Digital Sports Marketing: Benefits and Strategies
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Craig Bonnot
Like everyone else, sports fans love social media. That's why digital sports marketing provides a great opportunity to reach millions of sports fans. According to the Social Times, while watching their favorite sports, fans often post game reactions to social media or check the stats on their fantasy teams. Sports are an ideal platform for digital marketing because they are essentially a series of one unpredictable event after another. A game changing play can happen at any moment, and that means marketers can't wait hours after the game is over to interact with fans. This allows sports marketers the opportunity to interact with their fans in an intimate and personal way. However doing so, requires adherence to a detailed strategy.
Benefits of Digital Sports Marketing
- There are all ready a lot of sports fans using mobile digital devices. According to Scribble Live, sixty percent of smart phone and tablet owners "consume sports related content on their devices at least once a day." Since almost everyone owns at least one tablet or smart phone, that's a lot of eyeballs.
- Most sports fans are all ready using social media and other digital outlets to find out about their favorite teams, athletes or events. Fans love sharing their in-game reactions or analysis over social media, and many fans use the Internet to look up scores. Considering the amount of time sports fans are spending on these platforms, digital sports marketing is an ideal avenue for any brand.
Strategies
- While fans are watching live sporting events in person or on TV, many of them are also glued to their smart phones. According to the Social Times, this provides an excellent opportunity for marketers to create "engaging, real-time content that is appropriate to the channel they're leveraging." You can use twitter as a live feed. As a brand, react to exciting plays in real-time. This will show your audience that you, as a brand, care about the same things they do. You can use Instagram to give fans a behind the scenes look at athletes or events. This can be leveraged with a sponsorship with a team or sporting event.
- Give your audience a reason to engage with you on social media during a big game. Create hashtags or run contests during a sporting event. This will motivate your audience to engage with your brand on social media. They may even create and share their own content related to your advertising campaign. This provides an opportunity for your campaign to go viral.
- Before you begin your digital sports marketing campaign, it's important to develop a clear set of specific goals and benchmarks. With any marketing campaign, it's important to define what the campaign is designed to achieve. Are you trying to raise your brand awareness? Are you trying to make your audience more engaged with your brand? The answers to these questions will determine the nature of your marketing campaign. If you're trying to raise your brand awareness, your strategy should be to develop a campaign that will appeal to a broad audience. If you're trying to get people to engage with your brand in a more personal way, you will need a more specific and targeted strategy.
- All your social media posts should follow a detailed strategy. You can't simply post a lot about a particular sporting event. You have to know ahead of time how you plan to react to specific events. Since the appeal of sports is that game changing events occur at a moments notice, if you can't react to events in real-time, you won't be very successful with digital sports marketing.
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