Sports marketing in North America has grown to a market value of over 100 billion dollars. If you are thinking of exploiting sports marketing to boost business growth, this guide will take you through trends and strategies within the sports marketing industry.
What’s Sports Marketing?
This is the use of sports-related activities to promote your product or brand. This marketing strategy allows you to leverage the attention and popularity of sports with the objective of promoting a product or brand. Sports marketing is categorized together with entertainment marketing, where brand promote and market live sports activities and events.
Sports Marketing tactics and Services
1. Creating engaging content
One of the tricks applied by sports marketers to attract prospective customers lies in the creation of engaging content with the support of celebrity sports icons. Sports fans and enthusiasts are always sharing content among themselves and with friends, which means you can tap into the entire network of people linked to your target audience.
A majority of sports fans follow their teams on social media, so you are able to reach your target audience if they happen to be sports fans.
2. Timing your Message Well
To get the attention of sports fans, you should engage your content right before the start of a game. About 72% of the fans are highly excited by pre-game content during and long after the game or event. When marketing your brand before the game, it will be part of the excitement that comes with the long-awaited sporting event.
3. Consider Hiring a Sports Marketing Firm
Some businesses and brands prefer working with sports marketing companies such as Greenfly for all their entertainment and sports marketing needs. The reason why brands choose to work with sports marketing agencies is that most people are seeking more authenticity; they want to actually feel close to their favorite sports icons and closer to the action.
These firms help in bridging the gap between your brand’s products or service and your prospective customers who are part of the big sports community. Firms working in the sports marketing industry have the know-how and the contacts necessary for success.
4. Brand Partnership
Most brands today rely greatly on partnerships for them to drive results. Business brands and sports teams are seeking to align themselves with each other, and brands are drifting towards becoming more data-oriented. Highly performing brands are always looking for partnership opportunities and are, therefore, on the lookout to make that happen. This is why it’s not surprising that McDonald’s is the official NFL sponsor in the restaurant category.
5. Using the Appropriate Tools
For your Sports marketing campaign to be a success, you might have to utilize a combination of various tools in order to reach the target consumer. Sports marketers understand that individuals watch games on television, use their mobile devices to check results/ analysis, listen to games on the radio, read about sports online and in newspapers, and attend live events.
With a combination of all these platforms, you have a myriad of ways to reach your target market. Also, don’t forget that 96% of all Google traffic is from mobile devices, and about 47% of the fans use Facebook to results, comments, and analysis of a game.
