In 3 Steps to Successful Sports Marketing

1. What is sports marketing and what goals does it pursue?
2. What marketing opportunities exist in sports?
3. What makes a good sports marketing campaign?
4. In 3 steps to your ideal sports marketing concept
5. Test and Learn in Sports Marketing
6. Conclusion on sports marketing

Almost everyone is familiar with the legendary PR actions of the past - Red Bull, Adidas or Nike. However, not every sports brand has an advertising budget in billions and can afford to run such a wide-ranging marketing campaign. In this article, our guest author explains what the sports marketing of the new generation looks like without scatter loss and how results of modern sports marketing campaigns can be made measurable.

What is sports marketing and what goals does it pursue?

Sports marketing describes the application of classic marketing principles and processes to the sports market. In sports business, it is all about marketing sports goods in the sense of market-oriented corporate management. It should be noted that sports marketing does not only include the marketing of sports and sports articles, but in its extended definition also the marketing of non-sports products through sports as a communication tool, such as sponsorship.

However, this article will mainly deal with the narrower definition, i.e. marketing of sports and sports equipment. The goal of both forms of sports marketing is the same. Usually, it is aimed at promoting the sale of own products or increasing the brand's visibility. In short: Sales and/or branding.

What marketing opportunities exist in sports?

Basically, as initially described, two main categories can be found:

• Marketing in sports (marketing of sports, sports or sports articles)
• Marketing through and with sports (marketing of non-sports products through sports)

A wide range of possibilities are available for the marketing of sports and sports articles. These also include the classic marketing tools, such as TV, print advertising, radio, online marketing, SEA, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, sponsorship and many more. On OMR Reviews you will find a large selection of tools for classic marketing instruments.

What makes a good sports marketing campaign?

In the modern, digital age, the measurability and the resulting interpretation of the success of a campaign plays a vital role. This is exactly what performance marketing is for. Performance marketing is essentially about three pillars: measurability, modularity and optimisability.

Even with the major corporations with the largest advertising budgets in the sports business, it can be clearly observed how ever larger budgets are being shifted from traditional marketing measures, such as print or TV, to the digital sector. Because with performance marketing, every euro used can be traced 100% transparently and the results can be seen in terms of reach, clicks, impressions, sales, sales etc.

For you, this means specifically that the measurability of a marketing campaign has become more important than ever. Especially through digital channels, such as social media ads or SEA, comprehensive collection of performance data is possible via tracking codes on your own website. Nowadays, you no longer have to hope that printing hundreds of thousands of posters will increase sales or that the investment could prove to be poor. In performance marketing, not only can you watch the results of your campaigns live, you can also increase your budget flexibly at any time or stop the investment completely.

The evaluation of a marketing campaign in sports, however, is still based on the initial objective setting. Basically, good marketing in sports covers the entire customer journey, which means that a good sports marketing concept consists of several campaigns. Even then, the effectiveness of the individual campaigns can still be viewed separately.

For example, it may be useful to run a social media campaign in the upper funnel, which aims to create brand awareness, generate traffic and build up initial target groups. How to create a successful social media campaign, you can read here.

In the mid-funnel, these target groups, for example all users who have watched a video of the first advertisement by 50% or more, can be picked up again and played back. Following the AIDA principle, this campaign would strengthen the interest and desire for my product.

In the bottom funnel, it ultimately comes down to conversions and purchases. For example, SEA campaigns such as Google Shopping or search ads may be able to tap into the existing or newly created demand. Social media retargeting campaigns, for example on all users of an online shop, can also lure with a small discount code or similar to make the purchase of our sports item.

As you can see, there are countless ways to represent a funnel and a good campaign. This in turn depends on how explanatory a product is and whether sales should be generated at all or whether it's just about branding. In addition, the full funnel may need to be continually replenished, or a certain demand may need to be created first. Depending on how well known a brand already is.

In 3 steps to your ideal sports marketing concept

In the sports business, extracting the best performance involves dealing with many aspects and questions.

1. Choose your marketing channels

First of all, it needs to be clarified which channels should be used. Depending on the budget, omnipresence may make sense, but in most cases brand awareness and pricing policy are decisive.

