive at each membership tier, coupled with enhanced user experience in membership profile generation, resulted in drastically reduced friction for converting prospective members.
In the year after launching AVP’s improved membership portal, the AVP saw a 41.7% increase in membership sign ups and a 51.1% YoY increase in gross revenue.
