Sports and Digital Media Marketing: 3 Ways to Effectively Integrate

Whether you are a digital marketer yourself or someone who consumes digital media on a regular basis, it is always good to be up on the trends of today. Unfortunately, digital media and marketing best practices are still novel ideas to many business entities across the globe, and among the many who are starting to be left behind in this space are sports franchises. While some leagues like the NBA and certain super-teams like the FC Bayern soccer team out of Munich have been aggressive and tried to get themselves out in front of social/digital media trends, most in the sports world are still antiquated in their use of these "new-age" mediums.

As an undergraduate student in the Integrated Marketing Communications program
at Northwestern University, I have compiled a couple of articles that illustrate, in a broad sense, where digital trends are heading, and more specifically, how these apply to sports operators.

In a recent DigiDay article online, entitled 2018 Content Trends You Need to Know Right Now, Creative Executive Molly St. Louis speaks to how the digital content world is changing, and thus, how to best evolve with it.  The biggest, arguably most important point, St. Louis makes in the whole article is about just how dynamic this field is.  Long story short, this online, content-oriented world is constantly changing and evolving, and so the most important thing to do - staying up to date - may sound simple, but is most definitely easier said than done.  With that being said, there are trends she points to in terms of what is on the immediate horizon like the rise of "mobile" and "voice" activated AI; all things to consider when moving forward in the digital content space.

Image credit: company800 Staff Documents (https://sites.google.com/a/wcastl.org/the-westminster-school-of-business-and-communication/marketing/sportsmarketingproject)

Connect all of these ideas to what is going on in the sports world and you see some interesting parallels. SportsProMedia recently published an article entitled The Derby County model: digital transformation drives the future of sports marketing about a lower-divison soccer team in England and how they are trying to update many of the ways sports franchises interact with the online world.  Sports franchises used to have simple goals like getting people in the seats of their stadiums and winning games.  Traditional marketing was the means to an end to execute on these goals, but with the evolution of digital, there has been a proliferation of "means" to get to these simple ends. On top of this, sports teams do have the perk of having an abundance of ready-to-go digital consumers, also known as "fans." As the author, Matt Wheatcroft, puts it, "This ‘hidden army’ of support is the Holy Grail for professional sports clubs… a rich but untapped seam of digitally-savvy content consumers."  Matt notes how with the case in the article, the team made sure to make a seamless website no matter the device you are on in addition to an extensive user experience platform to engage with during actual live sporting events.  

In the case, the team seems to be prioritizing a lot of the qualities that Molly St. Louis alluded to previously in her article about content trends.  Now, when you think about these two articles in tandem, certain points begin to stick out.  Based on my review of the aforementioned titles and my studies at NU, I have created 3 key concepts to keep in mind when you are creating digital sports media or engaging with digital sports media.

Think Mobile
Tailor your user experiences for mobile devices – reach your audience where they are.

Drive Engagement
Reach isn’t always the most important metric – make sure your consumers are actually, actively 

ENGAGING with your content.

“Don’t try to be everything for everyone”
Make sure you know where to start and who your targets are before blindly going after every consumer. 

Whether you are just a sports consumer or a marketer by trade, these ideas are good starting points for you to think about in terms of how your favorite team is engaging with consumers online or, if not, how they should be.  Be sure to check out each article on it's own for even more detailed information on the topic.

Eli Sachs is a passionate digital marketer, social media strategist, and die-hard sports fan. He's pursuing his undergraduate degree in Learning and Organizational Change along with a certificate in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University.   You can get in touch with Eli on his twitter page here.