In the ever-evolving sports industry, which is anticipated to soar to a staggering value of over 623 billion dollars by 2027, keeping pace with consumer demands is paramount.
The huge drive for adaptation and growth requires a mix of each digital and physical sports marketing trends. Major sporting events similar to the Rugby World Cup, FIFA World Cup, and Women’s World Cup captivate vast audiences. However, in our AI-powered era, simply hosting events just isn’t enough. The industry is harnessing technological advancements to differentiate and innovate. Such technology not only enhances the fan experience each online and offline but in addition paves the best way for unique marketing opportunities.
Ready to plunge into such sports marketing trends?
1.Delivering Engaging Content Tailored for Female Audiences
Yes, the participation of ladies has grown rapidly in the sports industry over the previous couple of many years, but there still is an inclination to consider men when it comes to sports.
Almost 50% of ladies across the globe today have an interest in sports, which is a testament to the above statement. The challenge, nevertheless, is bringing the stat from almost 50 to 50 or above.
While there are a number of solid fans of ladies’s sports, marketers still need to deliver engaging online and offline content tailored to female audiences. Doing so will spike interest in young women and show you how to tap into recent markets. So it’s a win-win for each.
Now the query is: How do you reach them? Just a few ways listed below should help!
- Tailor campaigns promoting women’s sports events and highlighting the dedication of female athletes.
- Use social media platforms like Instagram and others to create interactive experiences.
- Show live matches on social media platforms to attract recent audiences.
The abovementioned tactics will show you how to go down a slow and regular path toward attracting audiences. The other way is to develop a number of but probably the most thought-provoking campaigns like DDB NZ. Such campaigns shake the web and garner attention from the users.
DDB Group NZ’s Thought-Provoking “Correct the Internet” Campaign
DDB, an Auckland-based agency, got here up with “Correct the Internet” in January 2023. The concept of this campaign could be very easy–to increase the visibility of sportswomen in the industry. However, the approach taken is the important thing.
The video begins with a young girl asking the web “Who scored probably the most runs in Football?”. The web replies with “Christiano Ronaldo” when the actual answer is – Christine Sinclair.
This easy 30-second video states the inconsistencies of the search results, which eventually prove to be disadvantageous for sportswomen to rightfully occupy the space in this competitive market.
Calling this video a mere campaign could be an injustice because the brand smartly urged the users to query this Internet bias. While such campaigns may not occupy a spot in the present sports marketing trends list, they definitely set your brand apart and compel users to think.
2.Leveraging Wearable Technology
Wearable technology is convalescing every year and the sports industry is ideal to profit from it.
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While fitness trackers and smartwatches help consumers monitor their health, the info helps brands devise creative ads and campaigns around the info. Just a few ways, as listed below, may be of help!
- Reach out to brands that make wearables to create unique products for his or her fan base.
- Connect with athletes and ask them to promote these products on social media channels like Twitter and Instagram.
- Introduce contests and challenges wherein users use their wearables to compete against their favorite athletes in real time.
Wearables are fun for fans to engage with and for athletes to collaborate with.
In each ways, the brand largely advantages, as sports, in any case, is one industry that connects people across races, religions, castes, creeds, or demographics. Whether you employ it to make your audience engage higher or just as a marketing gimmick is completely your alternative!
WHOOP’s In-Game Use of Wearables
How cool is it for a sports brand to get a recognized league’s approval to wear its wearables when playing the game?
Super cool, right? That’s what WHOOP did.
WHOOP, a wearable tracker worn in any respect times, collaborated with the
Major League Baseball for its 2017 season, wherein the athletes officially wore the wearables during games in U.S. pro sports.
But but but, how did they get the approval?
Kudos to the brand’s strain metric, which proved an asset for athletes. The WHOOP Day strain metric represents a running total of the athlete’s strain on that day, providing an accurate assessment of a pitcher’s well-being fairly than a pitch count. This metric helped athletes understand their bodies higher, resulting in higher performance!
