Tuesday, January 12, 2010

MVC College Basketball Marketing: #10 Creighton

It's time to continue our journey, looking at how programs are communicating to young athletes (or fans) from a digital point of view. Websites and digital marketing are the great equalizer -- a place where every program can share what they stand for. And I'd argue all of this is even more critical for the Mid Majors out there. Smart marketing can help build that connection that gets you the athlete you need.

Let's get moving.

# 10 Creighton
The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Nice photo galleries and very easy to contact Coach Altman

Weaknesses: Really no ways to follow this program at all.

Full Scouting Report:
I expected Creighton to market themselves well (picking them to be best in the Valley, here). They have a gorgeous gym, a program that seems to hit 20 wins every season, and they do a great job of recruiting. As you can guess by now, things don't always end up just as I expect them to. The Creighton athletics page, here, had a powerful statement visually. The layout is appealing and immersive.



The first thing I'm drawn into is the Fan Zone (image here). Sadly, the biggest statement inside the fan zone is a visual of a bicycling event. Weird. And not good weird.


Fortunately, there is some good stuff here. As you can see, Creighton has a really thorough and nice Photo Gallery. Cool. I'd just like to see this set up in a way to let you easily send these images to Facebook. Share the Jays visuals!



Scrolling down to the bottom of Home Page and you'll see the nice visual statement extended to the Valley. Cool.




OK, moving on, I went to the Creighton basketball home page, here. You'll notice they provide additional links on Men's Hoops on the left-hand side of the page. I'll zoom in.



As you can see, Creighton does a couple of great things here. One, they elevate recruiting - albeit only through a questionnaire. Still they elevate this for the prospective student athlete.


They provide you access to their coaches. Head Coach Dana Altman is one of the top coaches in the conference, and (as you can see here), they make it very easy to call or email him. Many programs don't provide an easy way to connect with their coaches and Creighton doesn't fall into that trap.



The Jays give you access to their Media Guide here (along with past seasons). But they don't let you view these online (you have to download them as PDFs). I like having access to past seasons, but wish Creighton would extract some of the big moments from their NCAA Tourney teams.



What was definitely missing was any way of following the Creighton Basketball team (or athletics programs as a whole), outside of the email newsletter we saw earlier. Creighton Athletics does have a Twitter Page here, which is not linked into the site. With just under 100 followers, it's clear they are just getting started. This would fill a big void.


That's it. Creighton has a few of the pieces, but really needs to share who they are and what they stand for as a program.

Come back tomorrow as we keep this going.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whenever you post MO State's, feel free to stop by MSUBearNation.com and let us know.

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