Daytona Int’l Speedway Dir of Digital Marketing Matt Vinson (@DISupdates) has been in his position four years, coming on board several months into the track’s Daytona Rising project. At the time, the DIS' digital marketing efforts were run by one person. Vinson said, “I’m pretty hands on. I have a digital marketing manager named Tera Lyons who handles the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour execution across all of our platforms. I oversee a lot of the strategy, a lot of the partner integration, how we are working with the series.” DIS does not focus solely on the Daytona 500, which has its 60th edition this weekend, but on all of the races and events the track hosts. Still, the “Great American Race” gets the brunt of the attention. Vinson: “We’ll take a little of the focus away after this 500 and we focus on (Bike Week) in March. We have renewals in April and those keep getting pushed forward each year, so essential from April through February, we are focused on the 500."
Content related to race’s 60th anniversary:
We spent a lot of our digital assets and a lot of our digital strategy around how we can pull forward those elements from the past 60 years. We are not focused on the 60 years across all of our marketing initiatives, just because it’s not as big of a milestone as say 50 or 75. It’s still historically relevant. We have leveraged our digital channels with that. For the past six weeks, we’ve done an article and a video highlighting each decade. For the past 60 days, we’ve posted a quote from a Daytona 500 champion.
Strategy for the race:
We work hand-in hand with NASCAR, but a lot of fans don’t know the difference between DIS and NASCAR and the different audiences we have. People who follow DIS aren’t all NASCAR fans because we host so many different events. During event times, we have to be cautious of the other events. You’ll see some Bike Week collateral coming through even during Speed Weeks. How we differ from NASCAR is we aren’t going to cover the on-track competition aspects; we aren’t going to cover the rules changes, we aren’t going to tweet out the lap-by-lap. What you are going to find is more facility related.
Marketing younger generation of drivers:
From our facilities standpoint, our team works with driver reps to get as many experiences with fans as possible. We’ll leverage anyone -- it doesn’t matter if they are young or old. We had Austin Dillon doing a Facebook Live, taking us on a behind-the-scenes garage tour, we had Ryan Newman talking to a bunch of USAC quarter midget racers. If we can connect them with fans one-on-one, that’s great. If not, we like to showcase behind-the-scenes aspects that fans aren’t going to necessarily see, through Facebook Live or Periscope.
Tech product needing improvement:
We’ve done a great job with the WiFi within our facility, but when you get 100,000 people you tend to get connectivity issues. We’ve got WiFi within the stadium, we’ve got WiFi within our campgrounds, in the UNOH FanZone, Victory Lane and our media center. It’s something facilities are starting to work on and we are among the leaders.
Thoughts on Snapchat redesign:
That’s the discussion topic of the week. I can see where they are coming from in separating brands from friends. It is definitely going to hurt the brand side. That channel skews young and it skews toward people who want to share things with their friends. So separating the two is going to limit your exposure.
