UNI Track and Field T-Shirt SALE

Myself along with the rest of my Track and Field team are selling UNI Track and Field T-Shirts!!! Let me know if you are interested in buying one. Design #1 and #2 are $10 each, and Design #3 and #4 are $15 dollars. Available in the following sizes (S,M,L,XL,XXL,XXXL) 


We are selling T-shirts to help fundraise for or program. It will help us with travel expenses along with equipment. Great way to get geared up and then come out to the UNI Dome and watch the Panthers in an indoor Track and Field meet this winter!


Go Panthers!!!

UNI Panther Town Hoops

http://www.panthertownhoops.com/
 (Visit this site first)

This interactive micro site put together by UNI's marketing department is being used to build excitement for the Men's basketball season along with selling season tickets, group tickets, and mini-plans. On the posters this year they put a bar code that leads you right to this site if you have a smart phone with a bar code scanner. The video that plays when you first get to the site was produced by Mudd Advertising (@MuddInc to follow them on Twitter). They have been alot of help with Panther Athletics and their marketing campaigns in the recent years. They have helped build the "Panther Town" campaign dating back to last year. It is nice to be able to work closely with a local advertising agency. Even though Mudd is know more for their car commercial advertisements they sure do a great job with athletic promo videos as well. The women's basketball have also been able to work with Mudd this season and last. Last years video involved both men's and women's teams in the same video, now this year they have separated them and made two separate videos.

Last years video:


The making of the the 2010-2011 Basketball Panther Town video:
Bryan McCarty (Copy righter, Creative Lead)
Aaron Smock (Motion Graphic Artist, Animator)
Jason Fiehler (Post Production Coordinator, Editor)

Informational Video for UNI by Coach Dan Steele

Living in Iowa people know about the University of Northern Iowa and are able to visit campus, and see what it has to offer. If prospective students are from other states or countries they might not know of UNI or may not be able to come to visit. These prospective students most likely want to know what life would be like at the University of Northern Iowa. The best way is to come to campus and find out for yourself, but with a informational video like this, students can see what it would be like from the comfort of their home. This doesn't mean this video is more effective then going on a campus visit or coming to Cedar Falls to see what campus is like. Coach Dan Steele is informing those interested about why he likes UNI and the Cedar Valley so much. Pieces like this can be very good informative tools for the program and University as a whole.

Dance Craves at Universities in the Midwest

Now a day kids like to move, and grove to music which some people call dancing. In the past couple years dance phenomena's have poked up at different universities such as Wisconsin with "Teach me how to Bucky" and at University of Northern Iowa "The Interlude". These dances quickly caught on and spread across campus like a wildfire.

Myself being a student at UNI the Interlude started out as a crazy dance a few friends came up with, then blossomed into a crazy dance that we now do at MANY home sporting event, Volleyball, Men's Basketball, Women's Basketball, and now Football games! At first it was just a few people in the student section participating in the dance, then the whole student section, and then a couple of kids and other fans in the arena, but NOW almost EVERYONE gets up and does "The Interlude". The dance has been spotted on YouTube at other campuses across the country, the military people in Afghanistan, Germany, China, and many other countries around the world.

This may not seem like Advertising for sports, but it has help bring the excitement of UNI athletics to a new height that it has never seen! Attendance has increase especially in the student section along with the general public. It is amazing how such a simple little dance can bring so many people together.

Take a look at how the Interlude Began:



Interlude at UNI Men's Basketball Game



Interlude Dance at UNI Football Game:



Take a look how Teach Me How To Bucky:



Official Music Video of Teach Me How To Bucky:

Live Twitter Updates During Sporting Events

Twitter has become very popular for different athletic teams to help update their fans about how the current game is going. Less televised schools and sports can utilize more then more popular sports, and bigger schools. Many times university sports such as volleyball, soccer, hockey, tennis,track and field etc aren't televised and with the power of twitter and its ability to have live updates helps keeps fans in the loop. @Flotrack uses this to update its followers about track meets that their staff are at all over the world. Also @UNIathletics uses this to keep fans informed throughout various sporting events.

Along with live updates, you can also advertise an upcoming event with twitter. Hash-tags (#) and shout outs (@) are a great way to reach out to different groups and audiences.

Athletic programs can also interact with their fans if they hire a Digital Advertising person to manage Twitter and other social media networking tasks. This could be very beneficial to an organization because followers really like to interact with their favorite teams. Twitter can be a benefit but also takes a lot of work to keep it updated and effective.

Follow me @unitrack08

Google Adwords Campaign (UNI Athletics)

I decided to have my campaign focus on University of Northern Iowa Athletics and see if Adwords would be a good source to advertise to Panther Fans and the rest of America. My goal starting out was to increase the traffic flow to UNI’s athletic website. I also had a couple side goal of trying to increase sales of Volleyball and Football Tickets/increasing their attendance. Also had a goal of increasing awareness for UNI Track & Field, but not the best time of year for that.

Since my campaign only lasted for a total of 4 days and spent all 15+ dollars in those 4 days I really wasn’t able to see if I could accomplish all my goals. I would say that I did accomplish my first goal of increasing the flow of traffic to UNI’s athletic website.

Myself as the exec of this ad campaign, I would say that it was a very successful one in its self. A few good things to point out from what I can see from the reports are: the excellent Click Through Rate (CTR) of 13.85% overall, which comes form 165 Clicks out of a total of 1191 Impressions. Also my Average Cost Per Click (CPC) was $0.12 which is VERY good! My Average Ad Position was 1.6, which means my ad was always either number 1 or 2 usually.

I believe that having a high CTR and low CPC are cornerstones for a great ad campaign using Google Adwords. I think it might be beneficial for UNI Athletics to use Adwords. Not all the time, but in specific times, such as before home athletic events to increase ticket sales, and attendance or when something really big happens for a team or an individual athlete. The CPC isn’t high, but I do know that the budgets are tight. The thing they have to remember you are still getting lots of impressions, but only have to pay for the clicks. You do have to worry about your own employees clicking on your ads though and costing you money too.

Some other Highlights from my campaign are some high CTR’s of my keywords. 

“Northern Iowa Basketball” = 15.38%

“Northern Iowa Football” = 15.07%

“UNI Basketball” = 12.50%

“Northern Iowa Athletics” = 30%

“UNI football tickets” = 42.11%

“UNI football schedule” = 22.31%

“UNI Volleyball” = 24.66%

“UNI football” = 19.55%

“UNI athletics” = 24.64%

“UNI Volleyball Schedule” = 57.14%

These are very successful key words and all with a quality score of 7+ all the way up to 10, which is the highest. I believe the reason that the Volleyball related Keywords had such a high CTR is due to the fact that they had 2 home Volleyball games going on during my ad campaign.

My recommendations are, if UNI would use ads for athletics in this way I would defiantly control when and where they would be shown so you don’t spend a ton, but do believe that it is a very effective way to advertise for athletics at a University. I believe that most of my keywords were relevant and useful, but there were a couple words that I could delete that didn’t get a high CTR or any clicks at all. I would also make a couple different Campaigns if I was to do this for an athletics department so I could use keywords specific to that ad rather then you being able to Google UNI football and a UNI track & field ad comes up. I would like to see the results of an ad that is up a couple days before a home football or men’s basketball game to see if it does help increase attendance or ticket sales. It would be nice to be able to see what the people actually did on the website once they clicked through the ad, or how long they stayed on the website as well. Overall I believe my campaign went extremely well. 

Links Below are great for beginners to learn more about Google Adwords:

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=21899&from=21899&rd=1 

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=1316546&rd=2