Big East College Basketball Marketing: #16 DePaul

It's time to dive into the programs of the Big East Conference. I'm excited about this one - as the history in this conference is amazing. Every squad has a chance to define what they stand for, and to sell the Big East in the process.

We're going to look at how programs are communicating to young athletes from a digital point of view. We dive into this because websites and digital marketing create an opportunity for coaches and programs to share what they stand for. The internet is always there, and always on. And, as they do on the court, the best programs take advantage of opportunities.

So let's get moving.

#16 DePaul

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Good branding of Blue Tube and YouTube

Weaknesses: Really limited ability to connect with this year's team.

Full Scouting Report:

As we hit the DePaul home page, shown below, you'll notice a super small font and a jammed feeling navigation that results from it. Let's look around. (I'll zoom in for you where it is needed!)



First, I noted a MultiMedia Callout. Mousing over this takes us to a pretty good list of ways to check out DePaul Athletics. We'll dive into each.



I love the name and logo around Blue Tube. It's smart, leveraging the YouTube brand in a DePaul-centric way. But clicking in does not leverage the YouTube brand, as you'll see it is a Pay for content system. Sigh.




Keeping my credit card out of this, I moved on to the DePaul YouTube Channel, here. They seem to be pretty active in sharing highlights of the Blue Demons. There are game highlights and highlights of Blue Madness here. While it isn't a basketball-only channel, I am excited to follow this through the season.




Moving on to the DePaul Athletics Twitter presence, you'll see they have a pretty active page (here), and 972 followers. But in terms of originality, there really isn't anything here I can't get elsewhere - it's mostly just game updates. Which, while good to share, don't make for a site I can't wait to see. The other issue I had was in who DePaul Follows - see the boxes in the lower right hand side. I can't find the pattern really, but those they follow include Hofstra, Miami, and UCF among others.




Hungry for basketball content, I moved into the Blue Demons Basketball section. You'll (hopefully) see the callouts to the right of Men's Basketball - which I'll move into.



First, the Media Guide is available to check out online. I know most programs do something like this, thus it isn't something to get uber-excited about, but it is leveraging what you have and thus it's good to call out. It also shows how over time what is created in a Media Guide is becoming much more important. At one point this was a guide for the Media (hence the name). It is no longer that. This is a Program Guide.





Here's a case of not really leveraging what you have. DePaul isn't known for having a big NBA Presence. But as you can see below, they have some great success stories - Mark Aguirre and Wilson Chandler... However this is just a text link that (where available) links to a page on NBA.com.



As you can tell by now, there just isn't any content on this year's team on the site. I did some digging around and found Assistant Coach Tracy Webster is up on Twitter, shown below. He's got around 200 followers, but also isn't very active in giving us a connection to this year's squad.



Which sums up DePaul. A great program in a great conference with some great alums. They need to become more current and connected to a new generation of young athletes and fans. And they need to open their team up to the world.

Come back tomorrow as we keep moving through the Big East.

Andy