Sports Marketing Has Evolved Over The Years…

Over the years, sports marketing has gone on to evolve as a branch separate from others in the domain of marketing. With this evolution though, sports marketers have only found the lot of responsibilities on their shoulders increasing.

 

From getting the stands to fill to selling merchandise to maintaining constant engagement with the fans, there are so many areas to look at for a sports marketer. Eventually everything though boils down to generating revenue. It isn’t an alien of a concept for any establishment that the marketers in an organization are the drivers of revenue growth. In addition to the sales department doing its job, marketers too are responsible for undertaking activities which will drive revenue growth.

Sounds like a tough job, doesn’t it?

It sure is too but then if you are a sports marketer and if you too agree that to maintain consistency you have to constantly evolve and develop then it isn’t so difficult after all. Over the years, sports marketers have been trying varied means of communication to better engage with fans. From the hard sell approach, sports marketers have evolved to taking the soft and subtle approach whenever and wherever needed. They have come to understood the importance of engaging with fans, building a community and taking them gradually from the need stage to the buy stage. This evolution has furthermore been assisted by technological developments. Gamification is one such development.

Gamification making a place of its own…

Once met with rife concerns, today gamification is a widely adopted and trusted practice in the domain of marketing, especially in the sports industry. Gamification has changed the manner in which teams used to interact and engage with their fans.

As a matter of fact, evidently, gamification made the whole process of engaging with fans so simple. It has brought so much to the table for all the stakeholders involved including the fans. Fans find their experiences interacting with their favorite teams now far more fulfilling and interesting. Teams are even employing reward mechanisms as a part of their gamification process to keep their fans engaged.

Gamification giving a boost to revenue growth…

Now what if you could use gamification to generate more revenue. Gamification has been adopted by teams across the world and they have witnessed spectacular results. Gamification is a way of making sure that your engagement with your fans yields money for your team. Gamification has the power to enable you to generate revenue for your team even during Off seasons. Gamification helps you convince your fans to contribute to your team’s growing revenue stream even if they are not inside the stadium.

There are multiple ways of using gamification to generate revenue. All you need to do is find the one that your fans are most expected to lap up. Some of the ways we feel gamification could be used to generate revenue are as follows:

1. The Freemium model – Let the application of your team be based on a Freemium model. Meaning, though your application will be available for use to all your fans, classifying certain features are prime features would be a smart thing to do. For instance, a feature that would allow the fans to watch live streaming of the team’s practice sessions could be classified as prime. Your freely available features will be enough to attract your fans to want more from your app and that alone will be enough to see your prime features finding takers.
2. Let them bargain – Come on, who on this earth doesn’t like to bargain? And most importantly who doesn’t like a good bargain? Fans, as is evidenced, go gaga over merchandises. Imagine selling your merchandise through your app but only in a different way now. Imagine your fans bargaining to get their hands on a merchandise. They would for example click on a button that would say BARGAIN and then once they have clicked on it, the price of the item would decrease. Now here’s the fun part, the fans would share the link of the item with the lessened price with their friends too who use the app and these friends too would bargain on behalf of the original sender of the link. This way eventually, the fans would be able to get their hands on team merchandises for a far lesser cost.
3. Further gamify your fantasy leagues – Just because it is off season, doesn’t mean your fans aren’t looking for some sporting action. Get them hooked onto your fantasy league games on your app by introducing new and improved interactive features to them. Fantasy leagues are an amazing and effective way to generate revenue. If you could allow only a set of players as freely available and pitch the more qualified and experienced or in-form players are premium, i.e. available at a cost, then it could too serve as a stream of revenue.
4. Product placement for advertisers – Advertising is undoubtedly a supreme means of generating revenue for a sports team. As a marketer if you could bank on this fact and gamify the advertising experience by introducing product placements then it could really seal it for you. Imagine placing the products of your advertisers in a way that they don’t obstruct the experience of fans and still manage to deliver what is promised to the advertisers. An example could be a gaming app that had the names of advertisers on the hoardings seen inside the stadium in the game itself.
5. Trivia – Now there’s so much you could do with trivia. From asking questions concerning teams or players to the game itself, only sky’s the limit here. A good and easy way to monetize Trivia could be having them sponsored by your advertisers. Your winners could get free tickets or merchandise sponsored exclusively by your sponsors.

Like an engine needs fuel to run, any business needs money to function. Being a sports marketer, you have to be tactful and innovative in your approach.