It then became the primary wearable technology approved by the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) for in-match use in 2021.
Of the various sports marketing strategies, such strategies leave a deeper mark and a more global imprint in the industry.
3.Collaborating with Brands Fostering Diversity and Inclusivity
Believe it or not, it’s never just concerning the products. It’s concerning the underlying story, caring about and catering to your unique needs. This story makes users feel included and brings diversified users together.
Sports, inherently, is an all-inclusive industry. Brands that learn to imbibe this value in their sports marketing campaigns robotically make it to the best sports marketing trends 2023 because inclusion and variety will all the time stay in trend.
Also, the concept of inclusivity goes beyond gender neutrality. To stand out in this ever-evolving world of sports, brands must develop products that cater to various groups of athletes–different castes, creed, religion, sexuality, etc. And as marketers, your job is to collaborate with such brands.
- Feature athletes from different backgrounds in the ads.
- Include personal stories from athletes as a part of the campaign.
- Build sports merchandise and products catering to several body types, genders
- and cultural differences.
- Involve fans in the campaign and encourage them to share their sports stories.
- Ensure the content is accessible to all of the users.
Fostering inclusivity doesn’t necessarily have to be a mega event. It may be so simple as adding subtitles to the video campaign so for the specially-abled audience. (Small gesture but big impact!).
However, when you want to leave a much bigger mark, devising a movement just like the Unified Sports program by the Special Olympics could seal the deal.
Unified Sports Program Promotes Social Inclusion via Sports
As the name suggests, Unified Sports brings people from diverse backgrounds together right into a single team. People of all ages, with or without mental disabilities are on the identical team. Doing so fosters acceptance, inclusion, and challenges the team to function with people from various backgrounds.
Special Olympics Brazil staff and Rio de Janeiro education officials took this approach down to their schools. The schools took step one of unifying their physical Ed classes.
Such campaigns hold the facility to promote inclusion even amongst marginalized communities and bridge socioeconomic gaps.
4.Using NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) to Engage Fans
Using NFTs is certainly one of the most recent trends in the sports marketing industry. How?
Well, NFTs have revolutionized the industry since they permit fans to have their favorite sports player cards to game video clips. One of the important thing reasons to leverage NFTs is it allows teams to deepen their relationship with fans.
Below are a number of ways NFTs allow sports organizations to engage with their followers.
- They offer exclusive member privileges to users, making them an element of essential governance decisions.
- Athletes can individually issue their NFT collections and keep their fans hooked.
- Virtual meet-and-greets or customized content with NFT ownership.
- Offers cross promotions wherein influencers and other people throughout the industry can join promotions.
Other than these perks, NFTs help sports organizations generate income!
So leveraging it isn’t only probably the most trendy thing to do but in addition lucrative. Top Shot’s NFT marketing campaign is an important example of deepening their love for the game.
NBA Top Shot’s NFT Marketing Campaign
For hardcore sports fans, nothing is more exciting than watching a player’s extraordinary shot transpire live. The NBA not only conceptualized but capitalized by turning such what-a-shot moments into NFTs.
Users can transform these moments into non-fungible tokens and keep revisiting them as persistently as they’d like.
The campaign simply allowed fans to buy and trade NFTs of a few of the very best plays that the NVA had witnessed. This easy strategy drove buyers to find and buy the moments that meant most to them.
The campaign easily made a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What a creative way to bank on nostalgia, right?
Conclusion
Yes, we enlisted sports marketing trends to profit from 2023, but a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work so you wish to fastidiously take into consideration your sports brand’s marketing strategy.
Some brands may profit from organizing engaging live sports events, while others might have to infuse more tech into their marketing campaigns. You can’t all the time know what advantages your marketing model, so reaching out to sports marketing agencies is significant. With their expertise and experience, they’ll develop marketing campaigns that work! Do a bit research, and also you’re good to go!
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