The world of sports is extremely important to many people. Fans from all over make a point of keeping up with their favorite team’s players, ensuring they never miss a key trade, draft, player stat, or game.
Because sports culture is so ingrained in our everyday life, it can be hard to see professional athletics as a sort of business. However, the organizations and leagues that fans know and love are in fact big businesses whose operations function in a similar way to major companies.
As such, marketing plays a huge role in the industry’s overall success. In general, digital sports marketeers work to make a team’s image more visible, promoting the group of athletes as they would any special brand. While this can involve a number of things at the ground level, there are a few key factors any sports marketing campaign needs to succeed.
A Specific Vision with Clear Goals
First and foremost, the starting step on the road to any effective marketing campaign must involve the creation of specific goals, clearly defining what your work is aiming to achieve. When it comes to the development of sports teams, these objectives are already semi-laid out in advance.
For example, the goals associated with promoting a team vs. promoting an individual player will be different in nature and therefore require a different vision. Additionally, marketeers should consider crucial aspects of the project such as task management, perspective and the end result even in the beginning stages. The bottom line: the absence of goals means great intentions without a plan to execute them.
Steady Engagement from Fans
There’s no doubt that passionate, devoted fans are sports marketeers main target audience. However, with millions of enthusiastic supporters worldwide, how does sports marketing work to consistently engage such a large number of people?
One of the best ways is by developing or sharing relevant content that immediately gains attention. For example, football lovers who follow the NFL zealously are most likely interested in what teams the experts have picked to win in different divisions, even if the regular season isn’t set to take place until September. Equipped with this knowledge, marketeers can strategically share content that relates to this up-and-coming event. By staying ahead of the game, both literally and figuratively, the target audience is kept informed and will most likely keep engaging in the future with the hopes that they will find more significant news across channels.
This takes us to our next point: the importance of multi-channel marketing in today’s digital environment.
Nowadays, any campaign must have a strong mobile presence to drive user interaction
Multi-Channel Marketing Tactics
Any marketing campaign, sports or other, is unable to succeed nowadays without mobile optimization. This means that work largely takes place in the virtual sphere, namely with social media. In the past, things like in-person brainstorming meetings and decorated flyers may have helped to promote an organization, but those practices seem largely outdated in today’s context.
Sports marketers must have specific strategies for working with platforms like Instagram and Facebook. It isn’t as simple as posting and sharing, but rather making these networks a first priority for outreach. For example, advertising through social applications is a great way to boost traffic and foster conversion. Because most fans receive sports updates and news alerts on their mobile phones anyway, a strong mobile presence will be advantageous on the way to accomplishing marketing goals.
Performance Review
In the same way that a vision is important to jumpstart the beginning stages of a sports marketing campaign, so is a performance review at the job’s end. Your team should examine things like sales number, revenue expectations and results, and the overall effectiveness of the campaign in light of the goals.
This process, known as the Post Campaign Analysis (PCA), allows marketeers from all industries to plan for future projects based on challenges experienced in past campaigns. After all, a growth mindset is crucial for the expansion of sports marketing.
