Lindsey Komson

I’ve been a New York Mets fan my whole life.

As a college student, it’s not always affordable to go to games on my own, but recently, the team instituted College Nights where fans in college can enjoy discounted tickets and concessions to enjoy a game in the best stadium in baseball (in my humble opinion).

While I know about these events because I engage with Mets content all the time on social media, many students attending college in the NYC area who don’t live here full time might not know about this promotion.

To fix this problem, I built a mock influencer campaign to attract local NYC college students to Citi Field to enjoy all that my favorite team and place has to offer.

Background

The New York Mets are a baseball team that was founded in 1962 and currently plays in Queens, NY. The team originally played at the Polo Grounds from 1962-1963, Shea Stadium from 1964-2008, and now has called Citi Field home since 2009. The team introduced College Nights in 2023 as a way to bring local college students to the ballpark at a discounted rate to enjoy everything the ballpark has to offer, and hopefully create loyal fans out of them.

As a Mets fan, I know about College Nights, but to enhance the attendance and widespread knowledge of the events, I think the Mets should work with influencers who appeal to the college-aged audience to create interest among local NYC college students.

Influencer selection

To identify influencers who would help achieve this campaign’s goals, I used TikTok to search college student influencers in NYC and HypeAuditor to analyze their metrics. The following influencers would be beneficial to this campaign:

Grace Chung

Grace is a student at New York University and creates video content about her life living in NYC. Her follower count categorizes her as a nano influencer, which is perfect for this campaign since we’re looking for relatable people who can easily influence other local college students.

Erin Harper

Erin is also a student at New York University who creates vlogs about her daily life and experiences in NYC. Her follower count categorizes her as a mid-influencer according to HypeAuditor. Her audience is much bigger than Grace’s, allowing our campaign to reach both very niche and broad audiences.

Strategy outline

This campaign would have 2 main goals – brand awareness and conversions.

The brand awareness goal allows the Mets to generate awareness about their College Nights among local college students in the NYC metro area. The conversions goal allows the Mets to track how many people took their desired action after seeing the influencer content, such as clicking a ticket purchase link or a link to sign up for text reminders about future College Nights.

In terms of the type of influencer collaborations the Mets should focus on for this campaign, sponsored posts make the most sense. Sponsored posts allow the influencers to share their experiences in an authentic, genuine manner while letting people know it’s sponsored material.

This campaign will focus on video content. The Mets have put out some static content (graphics) on certain channels like Facebook and X, but video content will be more engaging to the college-aged audience. With more engagements, the videos will reach much wider audiences, hopefully encouraging more students to participate. Content will live on Instagram Reels and TikTok, as those are the two most popular video platforms.

Below are some ideas of content that the influencers could create for this campaign:

• “POV you went to college night at Citi Field with your besties” – fun clips of the influencer and their friends at the game, enjoying food, and cheering on the Mets
• “Things to do in New York in college on a budget” – influencer who does a few of these videos can make one specifically about the Mets’ College Nights and include a link to sign up for text reminders
• “I went to Citi Field College Night and here’s what I did/got” – showcase the food, merch, and activities the influencer did
• “I’m going to College Night at Citi Field on X date, click the link in my bio to buy tickets and join me there” – talking head video, just the influencer encouraging people to join them at the next College Night

Performance measurement

The following KPIs would be used for measuring success: reach, engagements, and conversion rate.

Reach and engagements are important to our brand awareness goal, making sure word is being spread about the College Nights and that more people know. Conversion rate is important to our conversion goal, seeing how many people took the action we wanted from each video – link clicks, sign ups, ticket purchases, etc.

To measure the success of this campaign, I’d recommend using Hootsuite because we can track the social media analytics as well as tracking other related metrics like link clicks and sign ups.

Some potential challenges might come up when working with influencers, such as:

• Tracking metrics – if not a collab post, we might not always have access to an influencer’s metrics for individual posts and it might be hard to obtain them
• Getting them to appear genuine when enjoying your product/service – choosing the right influencers is crucial to a campaign’s success. If the influencer chosen doesn’t fully see the vision of the campaign or enjoy the product/services, it may be noticeable to their audiences and could deter people from engaging or converting