For Forsberg Racing, winning isn’t just about championships and trophies – it's about forging relationships with the community and partners who share their passion and commitment to fast, skillful and freestyle execution.
Established in 2007, the team competes across multiple championships, including Formula Drift, SRO World Challenge and Gridlife Touring Cup Championship.
The team’s production crew creates original content for its fans. Generating upwards of tens of millions of views, their content drives tremendous media value for their partners.
Since partnering with Hookit, a Kore Software company, for full social data evaluation and reporting in January of 2022, Forsberg now has the ability to put a dollar value on the content they create.
This has given the team the ability to prove value to their biggest partners and negotiate deals with new partners using the adjusted ad value model. By learning how to use these tools, the team has increased overall investment spend into their team by double, year over year.
Their long standing partnerships with brands like Nissan, NOS Energy Drink, Valvoline, and Steel-It Paint Coatings, have only grown stronger, with each partner delivering the commitment, support and drive needed to win races and build lasting connections with fans.
Valvoline is one brand that receives prominent exposure on the Forsberg Racing cars
How to quantify value in partnerships
Working with multiple content distribution partners, Forsberg Racing builds revenue by offering full service digital marketing solutions for brands of all sizes. Despite high engagement across their social media coverage, proving return on investment (ROI) for their partnerships was a tedious task to track accurately.
The team found themselves chasing data across various tools and from their own partners. They became familiar with the Hookit reporting tool – now a part of Kore Software’s single service platform – through their series partner, Formula Drift, but had to rely on access to the reports from their partner team.
When they did, insights, like the adjusted ad value (AAV), demonstrated direct value they created for their brand partners, through the content they produced.
Adjusted ad value: Incidental value versus deliberate value
The AAV is a deep measurement that determines a dollar value to assign to a social post based on how prominently logos and or brand mentions are displayed in image and text, combined with the level of engagement the post creates.
Posts that do not have a deliberate mention, keyword, or hashtag but feature a logo within the image or video create incidental value. When brands don’t track incidentental value they miss opportunities to capitalize with a deliberate keyword strategy.
Other social listening tools only capture data text, missing a large percentage of the visual attribution. With the Hookit tool, capturing clear, quality logo visibility can grasp up to 70 per cent of a brand's social value between partners and earned media.
Built-in automation to authenticate athletes and artists for social stories, alongside audience data and watch-thru rates creates a robust data story within the platform.
Teams like Forsberg Racing can easily see and track the AAV of the content they create on social media that displays their partners, or any brand they choose to track logos, and deliberate tags or keyword mentions.
Quantifying and proving their own value became not just a nice-to-have, but a business priority for them to grow. Forsberg Racing decided to invest into their own account with Hookit in order to manage their own reports and data.
The team knew that full access to this data, consistently, could be a game-changer for attracting more investment. They were right.
Proving your worth and earning more
Demonstrating success to their partners over long periods of time is key to keeping them supportive, happy, and invested in the Forsberg Racing Team. That same principle is why they chose to partner with the Hookit tool to power their social content data reporting, versus waiting on the Formula Drift series to provide data.
With consistent, full access, Forsberg quickly ramped up on identifying incidental value of social posts that featured logos and brand names within the visual content. Then the team was able to improve branded post value with deliberate actions through the use of mentions, hashtags and keywords ultimately driving more engagement and value, all with the help of Kore’s customer success team.
When Forsberg learned to focus on one particular keyword for a thriving, key partner, that keyword alone now drives the most interactions across the team’s social portfolio.
By increasing their tagging of that keyword from 221 times in 2021, to nearly 400 mentions of it in 2022, they’ve been able to increase the adjusted ad value they create for that partner by 62 per cent in just nine months, and are on track to double it by the end of the year.
While brands that don’t track their incidental exposure are losing opportunities to capitalize, Forsberg now earns nearly four times the amount of value on their deliberate mentions and keyword strategy, versus incidental exposure.
Chris Forsberg, the most successful Formula Drift driver in history, established Forsberg Racing in 2007
The motorsport team consistently is able to prove the ROI for their partnerships through AAV, demonstrating hundreds of thousands of dollars in value created every month.
“Our investment into [the social evaluation tool], has paid for itself ten times by now,” said chief partnership officer, Brandon Bolling, after nine months of full report usage.
Share results anywhere and adjust strategy anytime
The Forsberg production team can fine-tune their content creation approach from the fan engagement and sponsorship value they generate on social media, and test new forms of content for their partners, immediately seeing what works and what doesn’t based on the data and 24/7 access to reports.
Unlike other major reporting engines that have up to a 90-day lag, the Hookit tool allows Forsberg to adjust their strategy on the fly.
Bolling, a former Facebook global marketer, who joined Forsberg Racing to build on his passion for motorsports, thrives on cutting down the ambiguity and driving results.
“At the end of the day, I am obsessed with data. I can pull Hookit out of my pocket in a meeting and here’s the three-party verified data. The numbers tell the truth,” he explained.
“We help our partners hatch a plan for success that integrates all social advertising channels with correlating creative and a cohesive message to our shared audiences.”
For the team’s newer partners, they’ve been able to more than double their investment into Forsberg Racing year-over-year, specifically based on the tool’s insights and the reports they share.
Next steps for expansion
Today, the AAV that Forsberg Racing creates for their partners through social media coverage has been key to re-negotiating contracts and attracting new investors.
Partnership research, benchmarking and testing new ways to leverage the data tool for their partners, like the video game integrations, and other digital interactions will be front and center for the team. Their revenue growth will support the team’s official debut at some of the world’s biggest motorsport stages outside the US.
If you’re interested in learning how to drive stronger partnership value for brands, or rights holders, athletes and influencers, and increase your organisation’s revenue, reach out to Kore at [email protected] to learn more.