Cracking the Code: How i9 Sports Is Dominating with Marketing Automation

By Heather Anderson, VP of Marketing, Eulerity

The integration of technology is no longer a trend, but a necessity. Among the many tools and strategies a brand can implement for their marketing efforts, marketing automation stands out as a powerful force that can reshape the way businesses connect with their consumers, location owners, and internal teams. Few understand this transformation as intimately as Brandy Zickefoose, the Vice President of Marketing for i9 Sports. As a pioneer in the sports and recreation industry, the brand continues to use innovative approaches to elevate their marketing efforts. Beyond their impressive success lies a compelling story of leveraging marketing automation to revolutionize their brand, increase franchisee adoption rates, and increase their results to a phenomenal level.

I sat down with Brandy to discuss the real-life impact of AI and automation on i9 Sports. Join us as we dive into the strategies, challenges and triumphs that have propelled this brand to new heights, offering valuable insights into the current digital marketing landscape.

Can you give a little bit of an intro and share who you are, what your role is, and how you would characterize the evolution of marketing strategies over the past few years at i9?

Brandy: I’m Brandy Zickefoose and I’m the Vice President of Marketing for i9 Sports. i9 runs youths sports leagues, camps and clinics for kids ages 3-14 as a franchise business.. In my particular area of the world, we focus on national consumer marketing, supporting local franchise marketing, and franchise development marketing. With the industry that we’re in, people typically think of youth sports as park and rec and The Y, and traditionally, marketing in that area has been heavily focused on grassroots marketing — flyers, road signs and things like that. We’ve always leaned into marketing at the national level, and that’s been a big differentiator for us. But the approachability of digital has enabled local and regional competitors to become aggressive in this space. We found ourselves needing to supplement our top-down approach with a bottom-up approach and empower franchisees to be more competitive at the local level.

One of the things we’re seeing is that the landscape is being reshaped and brands are finding that there are certainly efficiencies to be gained, but also opportunities to unlock better decision making, better growth, etc. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the big challenges that you faced in multi-location digital marketing and how you see AI and machine learning changing the tides from that for you?

Brandy: A lot of our primary challenges revolve around scale. With multi-anything, managing scale is one of the more complicated components. One of the great things about local marketing is being able to localize offers, the look and feel, and focus on specific services. However, it also creates bigger chances that a franchisor could lose control. When you think about hundreds of locations placing digital marketing, across search, social, video and retargeting, there’s just so many factors of what you could do and how you could do it efficiently. Managing the scale to

making sure it’s efficient and being done well, but still localizing it for the individual market, has always been a big challenge.

When you’re doing things at the local level, dealing with smaller budgets and the economics of working with an agency can be hard.You have to make sure the agency is getting enough to actually be able to profitably support your business and make sure it’s being run well, which can be a huge struggle. Finding the right partner that can afford to give us the time and attention around the campaigns is imperative.

Can you share a specific campaign or strategy where AI has played a pivotal role in its success?

Whenever I think about a specific campaign or strategy, I think of how Eulerity approaches multi-location marketing and local digital marketing. It allows our franchisees, with a modest $500-$1500 a month in local digital marketing budgets, to execute digital marketing strategies that are in-line with campaigns I had executed at other companies at a multi-million dollar level. Being able to have an omni-channel, sophisticated approach that is well-run and efficient with fairly modest and low budgets brings a sophistication to local marketing that our franchisees couldn’t do beforehand, which has been pivotal on several fronts. The omnichannel aspect, the ability to be in all those places at once, and to analyze what works best in the respective franchisee’s markets has established a lot of trust. It’s created a buzz and a cool factor that has made them want to invest and adopt.

We quickly went from having around 10% of our franchisees investing in local digital marketing to over 75% investing. This is astounding because it’s making their local marketing so much more effective and efficient and allows them to be in more places than they ever could with just grassroots marketing. It’s helped us as a brand because it’s quadrupled our overall investment in digital marketing, which has been a game changer. I think that the approach and AI-backed platform has helped on so many fronts. From trust and adoption to scale…both on the brand side for us, knowing that it’s done well, and also on the franchisee side, as they are excited to participate.

How do you strike the balance between AI-driven automation and still maintaining and making sure you have that human touch and component in all of your marketing?

Brandy: Computers can do so many things, but they can only work with what they have. There’s always going to be things that we, as humans, know and what we want to push through our business that doesn’t always tie to the most efficient approach or the best ad. There will always be the opportunity to look at insights and data that allows you to take that leap and test something new or learn. One tangible example, from my experience, centers around optimizing for click-through conversions, which work across many things, but are huge for retargeting.I end up purchasing items from the internet that have been retargeted to me based on my online consumer behavior. The tricky thing about this is that you don’t always see the attribution when

you look at click-through rates, but it’s important to know it’s influencing your consumer’s online behavior.

For any of your peers out in the industry who might be hesitant about adopting AI and they don’t know where or how to start, what is your advice to them?

Brandy: I understand the hesitation! We like to know what we’re doing at all times, but let yourself start somewhere and see how it goes. Identify what your brand needs the most and use that as a starting point. For example, if you’re struggling with content creation, try askingChatGPT to craft a piece of content and get a glimpse of the AI capabilities it offers. I personally think that AI technology is like the high speed bullet train that has the ability to create separation between those that jump on board and those that stay on the congested highway. It’s very much a change or die moment where you need to adapt and get comfortable being uncomfortable.

What is the most exciting AI-driven marketing innovation that you’re looking forward to?

Brandy: I’m a data nerd and although we have a lot of systems and access to data, it’s all over the place. I’m dreaming of the day where we’re able to centralize everything and have all of our customer data and be able to tie in demographics, psychographics, media consumption habits, advertising spend, and customer feedback. It would be great to compile all data and aggregate it all up to then be able to be more predictive of where we should spend, what messages are

likely to resonate, accurately forecast demand and results and not only do that at the high level but use that data to support our franchisees better. This is something that we’ve seen more of through predictive analytics and I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve.

Conclusion

It is evident that the marriage of marketing, AI, and automation is not just a game-changer, but a game-winner. The success story of i9 Sports is a compelling testament to the limitless potential these technologies offer brands. AI and automation will only continue to evolve, offering brands unprecedented opportunities to streamline operations and marketing efforts, engage with their audience, and foster unparalleled growth. For brands aiming to stay ahead of the curve, the time to embrace these technologies is now. AI-driven automation isn’t just an investment, but a strategy that will shape the future of your brand, ensuring its relevance and resilience in the years to come.

Heather Anderson is the Vice President of Marketing for Eulerity, bringing brands AI-optimized digital marketing, optimized ad spend, seamless ad creation, and automated ad deployment — all available on the first ever online advertising app. Learn more about Eulerity here.