A guide to sports marketing

What Is sports marketing?

Sports marketing is the way to connect with your most important stakeholders - the fans. They’re the driving force behind many important decisions for any sports organisation because they are also the biggest advocates, followers and potential customers. Sports marketing can take many forms, from sponsoring a team or athlete to advertising at a sporting event. The key is to align the club’s values with the values of the sport so that the two can reinforce each other, to produce engaging content. Sports marketing can be both physical (billboards, newspaper ads) and digital (social media, email marketing). Many businesses have profited from sports marketing to grow their brand with visual storytelling. We’ve already discussed the importance of fan engagement, and that is only a part of the larger marketing landscape in sports.

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Sports marketing today is highly focused engaging fans, and on influencing the purchasing decisions of fans both in in-attendance for events and those away, watching on televisions using digital channels, with a huge focus on athlete branding and content as well as social media platforms. In the past, sports marketing was used as a term for mainly marketing strategies to sell more tickets, but it is now much more comprehensive. Organisations aiming to build fan loyalty and relationships for the long term with a solid sports marketing strategy. This is done using the athletes as ambassadors for the club and by interacting with your fanbase, providing assets to your partners so they can spread your brand and fostering long-term brand loyalty.

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Examples of sports marketing

AS Monaco’s social media content

An excellent example of sports marketing is a post by AS Monaco on the players that would be representing their countries in the FIFA World Cup. Even though they will not be representing the club, it is an effort by them to engage with not only fans of AS Monaco but also those of these countries, which could potentially go on to become AS Monaco fans in the future thanks to these players. Being the brand ambassadors of the club, putting the athletes out their plays a huge role in sports marketing and building fan loyalty - clubs can take advantage of a player’s performance for their national team for their own brand.

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Toulouse FC & UGC

Earlier this year in May, Toulouse FC celebrated their promotion back to Ligue 1 by winning the Ligue 2 title for the first time in almost 20 years. Toulouse wanted to capture this iconic moment in every way possible, and used ScorePlay’s link-in-bio feature for this. Linked in Toulouse’s Instagram bio, and promoted with a single story, the team could easily receive UGC content from their fans, while also linking to merchandising and memberships. Over the space of a few hours, hundreds of photos were submitted and moderated on their platform and immediately classified. Shared again on Twitter a few days later, another couple hundred submissions were received as fans relived the momentous day. Over 5K visits to the link, and over 500 submissions.

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Furthermore, all this content was downloaded and shared by Toulouse FC players. Athletes are a team’s ultimate online ambassadors in a new era of influencer marketing and individual brands, and this further amplified the reach of all the content.

Moving into 2023, sports will continue to face pressure from competing areas of the attention economy, and the sports marketing landscape is set to become more interesting and competitive. There will be a focus on producing content that unlocks its true identity, crafting interesting storytelling and most importantly, caring about optimisation which will achieve meaningful change in this space - and there’s where ScorePlay comes in.

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ScorePlay & Sports Marketing

ScorePlay brings everything together when it comes to sports media assets: photos, short-form videos, raw videos, broadcast streams & archives. A media-hub software like ScorePlay not only allows storage of streams and archives but acts as a dynamic tool that helps every internal team work more efficiently and faster every day, and is the absolute best way to share photos and videos with a group of athletes and foster fan engagement.

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ScorePlay is designed to automate manual media asset tasks to help you focus on content creation. Furthermore, our athlete app makes it possible to instantaneously distribute content to athletes which they can further push to their social media for fan engagement.

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Kick off your digital sports marketing strategy today. Join ScorePlay.