A Brief Summary
Digital marketing in the sports industry is moving at a rapid rate. Whilst the sports industry has been slower to adopt the digital revolution, it is by no means the slowest, and it is now seeing significant investment. But firstly, it makes sense to deep dive into why this is. Is it due to strategic marketing decisions? Or is it simply companies following their target audience?
Changing Audience Habits
From our experience, it is certainly the latter, and this is not necessarily specific to the sports industry. Viewers habits are changing. As consumers ourselves, we know this. I, myself, can confess to watching a film on TV, whilst online shopping on my laptop and checking Instagram on my phone. Double/triple, and in some cases quad screening, is something we have become accustomed to. 75% of the British population watch TV whilst using another connected device, and this jumps to 93% in the under 25’s [1]. Deloitte has also recently found the subscription-based streaming services have overtaken for traditional TV licenses.
But what does this mean for the sports industry? Actually, a lot of opportunities. More and more content is being consumed via digital. With the average person spending 3 and a half hours per day in the UK [2]. The majority is through social media, search engines such as Google and other on-demand platforms. This means when utilising the latest digital marketing tools available, you can be where your target audience is in a heartbeat. Enabling us to be hyper-targeted, super personalised and data-driven with your marketing campaigns. We now have the ability to advertise to an individual across their entire digital ecosystem of devices, with sports vertical-specific content and track their engagement throughout the entire digital customer journey. What a time to be a marketeer!
Sports Industry Investment in Digital
Digital Playmakers believes this could not be a better time to invest in digital marketing in the sports industry. Whether that is from a product/service perspective, or an advertising/digital campaign perspective. By now, it should be common knowledge that if you want to be successful you should have a visually stunning, highly functional and easy to use website. However, with organic sources of traffic to these website beginning to dry up (due to algorithm changes and platforms becoming far more commercially driven), a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is more important than ever before.
One of our strongest recommendations, to our clients, is to utilise paid/performance digital campaigns within their digital marketing strategies. An example is utilising social media and Google to drive traffic cheaply and efficiently to your site/app. Although CPM’s across platforms, such as Facebook are rising, they are still cheap and offer superb targeting functionality. It would appear that companies and organisations would agree. Digital ad spend has been forecasted to grow in 2019 by 19.1% [3].
Summary And What The Future Holds
We are at the start of a digital revolution. The digital space is very much in its infancy and it is really exciting to see its progress. In particular, the sports digital space. Our audiences habits are changing at a rapid pace but so is advertising. The time is now, and soon enough digital marketing in the sports industry will become overcrowded and highly competitive until new technologies and platforms are created and provided new audiences.
In a nutshell, a strong digital marketing strategy can lead forward-thinking companies on the path to success. However, it is vitally important to have the ability and expertise to implement and execute the strategy successfully. Whether that is in-house, or by utilising an agency like ourselves.
[2]https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/media/media-releases/2018/decade-of-digital-dependency
[3]https://mogointeractive.com/digital-ad-spending-to-overtake-traditional-in-2019/
