As the new decade comes, sports brands are hoping to start the year on the right foot by implementing fresh sports marketing strategies. And though it seems like it’s supposed to be a yearly ritual for those in the sporting industry, things have significantly changed.
Last year, the global sporting market was estimated to be worth between $480 billion to $620 billion with a CAGR of 5.9%. And among the several market sectors around the world, America accounts for 32.5% of the said market right after China with 12.7%.
This rapid growth then created an especially saturated and competitive market that left sporting brands on the hunt for brand new sports marketing strategies that can grant them great competitive advantage. And with experts predicting more growth in the coming years, they are now preparing themselves for even greater competition.
In line with this, Creatitive has listed down seven of the best ingredients brands should keep in mind in creating eminent sports marketing campaigns!
Seven Ingredients to Greatness
Behind every great brand awareness campaign or digital marketing strategy are key ingredients that created each marketing tactic a brand uses to promote their product. Complete these seven steps and your brand’s marketing plan will surely earn the competitive edge it needs to stand out!
Target Audience
Behind every great marketing campaign or social media promotion is a well-developed targeted audience. Your target serves as the main foundation of all of your brand’s marketing efforts.
They are the group of people you will be directly speaking to through your campaign. Determining your target audience or target market will allow you to figure out which is the most effective way of reaching out to them. Furthermore, the customer profiles you’ll cultivate around your target market will help your business focus on their needs and wants.
Without this, your brand will end up spending a large amount of money.
Brand Positioning
Think about how you want your targeted audience to perceive your brand and how you can stand out amongst your competition.
One of the greatest sports marketing strategies examples out there is the way Nike positions itself in the market. The sports brand giant targets consumers who hope to live the same lifestyle their favorite athletes have.
Nike takes this psychographic segmentation alongside the demographics of their target audience in cultivating their entire branding. The data they’ve gathered on sports fans serves as their main foundation for every tactic they develop such as their sports direct marketing strategy — emphasizing the importance of developing your target audience.
Moving Brand Language
Once you’ve developed your customer profiles and have identified the position of your brand, you can now start working on your brand language.
Though brand language is a term business owners often hear, it’s not something they really went into great detail with. It refers to the words — sometimes, even images — that a brand uses to define its purpose or tone.
Using the user profiles you have created and the brand positioning you hope to achieve, you’ll start building a brand language that resonates well with your consumers.
Great Platforms
Today’s modern technology and ever-evolving Internet has handed us several platforms we can use in reaching out. Once the previous ingredients have been prepped, your brand will have to decide which distribution channel will work best for you and your target audience.
Your customer profiles remain the foundation of your social media marketing efforts. Go back and study the content consumption of your target audience. Do they spend most of their time on channels like Facebook and Twitter or are they also into informative blogs?
Platforms will also determine the kind of content you’ll be producing. For instance, eye-catching videos work best for Facebook while compelling content marketing is apt for your website’s blog.
Cohesion
In order for your sports brand to truly be remembered by your target audience, each of its marketing strategies across all platforms must be cohesive with one another.
In this day and age where most people are estimated to own an average of 6.9 connected devices, it’s crucial for brands to offer a consistent experience from one channel to another.
Cohesive branding allows consumers to easily identify your sports brand in the sea of great competition. By keeping your customer profiles in mind, the platforms you have and the position you want to attain, you’ll have an easier time developing cohesive marketing tactics!
Using these seven ingredients, your sports brand can gain the edge it needs to survive the heavily competitive market the sports industry has. And with enough experimentation, you might be able to leverage them to reach the kind of success modern brands dream of having — omnichannel success.
How to Achieve Omnichannel Success
The emergence of the digital age has shifted the relationship of brands and consumers, resulting in a new breed of hyperconnected shoppers. And with this in mind, sports retailers believe that omnichannel strategies are now more critical than ever.
Several studies have shown that brands with cohesive marketing campaigns retain an average of 89% of their customers while those with weaker omnichannel engagement has a retention rate of only 33%. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a great need for cohesive strategies but unfortunately, only 8% of sports brands are confident they have achieved omnichannel success.
Admittedly, delivering consistent customer experience can be pretty challenging — especially for those relatively new in the business. Brand new sports brand owners have a hard time truly understanding the process and often feel intimidated by it.
For instance, while a brand may have enough data on their target audience, this doesn’t mean they can strategically use this in developing their marketing campaigns. They’ll probably end up hiring a marketing expert who would then give them ideas on marketing collaterals they can use that would then cause them to hire the services of a designing agency.
Omnichannel success requires expertise in several different fields that business owners often don’t have. Luckily, there are sports marketing companies like Creatitive that offer integrated services that can help struggling sports brands!
Making New Friends
Newly established sports brands can focus on their business by handing their marketing needs over without breaking the bank. Not only are they ensured of successful sports marketing strategies, they also gain a better chance at achieving the seemingly elusive omnichannel success!
