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The Newcastle Knights’ recent membership campaign is a six-pointer that exemplifies how content marketers can harness the power of community-led content to sign up new members and create tangible authenticity. Here, The Wests Group senior multimedia producer Jae Nelson, Newcastle Knights senior digital content producer Zac Nissen and Enigma creative director Matt Dawe share what made the content of this campaign resonate with fans far and wide.
Authenticity is one of those funny words.
In Marketing-land, it gets used like magic pixie dust, sprinkled into pitch decks and press releases without much care for what it means or how it’s achieved.
Most of the time, what’s labelled as authentic is anything but. Instead of something genuine and connected to truth, you get curated moments masquerading as real or polished slogans that ring hollow.
Yet, for all its overuse, authenticity is far from meaningless – especially in the world of sports content marketing. The line between real connection and empty hype can determine whether your campaign soars or fizzles.
More than a campaign
Sports fans demand more than empty platitudes. For many, loyalty to their team is raw and unfiltered. They endure the heartbreak of near-misses, revel in the euphoria of victory, and carry the team’s stories as part of their own identity. For a club, these are priceless connections.
For the Newcastle Knights rugby league team’s 2025 membership campaign, we wanted to amplify this connection and remind fans why game day is more than just a game of footy.
Instead of rolling out the expected cliches of highlight plays and bone-rattling tackles, It’s More Than a Game celebrated what fans already knew to be true – that being part of the club is about more than enjoying the action on the field.
It’s about the shared moments.
It’s the buzz of anticipation before kickoff, the chants that shake the stadium, the heartbreak of a close loss and the unmatched joy of a last-minute win. It’s the small moments too. The homemade banners raised high on the hill, mates standing shoulder to shoulder in the bucketing rain and kids meeting their heroes on the sideline after the full-time whistle.
Developed in collaboration between the Newcastle Knights’ Content Team and creative agency Enigma, the campaign didn’t just pay lip service to authenticity – it embodied it.
You can’t fake the real thing
When authenticity is treated as a marketing trend rather than a guiding principle, the results can be disastrous. Fans are sharp-eyed critics and they can smell insincerity a mile away. When campaigns miss the mark – when they reduce a club’s identity to buzzwords or attempt to create artificial sentiment – they do more than fail. They erode trust.
This is why It’s More Than a Game has resonated so deeply with Knights fans. It didn’t fabricate emotion or dramatise the experience of being a member. It reflected the pride, grit, and loyalty that already existed within the Knights’ community. By working closely with the fanbase and understanding what made game day meaningful, the campaign felt less like a corporate membership push and more like a shared celebration.
Connecting experiences from the stands to the socials
Content marketing plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between a club and its supporters. At its best, it doesn’t just tell the team’s story, it invites fans to see their own experiences reflected in it.
For the Knights, this meant going beyond promotional material to create a platform for connection. Social media became a space to share raw and emotional moments, from the blood and sweat spilt by players on the field to the quiet and tense moments shared in the stands. It went beyond selling memberships in a traditional sense – to reminding fans why they belonged.
The campaign’s refreshed tone, rooted in the Knights’ core value of ‘grit’, allowed the club to stay true to its identity while adapting to the changing media landscape. By embracing real stories and prioritising meaningful interactions, it resonated with new audiences, including a younger, Gen Z demographic, while deepening the bond with loyal, long-time supporters.
Why authenticity matters in sports marketing
Authenticity in sports marketing isn’t optional – it’s essential. It demands careful listening, a willingness to embrace imperfection and a commitment to showing fans not as an abstract demographic but as the heart and soul of the story.
It’s More Than a Game demonstrated how authenticity can be woven into every element of a strategy. It celebrated the messy, joyous and emotional truth of fandom. In doing so, it transformed membership marketing into something more profound – a way to strengthen the bond between the club and its community.
Since launching, the Knights have already surpassed their total 2024 revenue and membership numbers, while social engagement has surged, with Facebook alone seeing an 81 percent increase compared to the previous period. Proof that moving beyond buzzwords and embracing authenticity captures more than attention – it earns loyalty. Because in sports, as in life, the truth always hits harder.
Building an authentic community might seem impossible if you’re not working with a brand or company like the Newcastle Knights that already has camaraderie and gathering around a common interest baked into its reason for being. But it’s not. Niche Content has been developing authentic communities in the B2B space for more than 25 years across industries as diverse as architecture and design to cleaning and gaming.
If you want to build a community together for your B2B client, get in touch with Niche Content. We’d love to share how we’ve done it for more than two decades. (Spoiler, it starts with storytelling, which is what Niche is known for.)
