How Defined Audience Segmentation Helped Shape the Valkyries Inaugural Fanbase, and What’s Next
Jess Smith had the data that contradicted market assumptions in women's sports.
Of Golden State Valkyries season ticket holders, 7% overlapped with the Warriors fan base, showcasing a new audience for Chase Center and Golden State funneling in through the Valkyries product.
Women's sports audiences have been waiting; sports marketing agencies just needed better research methods to find them. Jess Smith understood this from the start. At Angel City FC, she maintained over 90% season ticket renewal rates by identifying distinct consumer segments and building experiences that served each one.
When the Valkyries achieved a $500 million valuation, Smith had proof: partnerships serving multiple audience types simultaneously generate higher ROI than those designed for a single demographic.
Key Takeaways:
Three distinct consumer segments drive women's sports engagement—the dedicated fan, the values-driven believer, and the traditional sports enthusiast
Multi-audience activation design creates partnerships where each element serves at least two segments while delivering measurable business outcomes
Continuous research investment refines audience understanding beyond initial segmentation to build increasingly targeted partnerships
How Skewed Research Costs Brands Billions
The flaw in current consumer intelligence for sports marketing is in the source data. Agencies built databases by tracking men's sports: NBA season tickets, NFL viewership, and MLB merchandise sales. When brands asked about women's sports opportunities, analysts searched those same databases and reported back small numbers.
"The audience is much larger and much more savvy than anyone's given them credit for. They just haven't been in anyone's database yet,” says Smith. “They've been waiting for this."
Brands compounded this by designing women's sports partnerships using men's sports playbooks. Same activation strategies. Same audience assumptions. Same measurement criteria.
The Valkyries' small percentage of overlap with Warriors season ticket holders proved these consumers make purchasing decisions differently, engage through different channels, and respond to partnership activations that aren’t measured by traditional sports marketing.
Smith now invests in continuous audience research to define and understand the audience that contradicts industry assumptions.
Each audience segment offers different engagement patterns, purchasing behaviors, and lifetime value. Partnerships designed for one group miss two-thirds of the commercial opportunity.
Three Untapped Audiences Brands Can’t Afford To Miss
As a means to start understanding consumer habits across the broader audience, Smith started with three audience segments in her focus. The reach to those three segments, and more, are expanding as the Valkyries continue to build and foster the fanbase. Each requires different activation approaches. To start with, the most successful strategies address these three segments simultaneously.
The Dedicated Women's Sports Fan
This segment knows every stat about every player. They've followed athletes from college through professional careers, watching women's sports across multiple leagues. They've been spending time, energy, and dollars on women's sports for years; they just weren't showing up in traditional sports marketing databases.
Partnership example: This segment spots performative partnerships immediately. Brands must demonstrate genuine commitment through multi-year investments and athlete-centered activations. They value depth over surface-level engagement.
Deep Blue and MassMutual's "Stay Ready" campaign with elite women athletes exemplifies this commitment. The financial services company created a platform spotlighting how players prepare year-round, honoring the dedication these fans already recognize and respect in the athletes they follow.
The "Bright Believer" (Ages 18-35)
Values-driven consumers who care deeply about where they spend their time and money. They connect through community aspects and values alignment, seeking spaces where they feel represented.
Smith positions them as consumers who are seeking a sports experience aligned with their value, the community being an initial draw that leads them to becoming obsessed with the sport.
Partnership example: This segment responds to purpose-driven activations with measurable community impact. They want specific outcomes like coaching certifications completed, small businesses supported, and girls staying in sports.
Kaiser Permanente's $25-per-jersey program funds coaching diversity and youth sports participation, directly addressing the statistic that girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys by age 14. Generic values messaging without trackable results doesn't convert them.
The Traditional Sports Fan
Quality-focused consumers who come for great basketball and return based on athletic excellence. This segment validates competitive credibility and brings expertise in evaluating technical performance.
Partnership example: This segment requires premium experience and respects elite athlete treatment. The Valkyries' use of Chase Center—a world-class NBA facility—signals to traditional sports fans that these athletes deserve the same elite infrastructure. Partnerships must emphasize athletic excellence, competitive integrity, and performance support rather than community narratives alone.
Aiming to Capture All Three
Smith's team asks during partnership development: which audiences does this serve, and how does it create value for each?
That question prevents partnerships from defaulting to single-audience solutions that miss commercial opportunity. When Sephora sponsors both the practice facility and the Valkyries Fashion Show featuring player-designed collections, they've created touchpoints across all three segments.
Season Two: Research That Refines Revenue
Smith's approach to the Valkyries' second season centers on diving deeper: initial audience segmentation is a starting point, not an endpoint.
The team is conducting "a large study on our male fans," Smith says.
"We want to know more about him. Why is he showing up? What are his consumer habits? What makes him feel more connected to this brand more quickly?"
Understanding male attendance patterns—which contradict industry assumptions about women's sports demographics—creates opportunities that would otherwise be missed. If male fans attend for different reasons than female fans, activations can address those distinct motivations within the same property.
Continuous research investment turns assumptions into data. That data reveals subsegments within each core audience type, enabling increasingly targeted activations that serve multiple consumer groups simultaneously.
This research also extends beyond domestic markets. As the team studies audience behavior patterns, they're identifying which segments translate internationally and how global fan development requires different approaches.
Building Global Audiences Before Playing Global Games
The Valkyries built one of the most international rosters in WNBA history. The Valkyries had three players from France during their inaugural season, positioning the team for fan acquisition ahead of the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup 2026 in Berlin.
International roster composition becomes market development alongside the competitive advantages and on-court successes these players bring. Each international player creates entry points for building fan bases in their home countries before games are played there. Merchandise sales reached 70 countries in the Valkyries' first season.
Teams can enter new markets with established fan relationships, or start audience development from zero when they arrive. The Valkyries’ roster composition makes that choice clear.
Women's sports properties can design for the audience agencies think exist, or build proprietary intelligence on distinct segments actually attending events.
