Every emerging sports franchise eventually faces the same question: which markets should we invest in next? Where should the grassroots events happen, the watch parties, the season-ticket-acquisition campaigns?
For an emerging professional sports franchise, the geographic question had teeth. The team's fan base concentrated in the metro market that hosted them, but the boundaries were fuzzy. Some neighborhoods had ten times the buyer density of others within the same city. Some far-flung suburbs over-indexed for their size. A few zips that should have been productive — based on demographics alone — were quietly underperforming.
The Methodology
We built a zip-code-level penetration framework spanning 1,548 zips. For each zip we pulled buyer count and population, then computed buyers-per-thousand residents — a fan-density metric that controls for the fact that an 80,000-person zip will have more fans than a 20,000-person zip even if interest in the team is identical.
Raw buyer counts tell you where your fans live. Buyer density tells you where the team is actually punching above its weight — and where it isn't.
We segmented zips on two dimensions simultaneously: absolute buyer count (where the volume is) and buyer-per-population rate (where the engagement is). Decile rankings on both were combined into a composite tier — High, Medium, or Low — that captured both fan-base size and local penetration.
across the metro region
of all single-game buyers
and bottom-tier neighborhoods
The top-tier zips accounted for roughly 57% of all single-game buyers despite representing about 30% of the zips and 19% of the metro population. That's the team's real footprint — dense, engaged, predictable. It's where you market for retention, not acquisition.
The middle tier was where the more interesting strategic questions lived. These were zips with respectable buyer counts but lower density — neighborhoods where the team had a presence but wasn't yet capturing its share. The bottom-tier zips were either far enough from the venue to be largely uneconomic or had structural characteristics making conversion much harder.
The buyer-density gap between the highest- and lowest-engagement zips was more than tenfold. That's the signal — there's real headroom in the middle tier, in zips that look demographically similar to the top performers but haven't been activated.
How the Framework Gets Used
For grassroots and partnership planning: which neighborhoods deserve the next watch party, the next youth-clinic partnership, the next street-team activation? For paid acquisition: which zips look most like the productive ones but aren't yet performing? For retention: where are the top-tier zips whose buyer counts are softening year over year?
The framework is also flexible by design. The team can re-run the same model on a different geographic unit, against a different revenue line, or year over year to track movement — which zips are climbing tiers, which are slipping, where the next acquisition opportunity is opening up.
Building a geographic acquisition framework for your franchise, retail network, or DTC brand? Say hello.