Nowadays, it is hard to imagine our lives without social media. We use these platforms for many different things such as communication, entertainment, education, and much more. Over the years, this digitalization heavily influenced the sports industry in different ways.
The first official sport-related digital marketing campaign was started back in 2012 for the London Olympics Games and since then sports teams and leagues use the power of technology to reach more people and grow their popularity.
There are many different digital marketing measures that sports teams and leagues focus on, such as search engine optimization, social presence, blogs, content marketing, app production, and much more.
In today’s article, we will take a closer look at how digital marketing is used in organizations and how it changed the sports industry forever.
Social Media
Nowadays, it is hard to find a team, organization, or sports league without social media accounts. Social media has the biggest impact on the sports industry and is the most commonly used in their digital marketing strategies.
One of the reasons why social media is very attractive to the sports industry is due to audience targeting. Before social media, it wasn’t possible to show ads to specific audiences that share similar interests. This means that the ads back in the day, were not that effective just because they were shown on billboards or TV commercials to a large number of people who didn’t even like sports.
The effectiveness of social media marketing brings down the costs for sports teams and leagues.
Additionally, social media is the most powerful tool for building huge communities where sports teams and other organizations have instant access and can communicate with fans. This will help them indicate things that the audience doesn’t like, share new ideas, or share crucial updates about sport-related news.
There is a limit to what you can share on social media platforms for sports organizations and teams. For example, Liverpool FC received a lot of negative backlashes when they ask fans on social media about who they wanted the next boss to be.
Rerouting Traffic to Their Own Platforms
Sports teams and organizations often use digital marketing tools and their social media influence to reroute traffic to their own website. Why do they do that?
Well, their private platforms can be monetized or offer special merch or jerseys where they can generate an additional source of income.
They can optimize their own platforms or websites to show only the things that fans are most interested in, and potentially create another business that can generate a lot of money.
Google Adwords
Since Google is the most successful search engine, all sports organizations are trying to take a piece of the cake and attract as many fans as they can to their own platforms. Google Adwords is a PPC type of advertising that changed the sports industry.
Nowadays, sports organizations, leagues, and teams that have additional income from their website are using pay-per-click advertising on Google for a specific type of audience that will help them stay on top of their competition.
Getting New Talent
The time of sports scouts is not over, but with social media and other digital tools, sports teams can attract young talented people to join their teams. We’ve seen many teams use digital marketing to attract people to join their youth program and hope that they can run into people who have the potential for becoming stars.
Brand Awareness
The most common use of digital marketing for sports organizations is for brand awareness. Sports teams and organizations use social media tools to promote new services and increase their brand awareness.
For example, many sports teams are trying to promote their eco-friendly strategy on social media just to show their effort into making the world a better place and gain more brand awareness.
With that said, digital marketing has become an essential part of every organization which is why they already have specific digital marketing teams in their organization. As new technologies emerge, the sports industry will continue to digitalize, as we’ve seen with the teams in the NBA trade rumors and their latest NFT’s (non-fungible-tokens) collectibles called Top Shots that are quickly becoming very popular.
Many advantages come from digital marketing, and the sports industry has barely scratched the surface. We expect even more digital marketing activities in the future from the sports industry.