Sports Marketing Machine Podcast
161 - Connected Marketing: What It Actually Looks Like with Tom Rupp
Apr 22, 2026
Season 1
Episode 161
Jeremy Neisser
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What does “connected marketing” actually mean for a sports team? In this episode, Jeremy Neisser is joined by Tom Rupp, co-founder of Revelocity Sports, to break down why so many teams feel stuck even when they’re doing good marketing—and how better integration between ticketing, email, paid media, and analytics can unlock smarter decisions and stronger revenue results. Together, they unpack what connected marketing looks like in the real world, where most teams are falling short, and what to fix first.
Call to Action
Free mini digital audit designed to directionally show what’s working, what isn’t, and what to fix next - sign up HERE
Key Topics Covered
- Why most teams hit a marketing ceiling even when they’re creating strong content and running solid campaigns
- What “connected marketing” really means: integration, automation, and visibility across your tools
- Why attribution is broken for many teams—and why multi-touch thinking matters more than ever
- How siloed reporting from Meta, Google, and other platforms leads teams to overestimate what’s working
- The crawl, walk, run framework for building a more connected marketing system
- Why pixel placement on your ticketing site is one of the simplest and highest-impact fixes a team can make
- How audience exclusions, segmentation, and personalized messaging can dramatically improve performance
- Why UTM tagging, synced ticketing data, and a unified reporting view are essential if you want to make smarter budget decisions
- What a digital audit can reveal about gaps, friction points, and missed revenue opportunities in your current setup
Timestamps
00:00 – Jeremy introduces Tom Rupp and the idea of connected marketing
02:17 – Why teams struggle to see what’s actually driving ROI
03:49 – The technical challenge of accurate tracking and attribution
05:44 – What it means to truly connect your marketing systems
06:52 – Why siloed attribution creates misleading performance data
08:07 – Why impressions and clicks are not enough
09:33 – The role of audience segmentation and personalized messaging
11:12 – How AI is helping teams create more tailored marketing content
13:22 – What Meta’s creative evolution means for sports marketers
15:00 – Crawl, walk, run: a practical framework for marketing maturity
16:51 – Why pixel placement and cross-domain tracking matter so much
18:58 – How automation and retargeting can improve campaign performance
20:19 – Using ticketing data to build smarter audiences
22:48 – Moving from marketing doer to marketing director
24:16 – What connected marketing makes possible in the future
29:02 – Why fan value and better visibility change how you spend
30:19 – The case for measurable personalization
33:45 – What a digital audit actually looks at
37:20 – The free mini audit and what teams can expect
41:04 – The first things teams should check right away
42:11 – How to evaluate vendor partners based on business impact
Links mentioned:
Revelocity Sports - LINK
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Sports Marketing Machine on Instagram
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