UFL - The Martin Group

Championing an effective marketing playbook.

Challenge

In 2024, the United Football League was seeking to build upon their Year 1 success by fueling sports/football fan interest and consideration to attend 2025 UFL games across their eight markets. The Martin Group was brought in to strategize and execute digital media tactics, and quickly evolved to playing a much deeper role as a partner who supports market insights, traditional media evaluation/placement, tracking/reporting, messaging, and more.

Solution

Our team started by building a thorough market analysis report to serve as a strategic foundation, inclusive of audience segmentation, media usage habits, unique market conditions, and top media vendors that the audiences engage with across traditional, digital, and social.

As the campaign got underway, we leveraged real-time data to refine targeting, creative, and budget/spend for maximum efficacy. Given that the objective was performance-based, we executed a multichannel approach across all eight markets aimed at building awareness, with the strongest emphasis on building familiarity and driving consideration to engage.

We were able to pivot quickly as we identified performance trends, launched new ad/messaging testing, and varied budgets across audiences, Home vs. Away weeks, and markets to optimize performance based on real-time data.

Results

The Martin Group generated significant YoY gains in terms of engagement levels and interest through optimized paid digital efforts. With a flat budget YoY, we drove more than 2x the click volume, over 3x improvement on the CTR, and reduced the CPC by 50% – all major wins in terms of improving campaign effectiveness and increasing ticket sales.

Through very detailed targeting and monitoring, we were able to identify market variances by target audience, messaging preferences, media mix cost efficacy, and more, allowing us to use this past season as a solid foundation for continued growth, testing, and optimization for the 2026 season and beyond.