A brand-new pro track league. Four host markets. No CRM history, no attribution scaffolding. This is how iExcel built the digital engine — database, email, and market-specific ticket campaigns.
Launching a professional sports property in 2020s attention is not a marketing warm-up. It's a cold start. No inherited fan database, no attribution history, no paid-social baselines to compare against, and — critically — a tight window between racer announcements, ticket on-sale windows, and event day.
Grand Slam Track came to iExcel with a season to sell across four host markets — Kingston, Miami, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles — and the operational reality of every new sports property: a legacy email platform that had been carrying broadcast blasts, a nascent CRM that didn't yet know how to talk to the ad accounts, and a broadcast partner rollout schedule that wouldn't wait for infrastructure to catch up.
The brief wasn't "run a campaign." It was: build the marketing engine while the season runs. Database consolidation, source and channel attribution, email cadence for racer announcements and ticket launches, market-specific paid social by DMA, and a reporting layer leadership could actually read on a Monday.
The first structural lever was moving marketing off DotDigital — the legacy email platform the league had been using for broadcast sends — and into HubSpot as the system of record. It was more than an export/import. It was a full rebuild of how the league's fan, ticket-buyer, and partner audiences would be captured, tagged, segmented, and messaged.
iExcel scoped and executed the migration end-to-end. Database consolidation across every legacy list. Subscription and legal-basis mapping so the marketable-audience count was clean, not just imported. Form testing on every ticketing, subscription, and lineup-alert entry point. Email sending domain, IP warm-up, and deliverability configuration in HubSpot. Onboarding workflows for new subscribers so the first touch after opt-in was intentional — not silence.
Marketing blast readiness landed in phases: racer-announcement sends, then broadcast-partner reveals, then Miami / Philadelphia / LA start-list emails, then slam recaps. Every send tied to a workflow, a segment, and a source tag. DotDigital shutdown followed only once every workflow had run cleanly in HubSpot.
You can't run market-specific paid campaigns without a marketing-sourced view of where the audience came from. In a first-season sports property, the honest starting point was: the database didn't know. Contacts were coming in from ticketing forms, subscription boxes, racer-announcement landers, and partner integrations — and landing in HubSpot with First Touch Channel and First Touch Source fields either blank or inconsistent.
iExcel ran the fix in two passes. First, a historical backfill — every existing contact assigned a First Touch Channel and First Touch Source against the best-available signal on the record. Second, maintenance workflows in HubSpot that fire on new-contact creation, so the tag is written the moment the record exists — not weeks later during a leadership review.
The result was defensible: the reporting layer above the CRM stopped guessing. When the CEO asked which market and which channel a ticket-buyer had come in through, the answer was a HubSpot property, not a spreadsheet reconstruction.
Meta paid social ran market-by-market, not one national campaign in a trench coat. Each host market got its own DMA-targeted structure, its own creative testing, its own retargeting layer, and its own budget recommendation calibrated to on-sale windows and local density.
The card below is the shape of it. Each lane is a market. Each market has a role in the season, a targeting posture, and a set of paid-social plays wired to conversion tracking on the ticketing side.
What the card doesn't show — because it doesn't fit in a tile — is the operational side. Payment-error recovery inside Meta Ads Manager when checkout hiccuped mid-flight. Conversion-tag troubleshooting between GTM, Meta Pixel, and the ticketing platform. Campaign rebuilds when the ad account misfired and the on-sale window couldn't wait. Boutique, senior team — not a junior swapping creative in a dashboard.
The Miami build proved the value of segment discipline: isolating a strict track-and-field interest audience, instead of running broad retargeting, dropped the cost per ticket purchase sharply against the market's own blended campaign average. Philadelphia proved the value of pacing — the media mix leaned into the final on-sale week and purchases attributed to Meta accelerated hard against the campaign's own early pace as doors approached.
Once HubSpot was standing and attribution was tagged, the email engine got to run at the pace the season demanded. Every send tied back to a segment, a source, and a next-action for the reader — tactical, not "content marketing" in the abstract.
The Miami merch send was the clearest proof the segmentation work was paying off. Timed against the market's on-sale window, it pulled a unique click rate well clear of general email benchmarks — evidence the audience wasn't just opening, it was acting.
Meta was the workhorse for market-specific ticket sales. But the season needed more than one channel to build a sports audience from cold — and iExcel scoped the broader paid roster against that reality.
TikTok Ads for the audience that lives inside vertical video and the athlete-content native to it. StackAdapt CTV for connected-TV video awareness — the format that actually gets in front of the household televisions where sports fandom is still built. Google Shopping and Display for the GST Shop merchandise channel, because ticket-buyers and merch-buyers are adjacent audiences, not identical ones.
Each channel was scoped as a test roadmap, not a permanent line item — a hypothesis about incremental reach against the paid-Meta baseline, with a defined budget window and a defined read.
Market-specific ticket-sales campaigns. DMA targeting, retargeting layers, creative testing, campaign rebuilds, payment-error recovery. The workhorse channel.
Vertical-video tests against the athlete-content audience native to the platform. Scoped as an incremental-reach hypothesis against paid-Meta baselines.
Connected-TV awareness plan against sports-fan household inventory. Video creative tied to the season announce and the on-sale calendar.
Paid-search and display plan for the GST Shop merchandise channel — merch-buyer intent, adjacent to but distinct from ticket-buyer intent.
Post-migration system of record. Every send, every form, every source tag, every workflow. Marketing blast readiness sequenced against on-sale windows.
Conversion tracking wired from ticketing entry points through the checkout event, with troubleshooting when the tag layer drifted mid-campaign.
If you're standing up a new sports property, a new event series, or a first-season live-events business — and you're staring at a legacy email tool, a CRM that doesn't yet know how to tag a source, and a paid-social ad account firing at markets you haven't segmented — the Grand Slam Track engagement is the shape of what to do about it.
Foundation first. Migrate off the legacy platform onto a system that can carry attribution. Attribution second. Backfill First Touch, wire the workflows, and stop guessing at the leadership view. Cadence third. Racer, broadcast, ticket, recap — each send tied to a segment and a source. Paid fourth. Market-by-market, DMA-by-DMA, with the measurement plumbing already holding underneath it.
Most agencies sell the paid campaign. iExcel sells the operator layer underneath it — and stays through the phases that make the campaigns work once the season is actually running.
A CRM you can trust. Attribution you can defend to leadership. Email cadence that ships. Paid social by market, not by wishful thinking. Book a 15-minute sanity check on your setup — we'll tell you what's under-built and what to do about it.
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