To do this, it is best to ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you a manufacturer or retailer? Better formulated, do you have an online shop and do you operate business-to-consumer?
• Are your prices competitive with the offering that can be found elsewhere on price comparison sites such as Google Shopping?
• How well-known are you in the market? Or what is the brand awareness of the products you sell? This can be researched wonderfully with Google Trends, the keyword planner or other SEA Tools. Especially important: the monthly search volume.

For example, if you are a sports goods manufacturer who traditionally relies on specialist trade and sells at RRP, the following approach often makes sense: strengthening brand awareness primarily via social media ads.

On the other hand, if you are a retailer who sells well-known brand products, SEA and Google Shopping are a good choice.

Basically, mixed forms can also be plausible. The important thing is just to know where you are in the customer journey. Generalising this is difficult and not recommended. Time and again, we have also been able to scale retailers via social, or find niche keywords on SEA for manufacturers without a shop. For illustration and inspiration, I offer a small overview here:

2. Know your position in the market

Once the right channels have been found, you have to ask yourself where exactly you stand in the market. In the sports business, there is a large offer of many start-ups, established manufacturers and retailers. Due to the intensifying factor of price transparency of the internet, it is becoming increasingly important to know and communicate your USPs correctly. Depending on the business model, it may already be enough to offer the best price and sell via Google Shopping. Otherwise, You have to consider even more, which USP, feature or similar, which persona addresses.

Especially in sports business, there are always different personas. For example, a manufacturer of running shoes could attract the professional athlete, the ambitious hobby athlete, as well as the simple consumer who only wear the shoe for leisure purposes. If possible, each individual target group should be addressed differently and different USPs communicated.

3. Address your target audience appropriately

Sports marketing also stands out through a particularly dynamic and emotional approach. Especially on social media and YouTube, mood shots and videos of sports articles in action are highly successful. User-generated content is also popular.

To generate ideal touchpoints with a potential buyer with a more emotional appeal, dynamic backgrounds in Dynamic Remarketing Ads are a great Performance Booster. We have tested this with all our sports customers.

Here is an example of what it can look like:

Especially in combination with influencer marketing, as in this example, the performance can be reinforced even more.

If you are now wondering how to get dynamic backgrounds into your Dynamic Ads, here are three options.

1. If your online shop happens to show an action shot picture at the same position for every product from the start, you can simply set that always this picture, for example always the third picture, is exported to the Facebook catalogue as the primary image link.
2. If, like most shops, this is not the case, you can deactivate the synchronisation of the Facebook catalogue and manually upload an action picture for each product. The disadvantage is that prices and availability will no longer update automatically. Moreover, this is quite a lot of effort and often only feasible for manufacturers due to prices and availability.
3. The elegant variant would be to work with a product data optimisation software. Here you have the option to upload a second, additional feed with the columns id and image_link. You can then match this image_link, which contains a link of an action shot, with your main feed and export the additional image to Facebook. As a storage medium for the images, a publicly accessible image link must be chosen, such as Amazon AWS.

Once you have found your ideal marketing concept, the real work begins - namely optimisation.

Test and Learn in Sports Marketing

To refine your marketing concept, we always recommend collecting as much data as possible. This includes not only solid tracking and recording of all KPIs, but also the strategic collection of testing results. For this you should work with a Hypothesensheet. Write your hypothesis before an A/B test, how you test it and what results you expect.

At ALPSTÜRMER, we collect testing data and subsequent best practices from all areas of the sports business for this purpose. The evaluation of the data also plays a significant role. For visualisation, we like to use Supermetrics and Google Datastudio.

One point that few brands anticipate is the topic of product data optimisation. For this we like to work with the platform Productsup. With this we are able to adapt our product data feeds individually to all channels and collect data through testings.

In short: you can not only test and optimize within the campaigns, but also your overall product data. As Kevin Plank, Founder of Under Amour already said: "Data is the new oil". There is not much more to add to performance marketing.

Conclusion on sports marketing

Sports brands have been using sports marketing methods for ages. Recently, non-sports brands also see the benefits of sports marketing. In the sports business, it is seen daily how more and more marketing budgets flow into digital marketing.

The main reasons for this are measurability and optimizability.

Basically, there is no one way in sports marketing. As an old saying already clarified: All roads lead to Rome. But the fastest way is with a thought-out route planning, which has been tested and optimized in advance.