MVC College Basketball Marketing: #8 Indiana State

We'll keep moving through the Missouri Valley Conference, 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.

Thus far our journey has shown us #10 Creighton and #9 Evansville .

Let's keep moving.

#8 Indiana State

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Cool photo tour of the weight room plus nice use of photos in Facebook

Weaknesses: Need to leverage history of the program and infuse information on this year's squad.

Full Scouting Report:
I think I had visions of a personal welcome from Larry Bird when I hit the Indiana State home page, here. No Larry, but lots of Blue. You'll notice the Facebook callout in the bottom right.

Facebook.

We'll get to that in a second - I'm too excited for the history! And history was in the site, though it wasn't anywhere near what I expected. Granted, it was about 20 years ago. But think about this. One of the best players to ever play the game led your team to the National Title Game. That's a story that shows the heritage of your program. It's something I think most teams would die to share. And all that is shared is one image and a lot of text... Don't go crazy, but show off your strengths!


Moving on, as I looked at the home page, the Facebook callout on the bottom left hand part of the page popped out. I clicked in here.



They have around 2,400 fans and a very strange profile picture. I'm not sure why ISU chose to focus solely on Women's Basketball as this picture, but it made me do a double take. (Was I really on the ISU Athletics Facebook page?) I was. Clicking through it, I found that they do a nice job of sharing pictures after games. I like that feature a lot, as that makes the pictures very sharable. With 50 albums to date, they are pretty active.

Indiana State also does a nice job of photos on their site - check this gallery out of their new weight room...


Moving on, you'll notice below that ISU gives you a couple of places to access Video on Demand, Sycamore Vision...


Clicking in takes you here, to a premium (subscription only) place. This seems to be a nice video player, but if it is premium, I think you need to call that out early and often.




Scrolling to the bottom of the page, you'll see the ESPN U Headline box. If this was Indiana State headlines, I'd be pumped. But, as you can see below, it is ESPN-U headlines. Not cool. This is a reminder to recruits that other schools are making the news. I'd love to see the Sycamores customize this one, quickly.



In search of Hoops content, I moved on to the basketball home page, here. It's got a lot of the feel of the home page, and I began to look for information on this year's squad.



ISU makes their Basketball Guide (which I'm glad they called it, rather than media guide!) available to download as a PDF or flip through online. The unfortunate thing is that this is really the only information I could find on this year's squad through their site.


Moving to the Coaching Staff, Coach McKenna makes it very easy to contact him. Phone and Email are right there, out in front.



But what I didn't see linked into the site was Coach McKenna's Twitter page, here. He's at 219 followers and does a pretty good job, though he isn't as active as I wish. I did like reading about his search for future "Trees."


Indiana State Athletics is also on Twitter, here. With around 150 followers (and a better background than the ISU Facebook page), they cover all sports and are another site that provides updates on game times, scores, and articles. It's ok, just nothing you can't find somewhere else.



That's it. Come back tomorrow as we keep moving.