Irrespective of the type, size, or nature of business truth is your success lies in the efficiency of your marketing team. Your brand will not be as successful as you wish if the consumers did not know who you are or what services you offer. This is where you need marketing.
The traditional marketing techniques like television, radio, billboards, or newspaper advertisements. With the dawn of the current age, these age-old methods are facing a decrease in popularity and thus, effectiveness. So, what’s in?
Today we shall talk about Sports marketing and point out the ways it is different from Traditional Marketing. In the process, you will also understand what it takes to run a sports marketing campaign and how a sports marketing agency can help with the same.
Traditional Marketing
This has been in existence successfully for decades and uses the conventional methods for marketing. Things like flyers, billboards, radio, television, or newspaper advertisements.
Traditional marketing is mostly tried and tested and it has proven its worth in the past. However, we should not forget that this current world is nowhere like it was a couple of decades ago. Even more so, if you consider the post-pandemic world. The bottom line is what worked just 5 years ago, might not work now.
As an example, consider ads on the radio. Do you even remember the last time you heard them? Do you remember the name of the company it was for? Can you give a brief about their services? Under the most probability, all answers will equate to a negative response.
In the current time, people are now playing music on Spotify, Apple, or Pandora as compared to old school cassettes or the newer compact disks. Some of them are even paying a fee to not hear ads at all. This is also the reason radio sets moved from your tabletops to a smartphone app and now not even that. The same applies to the other mediums as well.
With these changes, brands must evolve with the needs of the customers and the current trends. And it would not be untrue to say that the traditional form of marketing is because there are newer and more effective means of gathering info. Now, who will pay for a billboard, when they can simply publish a story on Youtube. Unfortunately, conventional marketing is no longer the first choice of businesses as it is no longer effective for your business. These forms of marketing are already outdated and on the verge of becoming obsolete.
Sports Marketing
This is one of the most efficient and modern forms of marketing and uses sports, sportspersons, or just the passion of the fans to sell their goods or promote their services. Sports marketing can take place in any sports or level irrespective of the game type. This holds for (NFL/NHL), college sports (Minor league teams, and also minor league teams (MILB).
Your campaign goals and budgetary allowance will decide which athletic organizational partner will match and fit your brand best. Just consider if you are targeting consumers aged between 40-60, a sports partnership might not be the best fitting answer for your business. In the end, it is only about what you have strategized and what you wish to accomplish as a business.
What keeps sports marketing apart from the other marketing tactics? It’s the fact that they don’t rely on one method to promote the business through the campaign, but rather a super-efficient set of promotional alternatives that are flexible and dynamic to the core.
It’s much, much more than just a billboard next to the interstate or a jingle that keeps playing repetitively between songs on the radio.
It’s more of an outfield sign that keeps on changing every time a home run is hit. It is about the gala promotion that takes center-stage at halftime and gets the fans on their toes, jumping in excitement.
It’s about the mascot that runs around and engages the fans with their favorite team. It’s about the 400k views on that video on Facebook. These experiences are what makeup memories.
After all, it's not every day that you get to meet and talk to the head coach.
Why Does It Matter?
Sports fans are very passionate. They are twice as likely to amend their buying habits to match their team’s or player’s choices. When your business is collaborating with a sports team/players you gain the full support of their fan base.
As the fans gain their bit of experience that they will never forget, and if it’s a campaign from your business rest assured they will not forget your name. Traditional marketing methods can’t achieve this even with all of their tactics.
Another important factor that is a contributor to the success of sports marketing is time spent by the fans looking at your business logo and/or its messages. A radio or television advertisement is about 30 seconds on average.
This time average kicks up to 2 hours when you endorse your product at a sporting event. Also, consider there are numerous games every season. The fun fact is, using this way you are not counting exposure in seconds but hours.
The next time you are absorbed in your game day traditions like wearing your lucky socks or jacket, for a game in mid-September to support your favorite player or team, ask yourself if your billboard advertisement is working or should you consider sports marketing.
How Does It Have So Many Benefits?
So, let’s talk about the benefits that a sports marketing agency can do for your brand and why they do it better than other marketing methods.
1. They stop and look
This approach works because the endorsements are not dumped on you and you are not forced to watch or listen. Rather it’s something you choose to stare at and engage with. Consumers who come across brands in the setting of a sports match generally seek out further content and experiences through online social media content.
A physical experience makes them stop scrolling to read and engage with a brand’s content. The placement of these advertisements is made crucially after understanding the audience’s habits when a sports marketing agency is involved. This lets your business get ahead of the competition and not lose out to the scrolling habits of today’s generation.
2. Buy it once they try it
About 74% of customers say that they may buy something new once they engage through an experiential event at a sports venue. Sports is a huge crowd-puller and through the use of an experiential campaign at the game viewers can be converted to customers. They are even more likely to do so when they see a player they love from their favorite team endorsing the product.
The strategic placement of these events can be effectively done by a sports marketing agency. Your marketing team may not be able to chalk out which event, needs to be organized at which place for maximum benefits.
3. Redirect the customers to your social media handles
This needs experts at the helm. Creating hashtags and Snapchat filters may sound easy but aren’t exactly so. It's very easy to falter as there are a huge number of possibilities. Sending the customers directly to your websites or other online content, to understand the conversion rate of the audience who choose to engage with your product.
A sports marketing agency can do it very easily by using correct keywords as hashtags that will make the masses interested in your brand, product, or service.
Sports marketing has the power to get a majority of the viewers interested as sports icons are mostly treated and considered to be real-life examples. You may be skeptical about a celebrity endorsing a food joint, and at the same time a sportsman known for his fitness can just put on a tee with their logo.
It is no wonder that the latter draws much more attention to the logo on that tee, even if the sportsperson does not say a single word about it.
Conclusion
A sports marketing agency is an entity that has been in the market and has gained a lot of experience and expertise in this arena and knows what works best, where. This knowledge lets them plan out and execute marketing plans for your business in the sports arenas where they are bound to gain much more attention than traditional marketing.
Though traditional marketing has traveled a long way and cannot be fully written off, it is no wonder that sports marketing has proven itself to be much more effective and hands out a better ROI than its predecessor. The presence of a variety of ways and options makes an agency have the best position to strategize, plan, execute and measure a campaign for you.
This also means that you can connect to the consumers long after the events have come to an end, which means you have earned a place for your brand in the customer’s minds and hearts.