Sports marketing is the practice of using sports or sporting events to promote brands or products. If you yourself are a sports fan, you will likely have seen many ads in and around your favourite sport. Whether that be in person or digitally.
Examples of sports advertising would be ads at half-time in football games, ads inside stadiums or endorsement by athletes. As you can imagine, these ads can be very effective due to the huge audience of sport. However, they can be very pricy. Because of this we are doing to discuss the best strategies for sports marketing and dive into how the experts do it!
Develop a Target Audience
The first thing you need to do before anything else in sports marketing, is develop a target audience. You can’t just send your ads out to everyone and hope for the best. Therefore, you will need to select an audience that you think will best engage with your advertisements. Aspects of a target audience may be age, location, income, interests (sport most likely) and more.
Developing this target audience allows you to know exactly the type of people you are marketing to and therefore, hopefully achieve better results for your campaigns.
Create Engaging ‘Over the top’ content
Once you have a target audience in place it is now time to create the content you wish to be advertised. This may be in the form of text ads, videos, images, billboards, etc. but whatever it is you choose to use, they must be engaging and catch the attention of your audience.
Some ways to create this type of content is to make the content seem flashy, trendy, and sometimes even over the top. Since televised sport is seen as so elite these days this type of content may resonate with an audience that may enjoy watching it.
Celebrity endorsements
As previously mentioned, sports and sports personalities are viewed as such elite members of society to many people, especially younger audiences. This presents a great opportunity to use these personalities to promote your brand or product. This can be very effective as when people see their favourite athlete endorsing something, they will want to follow in their footsteps.
The downside to this strategy is that it may be difficult to secure a celebrity athlete to endorse your product as well as it also being very expensive depending on who is desired for the endorsement.
Time your advertisements well
It has been found that 72% of fans are excited by pre-game content. This is because your brand or product becomes a part of the exciting build up for the fans. This means if you can get your adverts in front of as many eyes as you can, as close as you can to the beginning of a sports contest, the audience may be more likely to engage with it.
Brand partnerships
Many brands are constantly looking to partner up with popular sports teams as it provides benefits to both parties. The sports team gets a nice amount of cash for representing the brands name and possibly wearing it on uniforms or equipment, and the brand get to have their name associated with a top-level sporting team. An example of this would be Rolex and Formula 1, both are seen as very prestigious and so make a great partnership.
This also goes back to what was mentioned when we discussed celebrity endorsements. Having the brand associated with people’s favourite team will make them more likely to want to associate with that brand themselves.
In closing
These are only a few of many strategies that can be used when marketing around the world of sports. We encourage you to experiment and research all the best ways in which marketing has been done in sport over the years.