The Big Bash Twenty20 Cricket League in Australia has been around since 2011 becoming sixth most attended sports league in the world with respect to average crowd per match in the 2015-16 season. It now has a worldwide fan following with fans displaying loyalty for Perth Scorchers that has won the title three times. Yet, the league’s popularity remains understated. For a league that has so much value of entertainment, million more fans can be engaged indefinitely. This blog lists four ways the Big Bash League can achieve a fan engagement that truly lasts.

1. Challenge fans with fantasy games and prediction

Why settle for a season-long fantasy platform when you can practically engage fans throughout the year with daily fantasy games? The Big Bash League can create stunning fantasy games that are far more challenging than the existing ones adding features for continuous fan engagement. It has been proven time and again that fantasy sports have taken the popularity of leagues such as NFL or NBA to a whole new level. Big Bash League can multiply its fans by simply challenging fans of cricket worldwide on a competitive fantasy cricket platform. Fans particularly love game predictions that can be smartly incorporated in the fantasy cricket platform in order to keep the fans coming. The platform should be a great balance that attracts new fans along with challenging the knowledge of savvy fans.

2. Give your fans a voice

Nothing makes any sports platform more popular than word-of-mouth fan discussions. Imagine creating an official platform for healthy discussions about anything and everything related to Big Bash League. Today, several digital tools make these discussions happen like real life fan debates. These tools coupled with smart mobile apps can establish the league as a savvy organisation that evolves with its fans. Your fans need to feel heard and when you provide a platform welcoming their feedbacks, suggestions and feelings, you can win them for life. This will help fans take the transition from being passive fans to serious community members driving the league’s popularity.

3. Live matches

Millennial fans today are constantly texting, chatting and updating status on social media while watching the games live. This means, there’s a fair chance they would text about Big Bash League during the season and make it a trending topic all over social media. Live Game is a great feature for a fan engagement platform that the League can utilise for more traffic. The more traction the games get, the more traffic it would bring to your fan engagement application. Real time discussions around a game on a single platform doubles the thrill for today’s fans and win more engagement.

4. Measure fan sentiment by analytics

Despite a stunning application and a great social media strategy, you may still be missing out on useful fan analytics. Analytics are the key to understanding fan sentiment that you may want to channelise for better brand advocacy. If your fan engagement application has great tools for fan insights, it’s a truly winning platform that would help your league to not only devise strategies today but also provide future insights of your fans. When a league evolves along with the ever changing technology and fan sentiment, it becomes a force to reckon with.

The Big Bash League has eight popular cricket clubs that are now gradually growing fan base around the world. The league can speed up this growth by simply providing fans a great platform to discuss, play, comment and enjoy the cricket matches as they happen each season. We have a great framework ready for such engagement platforms and we are confident that any enterprise wanting to build such an application around the Big Bash League is up for a win-win.