Popular with parents and students alike, social media played a large role in marketing the high school football app and keeping the community engaged. User-generated content fueled our strategy.
While part of the audience are diehard high school football fans, the low-hanging fruit are the students and their relatives. Good action shots of the students or pictures from schools with loyal fans tended to garner the most engagement.
High school football is huge in East Texas. Some even refer to the area as #bEASTTexas due to the number of pro-football recruits. Some professional athletes from East Texas that have recently made headlines include Earl Campbell, Adrian Peterson and Patrick Mahomes.
After years of a stand-alone TV show highlighting the action under the bright Friday night lights, a companion app for iPhones and Androids was launched in 2013. It was KLTV’s and Raycom Media’s first foray into niche audiences, and the risk paid off.
The app was popular among football fans and advertisers drawing in thousands of dollars in additional revenue. The following year many Raycom stations would try to replicate the effort.
In addition to housing clips from the Red Zone show and football coverage from the daily newscasts, the app was home to a live scoreboard that tracked more than 20 games across the region every Friday night (and some Thursday and Saturday nights!).
The scoreboard continues to be staffed by a small but mighty team of digital producers, newscast production crew members and anyone the team can sweet talk into spending their Friday night in the newsroom in exchange for a few hours and the best pizza sales could secure as a trade.