Fränkischer Tag: Engaging the local basketball team’s fan community

Main image: The newspaper has promoted its newly launched newsletter for Brose Bamberg fans on Facebook and Instagram.

The pandemic forced the German local newspaper to rapidly rethink its approach to sports journalism. The company quickly identified the fans of the local basketball team, Brose Bamberg, as a potential target audience, and its sports desk has revamped its content production to successfully engage them.


Publisher bio: Fränkischer Tag is a local newspaper, founded in 1946 and situated in Bamberg, a town in Upper Franconia, Germany. It is part of the media company Mediengruppe Oberfranken (mgo), which also owns four other local daily newspapers. Taken together, the newspapers have an editorial team of more than 150 people spread across 7 locations.

Fränkischer Tag has a circulation of more than 82,000 (plus 11,000 e-paper subscribers). Its website, fraenkischertag.de, which was launched in 2021 as an addition to the successful news site infranken.de, uses a freemium model (60–80% of the content is behind a paywall), and has 1,250 digital-only subscribers, along with more than 6,000 print subscribers who also have access to the paywalled content.


Challenge: Finding a new sports content strategy beyond match reports

Some teams in Table Stakes Europe struggle to choose their target audiences. But for others, the process is straightforward – or they may even realise that they’ve stumbled across an audience.

The team from Fränkischer Tag had the latter experience.

The German local newspaper joined Table Stakes Europe to accelerate its digital transformation process and gain more digital subscribers.

It aimed to do this by focusing on specific target audiences, forming mini-publishing teams that serve those audiences’ needs and interests, and thus become a critical source of local news and information.

But unlike many other teams, Fränkischer Tag had already taken a big step towards the audience-first approach – even if they only realised it afterwards.

The roots of this decision go back to the early days of the pandemic. When all sporting events were cancelled in Germany, the newspaper’s sports team were left with daily print sports pages that still needed to be filled, even if there were no games to report on.

“Our sports team decided not to wait for games to start but to talk about the players, how the teams won or lost, and who the people running the teams are,” says Andrea Pauly, Head of Content and Audience Development at fraenkischertag.de.
With this approach, the team led by

Torsten Ernstberger, Head of the sports department, identified the local basketball team, Brose Bamberg, as a particularly promising topic to focus on, thanks to its large and active fan base: the team has 53,000 followers on Facebook alone.

The sports desk quickly set out to cover the Brose Bamberg team, creating content specifically for the newspaper’s website and distributing it on Instagram and Facebook.

As Pauly puts it: “Before we even knew the word, we had set up a mini-publishing team.”

Decisions: Finding new, successful article types

As the pandemic permitted games to start again, the sports team – which includes die-hard basketball enthusiasts – decided to double down on its match reports.

“They watch the games anyway so they decided, we could just as well write about them,” Pauly said.

This means that two journalists cover every Brose Bamberg game, whether the team plays home or away. If possible, the journalists follow the game live at the arena, where they can also interact with the players and fans to enhance their reporting.

Almost all stories about Brose Bamberg are placed behind the website’s paywall. During their Table Stakes Europe journey, the sports team has written almost an article per day about the team.

As mentioned before, the coverage goes well beyond match reports, and looking into the readership data, Fränkischer Tag has seen that articles that consistent- ly perform well include stories about Brose Bamberg’s ex-players and ex-trainers – articles such as “where they are now,” or news about a competition they won recently.

Pauly says the team is also used to thinking about the role each story type has in the broader funnel strategy: “They are always asking themselves: Is this an awareness story, is this an engagement story, or is this a conversion story?”

Outcome: Fans and the basketball league sharing the stories

Another type of article that tends to generate high pageviews and conversions are stories about young talents. What also performs well are – perhaps surprisingly – simply reports from matches.

“We’re not the only ones reporting on the games, but people still pay for it because our experts don’t just write what happens, but also why it happens, what happened before and what happens next,” Pauly says.

The new approach is indeed having an impact: traffic to sports content generally has grown, and articles about sports also tend to get a higher active time on page than most other stories. Interviews perform particularly well in this regard, with an active time always somewhere between 2.5 and 3 minutes.

“We have also seen that fans share our content on their social media,” Pauly says. “What’s even better is that the Basketball Bundesliga [the highest-level league for basketball in Germany] is sharing some of our stories on social media, even though they are behind the paywall, which is fantastic.”

To expand its offering to Brose Bamberg fans, the sports desk launched a newsletter in September 2022 that is sent out every Friday at midday. This new product has been promoted on Facebook and Instagram, and in a couple of weeks 120 local basketball-enthusiasts had subscribed to it.

The sales team is on board, too: The newsletter will be subject to creating more revenue by advertising or sponsorship models for a business partner that matches the audience.

 

Achievements during TSE:

In addition to the Brose Bamberg mini-publisher team, the company started focusing on two other target audiences, one for beer and food connoisseurs in the region and the other looking at housing and lifestyle, as well as planning to involve more reporters generally in mini-publishing teams. The publisher is also rethinking its approach to advertising to target more ads to specific audiences.

Key learning from TSE:

“We have had several key learnings from TSE. Implemented in our work is shifting our focus away from what we write about towards whom we are writing for in every single story. Another big one was how working together as a team from editorial, audience development, product and sales helped us to work with output and outcomes in mind that expand beyond each team’s specific goals.”

– Andrea Pauly