Futures Fantasy Baseball: Launching a Brand-New Ballgame From Scratch
Launching a fantasy sports platform is tough enough, but when you’re building a brand-new game centered around Minor League Baseball, you’re dealing with a highly specific niche.
Futures Fantasy Baseball had a fantastic, incredibly fun concept, but they were starting from square one with absolutely zero existing audience. They needed a massive, top-of-funnel awareness blast to introduce themselves to hard-core baseball fans, paired with a smart conversion funnel to turn that curiosity into active game registrations. By mixing mass-reach sports network media with witty, hyper-localized organic social content, we helped them step up to the plate and hit their launch right out of the park.
Industries Served
Services Delivered
The Client
Futures Fantasy Baseball is an innovative online gaming platform that lets baseball purists and stats geeks draft, manage, and compete using real-world Minor League players. It’s a game built by die-hard fans, for die-hard fans. They brought the deep baseball knowledge, the seamless gaming interface, and a true passion for the farm system. Our job was simply to light the fuse, get their name in front of the right baseball communities, and pack their leagues with active managers.
The Challenge
When you have no existing player base, your first hurdle is just letting people know you exist. Minor league fans are incredibly loyal, but they are scattered across hundreds of local teams and affiliates. The challenge was twofold: we needed to cast a wide enough net across major sports networks to build instant credibility, while simultaneously delivering hyper-specific, localized content that resonated with fans of specific hometown teams, all on a budget that required every single impression to work incredibly hard.
The Approach
We knew we couldn’t rely on a single ad format to do all the heavy lifting, so we built a strategy that balanced big-brand awareness with grassroots community building:
- The Big-League Awareness Blast: To establish immediate authority, we secured high-visibility display ads, video pre-roll, and dedicated email mentions across official MiLB platforms and major sports networks. This put the brand right alongside the official stats and news fans were already consuming.
- The Grassroots Social Engine: Underneath that mass media push, we ran highly targeted Google, Twitter, and Facebook ads. We backed all of this up with a highly active, personality-driven organic social program. We leaned heavily into baseball humor, local team news, and player spotlights to get fans talking, while setting up official sponsorship integrations with multiple MiLB teams to embed the brand directly into the local ballpark culture.
Key Takeaways
Lean Into the Subculture: When you are targeting a passionate niche, generic ads don't work—relevance does. By tying our creative content directly to player spotlights and insider baseball humor, our paid ads achieved a 0.22% click-through rate (CTR), which sits comfortably well above the industry average for sports entertainment.
Organic Buzz Multiplies Paid Reach: You don't always have to pay for every single eyeball if your content is highly shareable. Engaging directly with minor league communities and running a clever, fast-moving Twitter program allowed us to generate a staggering 6.63M organic impressions in just 28 days.
Credibility Drives the Click: In online gaming, if your site looks unproven, people won't sign up. By pairing our grassroots social media engine with high-profile sports network placements, we built instant trust—resulting in a phenomenal 3.51% on-site conversion rate for new user registrations.