Once upon a time, a local soccer club set out to build something legendary in the heart of Colorado Springs. Since 2018, Wolf & Key has been the digital engine behind the Switchbacks FC, turning a local team into a league cornerstone. From their first field at Sand Creek to the 2024 championship roar at Weidner Field downtown, we’ve been an SFC partner making sure the internet is maximized for their success.
The Switchbacks didn’t just need to sell tickets; It meant building momentum for a massive stadium transition to downtown Colorado Springs, and it meant bringing an experience with them that no one knew they even needed yet. Challenges of trailblazing. To do it, they needed a digital presence that matched the intensity of their play on the pitch. For a team with championship DNA, a standard digital marketing strategy wasn’t going to cut it.
We didn’t just run ads; we became part of their front office. Starting in 2018, we took a long-term partnership approach. We launched a multi-phase social media strategy that evolved from simple awareness into a high-conversion, ticket-selling machine. It went from selling tickets to soccer fans, to selling tickets to everyone in COS. By leveraging sophisticated targeting for their unique brand content, we created a direct connection between the club and the community. We’ve navigated stadium moves, league shifts, and championship runs with them. Looking back, it all goes to show that long-term partnership is the ultimate competitive advantage. It’s our favorite Wolf & Key client character trait.
The results speak for themselves: The organization would grow to record levels, and be sold to new ownership, reaching national headlines. Our role was to be a great Partner. We did a bunch of “fancy techy digital stuff”, but it worked because the SFC and W&K teams had a shared mindset: partnership over transactions, and long-term vision.
The Switchbacks didn’t just need to sell tickets; It meant building momentum for a massive stadium transition to downtown Colorado Springs, and it meant bringing an experience with them that no one knew they even needed yet. Challenges of trailblazing. To do it, they needed a digital presence that matched the intensity of their play on the pitch. For a team with championship DNA, a standard digital marketing strategy wasn’t going to cut it.
We didn’t just run ads; we became part of their front office. Starting in 2018, we took a long-term partnership approach. We launched a multi-phase social media strategy that evolved from simple awareness into a high-conversion, ticket-selling machine. It went from selling tickets to soccer fans, to selling tickets to everyone in COS. By leveraging sophisticated targeting for their unique brand content, we created a direct connection between the club and the community. We’ve navigated stadium moves, league shifts, and championship runs with them. Looking back, it all goes to show that long-term partnership is the ultimate competitive advantage. It’s our favorite Wolf & Key client character trait.
The results speak for themselves: The organization would grow to record levels, and be sold to new ownership, reaching national headlines. Our role was to be a great Partner. We did a bunch of “fancy techy digital stuff”, but it worked because the SFC and W&K teams had a shared mindset: partnership over transactions, and long-term vision.
2024 USL Champs.
Pretty big deal. Leading the Pack, as we like to say. We love clients who are exceptional at what they do, while still being genuine folks who understand their place in the community. The SFC organization is on the cutting edge of their industry, but they’re also committed to their roots. That speaks volumes to us at Wolf & Key. We believe in our city and we’re dedicated to working with clients who feel the same. Our partnership with the Switchbacks organization makes all the sense in the world.
If you get what we’re saying…let’s talk.
Great content is the fuel for success, and the internal SFC video team has mad skills. But “great” looks different on a smartphone than it does on a TV, and there is an art and a science to creating content that works in the digital space. We work hand-in-hand with the Switchbacks’ internal video team to ensure their content skills and high-octane footage are optimized for the digital landscape. We advise on ad concepts, hooks, formatting, landing pages, and video pacing to ensure every goal celebration, happy fan, and blue smoke moment is leveraged properly to stop the scroll and drive action.
We don’t just report on data; we act on it. Over nearly a decade of partnership, we’ve gathered a mountain of insights that allow the Switchbacks to make smarter, more profitable decisions. This is essential to making sure every dollar of the marketing budget is an investment, not a shot in the dark. This is one of the most important parts of hiring Wolf & Key to handle your digital marketing: we’ll help you spend where it counts, and not where it doesn’t.
Here are some top performing campaigns.
Strategic Campaign Architecture – We designed a multi-year digital roadmap that evolved alongside the club’s growth and stadium moves.
Advanced Audience Segmentation – We identified and reached high-value demographics beyond the traditional sports fan to expand the donor/fan base.
Internal Creative Advisory – We provided technical guidance to the client’s video team to ensure all content was high-performing and “feed-ready.”
Full-Funnel Ad Management – We executed end-to-end management of Meta and Instagram campaigns to drive both awareness and direct ticket sales.
Data-Driven Revenue Optimization – We leveraged 8 years of historical analytics to help the club make informed, profitable decisions regarding their ad spend.
Long term partnership imroves ad performance for Wolf & Key clients because it allows the time and space to make decisions based on what we know and discover over time. Over the years of working with SFC, we’ve tried many different ad campaign, messaging, and targeting strategies, and we can track every piece of what we do. We can act on that knowledge to make smarter decisions with marketingt dollars. The reason long term partnership is so important to us at W&K is beucase it’s in both ours and our clients best interest.
One of the best parts about a digital marketing budget is that it’s flexible. All our clients have busy and not so busy times of the year, so we adjust accordingly. Budget can be directly corrolated to impression and reach count. Sometimes SFC wants to spend more to reach more users with hype and awareness in order to sell more tickets. Other times, they want to spend less. We spend a significant amount of time with all our clients making sure marketing budgets are allocated properly to accomodate certain times of their year as needed.
Clients that see the long game don’t just measure sales. It’s a big indicator for a soccer match obviously, but rememebr, SFC is not just after ticket sales, they’re after cultural change. We run campaigns promoting ticket sales for games, in which we measure ROI in those terms. But we also run SFC campaigns where the goal is more conceptual, more geared toward a broader effort to expand the soccer culture in Southern Colorado. Those campaigns should be viewed with a wider lense in mind, with much longer term goals.
No organization is too small to get smart with their targeting. No matter your ad budget, be sure you’re honing in as specifically as you can on your target audience. Advertising paltforms have gotten smarter, so you’ll be pleasantly surprised that the ability to reach your ideal clients/customers.
Wolf & Key loves empowering internal teams and making them look great for their bosses. We often come along side internal creative teams like the SFC team, and essentially help make their creative materials more powerful. The digital space is ever-changing, so we help our clients’ internal teams
We share all campaign data with our partners, to the extend they want and need. We have many metrics available during and after each campaign, each with their own usefulness. But we make it a point make the data digestible and actionable for our partners so we they can make smarter decisions and increase ROI. This is one of the most imprtant parts of digital marketing.
Data is available right away. Sometimes we recommend letting things play out, sometimes we recommend acting on the data sooner. Results that really matter long term usually take time, so one thing we always tell every client at Wolf & Key is “stay consistent, good things take time. We’ll help you the whole way.”
