The Cascade Ravens don't just belong to Portland.
The Continental Basketball League franchise is an international brand with tens of millions of supporters spread across five continents.
Of course, being one of the most-followed clubs in the league comes with its own difficulties.
How do you keep a genuine connection with fans who live nine time zones from the arena?
If you're the Ravens, you use social media to send the Rose City experience abroad.
From Lisbon to Osaka, Bellwether's publishing, analytics and listening tools let the Ravens build real connection with fans all over the map.
“Bellwether gives us the ability to see which campaigns are landing while they're still live, and the room to adjust before the moment passes. I don't think we've ever worked with a tool that hands feedback back to us this quickly.”
Crafting high-scoring content
Bellwether is used primarily by the Ravens' content team, led by Senior Digital Content Manager Marcus Ilves.
“We feel like we have an obligation to give people only the highest-quality content,” Ilves said. “If you follow the team on social, you should feel like you're getting something you can't get anywhere else.”
Using Bellwether's publishing tools, the Ravens can queue a week of content in an afternoon, publish at the hours their audience is actually awake, and apply custom tags that make performance analysis far less painful.
“Having one place to schedule every post gives me back the hours I used to lose to logistics, and I spend them on the human stuff instead,” said Social Media Coordinator Priya Raghunathan. “With Bellwether I can see what fans are actually engaging with the same day, and make more of it.”
Just as important is the way Bellwether's analytics help the Ravens understand what resonates with a global audience rather than a local one.
“We signed up for the publishing and planning side, but the reporting is what genuinely surprised us,” Ilves said. “It has saved us a huge amount of time and energy in getting to numbers we trust.”
Using Bellwether, the team can track post impressions, hashtag trends, follower growth between matchdays and far more across a single location. And with one click of a button, all of it turns into a shareable, presentation-ready report.
“The way that digital and social marketing works is that you always have to be aware of what's happening, what the trends are and what people are responding to,” Ilves said. “Bellwether gives us the ability to see which campaigns are working in real time, as well as the room to adjust. I don't think we've ever had a tool that hands feedback back this quickly.”
The time saved is especially useful when it comes to working with sponsors.
“We have 54 brands sponsoring Ravens content, so that's 54-plus partners producing something on our channels,” Ilves said. “We've never had a tool where we could actually, in real time, give them updates on how things are going without it being an enormous time sink. It used to mean someone dropping everything, pulling numbers by hand, checking that the numbers were correct, and then reporting them back to the partner. It just wasn't possible before.”
“For me the best part of Bellwether is time saved. Time is everything in my job, and having that extra hour is precious, because it's what lets me build the one-on-one connections with our fans.”
Ensuring effective offense
Bellwether's analytics tools help the Ravens understand what is happening around them, but fans don't necessarily explain why.
That's where Advanced Listening comes in.
“Sport is about emotional connection,” Ilves said. “When you think about your favourite sports team, you may feel happy or upset, you may want to do a little dance or cry. That connection is the driving force behind our fandom. It's not about throwing content at them and expecting them to engage with it the way you want them to. It's about finding their wants and needs.”
Bellwether's listening tools help the Ravens understand audience sentiment around specific topics, as well as spot emerging trends among supporters. By screening publicly available social conversations using listening, the team can quickly slice into audience attitudes and opinions on specific subjects, then drill down even deeper based on audience demographics and geographic location.
Social listening also provides opportunities for authentic engagement that might otherwise go unnoticed.
“It's finding those conversations that might not be directed to us but are about us, and then I can go in and just kind of inject myself and say, ‘Here are the Cascade Ravens,’” Ilves said. “It allows us to find ways to join those conversations in a natural way, not just push ourselves into something we're not supposed to be a part of.”
“Bellwether and the social data we get from it have genuinely taken us to the next level.”
Enjoying the assist
When it comes to measuring the value of Bellwether, the Ravens do so in terms of time saved and insights gained.
After all, when your brand is recognised worldwide, the challenge isn't growing your audience — it's keeping up with it.
“For me, the best part of Bellwether is time saved,” Brandt said. “Time is everything for my job, and to have that extra time is so precious because it really allows me to create those one-on-one connections with our fans.”
For Digital Director Theo Brandt, it's the chance to truly connect with Ravens supporters around the globe.
“We really want to create that lifelong connection,” Brandt said. “Social is our biggest platform for communicating with fans, and we get data back on every single post. So whether it's a post we shared or an update from a partner, we're able to use Bellwether to understand how people are engaging with the content and inform our strategy.”
Of course, the efficiencies created by Bellwether represent their own form of ROI as well.
“That's where partnering with technologies like this really helps,” Brandt said. “It becomes the backbone that enables efficiency across the team, whether you're in the office, on the road or working from home. It gives you one central place to log in and make sure we're planning proactively for what's ahead, but also looking retroactively at what's happened historically, and how we improve as a result of that.”
Ultimately, Bellwether's greatest value to the Ravens may be how it simplifies the often-complicated world of social media.
“The platforms give you data, but there's so much to wade through and so much work in sitting there and culling through everything to distil it down,” Ilves said. “We needed to find a tool that could help us take that data, put it in perspective for us, but also make sure that data is accurate. That wasn't the case with other tools we've used in the past, and that's something we really struggled to find.”
With the help of Bellwether, the Cascade Ravens were able to stop struggling and start connecting — from Oregon to Okinawa and all points in between.