Big East College Basketball Marketing: #9 Rutgers

Let's keep moving through the Big East Conference, looking at how programs market themselves. How they are communicating to young athletes online. It's our chance to see how coaches and programs in a power conference stack up against each other -- and how they share what they stand for.

Thus far our journey has shown us #16 DePaul, #15 Seton Hall, #14 U Conn, #13 Notre Dame, #12 Louisville, #11 Pitt, and #10 Cincinnati.

#9 Rutgers

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Super cool tour of their athletics facilities, locker room, and offices.

Weaknesses: Not much updated on this year's team.

Full Scouting Report:

As we dive into the Rutgers home page, here, you'll see a lot of powerful visuals and then a nice little set of icons in the upper right. Let's start there.



As you can now see, Rutgers hits you with a set of easy ways to follow their programs: Email, Facebook, Twitter, and a sweet Podcasts logo. Let's explore.

Clicking on Facebook (or Twitter) takes you to the same place, here, to a nice directory. This is great, as it gives you a simple list of ways to keep in touch.


On the Basketball front, Coach Fred Hill is on Twitter, here. He has 675 followers and is pretty solid at posting interesting observations -- he's just not doing it extremely often.





As you could see in Coach Hill's Twitter page above, he has his own site here, to funnel info on his camps. (And vice versa - he drives people from his Camp site to his Twitter site... Nice).



The Rutgers Athletics Twitter page is here, with over 1500 followers, some personality, and good coverage of all sports. The only thing a little weird here is the Scarlet Knights' mascot, but that's a topic for another day.



Moving ahead, the Scarlet Knights Facebook page is here - with just under 900 fans, albeit a not too active community from what I can tell.... and more mascot pictures.



Rutgers offers Podcasts across all sports. They don't allow you to subscribe by your sport, but they do regularly add new broadcasts. It looks like they have two weekly football programs, meaning their is a feel of predictability (in a good way). Tune in next week and you'll get two new programs.



Moving to the top of the home page, you'll see that there is a Multimedia Section that gives you access to Podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, and Archives of content. It's another way in to the connections we just saw. Solid.



The good news is Rutgers has a Recruiting Menu Item. The bad news is that the content beneath it is not deep, inspirational, or basketball-focused and that they called this Recruiting. Recruits would be more correct. And Be A Scarlet Knight is more impactful.



Here's the Welcome Page that greets potential student-athletes. It's a powerful visual, I just wish there was a way to pump the Basketball vision here as well!



So let's move to the Basketball home page, which at first glance feels very much like the home page. There's some power beneath this visual though, which we'll go through now.



The Rutgers Coaching Staff is shown below. But I could have chosen any page in the basketball section for this. Rutgers gives you the ability, in one click, to share the page you are looking at with your friends in about every way you could imagine... and that means way beyond Twitter, Facebook, or Email.



Rutgers does a couple of other simple things really well. First, they give you a look at their Final Four season -- from 1976. Recall we just went through Cincinnati and did not see anything about their 1992 Final Four. This is a big deal for many reasons -- but most important in my opinion is to paint the picture in the minds of a recruit that if you come here, greatness is possible.

The other big area Rutgers Basketball succeeds is here - a photographic tour of their facilities. This is something that is just surprising we don't see more often -- it's a look at a day in the life of your team. It's a visual cue for what you as a recruit will experience if or when you come here. And it's a strength of most Big East schools. So show it off!

Here's the Locker Room.




And their Film Viewing Room. Not a bad place to watch your game footage, huh?


And, finally, Rutgers offers a fully interactive tour of their spaces: Lounge, Locker Room, Practice and Game Facilities. The combination of these visuals and video is strong and effective as it creates a premium positioning at Rutgers!


That concludes the first half of our Big East programs. Come back tomorrow as we move into the upper division... the top 8 programs. Who's going to win this thing?

Andy