Seeing a big club get relegated is never fun. Ever. As elitist as this might seem, big clubs have that edge, the history, tradition, and the trophies that make them essential for a league’s identity and image. It is a sad day indeed when these teams have to accept defeat, and drop to a lower status.
Parma fans have had many of these sad days over the past couple of decades. Once a glorious, regular title challenger in Serie A, the Ducali are now battling it out in Serie B, hoping to make a comeback to where they truly belong. As a matter of fact, Parma are, at the time of writing, comfortably sitting first in Italy’s second division. They’ve been incredible this season, and many believe that it is only a matter of time before the club makes its way back to where it truly belongs.
As the players and staff try their best to return to the highest stage, the club itself undergoes a different type of preparation in view of the likely promotion. Building on the strong brand established through trophies and successful seasons in the late 1990s, Parma is now employing a very interesting digital marketing strategy – one that could soon make Parma one of the biggest brands in Italian football.
First and foremost, do you know how many followers Parma can boast on all social media platforms? 2 million. Not bad for a second-tier team, whose home city has less than 200,000 inhabitants. How is that possible? Why do people outside of Parma even care about Parma? It is one thing if you are one of the biggest brands in Italian football and a big chunk of your following comes thanks to a long history of winning both domestically and internationally; but how would a team like Parma market itself? A little hint actually comes from the club’s distribution of social media following, where more than half is taken up by a single platform: TikTok. The interesting thing about TikTok is that the content it pushes for each individual user is based on an algorithm that often feeds them new creators. Although this feature is present on Instagram and Facebook as well, users mainly focus on their home feeds here, which, in other words, is a page dominated by accounts that they know and chose to follow. On TikTok, you are constantly interacting with new profiles and creators by simply scrolling, which makes it the perfect place to look for new fans – fans that would not be exposed to the Parma brand otherwise.
But to appear on a given user’s TikTok “For You” page, you would have to go viral, or at least get some good interaction on your videos, and Parma does this with cleverly curated and selected content that appeals. Memes, trending sounds, challenges, and filters are all over Parma’s TikTok page, showing how heavily the club relies on humor and pop culture to get potential consumers to interact with their page. In order to do this well, however, you need to have a certain level of insight into the generation that (for now) rules TikTok, and that would be Gen. Z. Parma is doing an incredible job at appearing genuine and real with its content, and as a Gen. Z TikTok user myself, I can confidently say that the club’s strategy fits the ethos of the app and my generation extremely well. It just does not feel like the content they put out has the intent of exposing a brand, and that is probably the best part about it.
And before we move on, I would like to remind you that Parma – a Serie B club – is the sixth most followed Italian team on TikTok. Kudos to the social media people there.
Let’s quickly look at this TikTok. I will not get into too much detail on why exactly this particular one is so successful, but I can point out a couple of details that I like. First, we have the song choice. “End of Beginning” is a song by Djo that has recently exploded on the platform and can probably take the crown as the most used song on TikTok at the time of writing. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with the content of the TikTok in any way whatsoever, but the social media team at Parma decided to use it anyway. Why? Simply put, the song is popular, and that gives the video more chances of going viral. The content of the TikTok itself is also remarkable, in its own way. The video mentions “Brawl Stars”, and for those that do not know, “Brawl Stars” is an online game that carries a bit of a funny connotation because it is theoretically targeted at a very young audience, though it attracts a lot of high school or university aged players. It might seem idiotic, but you would need very good research on young pop culture to come up with a video like this, and the almost 300,000 views and 40,000 likes on the video confirm the quality of the work done by Parma here. Their page is filled to the brim with content like this, and this is a major reason why they have been so successful on the app.
Marketers at Parma know that their football content does not measure up to the likes of Inter or Roma. They know that in the eyes of many, they are just a small-league football club with not much to offer. This is why they have to reinvent themselves and the way potential fans and consumers see them, especially with the imminent Serie A promotion. They want to attract new fans that can bring in more revenue to the club, but they have to resort to other methods in order to acquire them.
The important thing, at the end of the day, is to expose your brand.
Some, like Parma, just have to be more creative with it.
A second part dissecting the rest of Parma’s digital marketing strategy and its effects will be posted soon.