With pumpkin lattes comes the fantasy football season and how. Fantasy sports is a $7.22 billion industry and there are 59.3 million fantasy sports players in the United States and Canada alone. This is the largest number of participants recorded in the 14-year history of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) study.
It’s about time you learnt how to top these millions of users and bring them on your fantasy football website. Here you go.

Be mobile-friendly

No new that mobile and tablets trumped desktops long time ago. The mobile friendlier your fantasy football site, the more visitors it would garner. There was a 3.3% jump of fantasy sports players from a year ago. That means more users that grew up using mobile phones and tablets are likely to play fantasy football on these devices. Make your website easily accessible and smooth apart from adding mobile-friendly content and social tools.
Take-away: A fantasy sports user is twice more likely to return to your application if it’s available on his mobile.

Time to tap female fantasy sports players

FSTA also reported this year that the female participation overall was 29%. Now that’s a bunch of users waiting to be tapped. With the advent of women playing football, soccer, cricket and other sports, there’s a growing number of female fantasy sports players now. These women know statistics, would love to play fantasy sports and love a great user experience. They would naturally endorse a good fantasy sports website.
Take-away: Give exclusivity to these women by creating fantasy sports contests and leaderboard dedicated only to female players.

Optimize your content

Who’s reading, browsing, using and enjoying your content? You may have a stunning fantasy football application that’s almost never visited. Too bad especially when this is the season of fantasy football. Optimize your content with relevant keywords and make sure you know the best times to post according to the targeted demographic. Important keywords such as fantasy football, NFL ranking, NFL rank, NFL player ranking, fantasy draft tips have been trending for the last few years but experience a spike specifically during the season. Some keywords would be high on game days, others would be trending on the day after. Make sure your fantasy sports website has a blog that informs and educates users. Nothing would flock more users than a thriving blog with the right keywords.
Take-away: Don’t just create content, optimize it with the help of right keywords and make sure it’s visible.

Make Contest Sharable

Twitter has signed a streaming deal with NFL and COO Anthony Noto recently said on record that this deal has increased engagement on Twitter. In his words, “total tweet impressions, which are the number of times people see tweets related to the game, jumped from 100 million for a Thursday night game on TV, to 300 million or 400 million when Twitter streamed the games online.” There’s no reason why you must not make your content easily sharable on social media. The more easily your users are able to share content, the more traffic and attention your fantasy football website would get. For this you can use some simple sharing tools and plug-ins with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram etc.
Take-away: Create contest and make it convenient to share on social media.

Let the users keep clicking

Now that you have got an engagement strategy in place, make sure you use it to create returning visitors. Make your fantasy football website a one-stop-shop of information related to football and NFL. Share news and articles, high quality photographs, live streaming, chat forums, rewards, tips about drafting, friend referrals, bonuses and the likes. Did you know that fantasy sports participants are fiercely loyal to the players they draft? 73% have purchased memorabilia related to their fantasy teams (e.g., player jersey, autograph)? Share content related to their favourite players, add awards like give-away tees related to leagues and players and keep your users coming on to your website.
Take-away: Keep engaging users with live chats, forums, rewards and referral bonuses.

These are some of the simplest hacks to get the best of your fantasy football application this season. For more tips and tricks, don’t hesitate to contact us.